Audiovisual Feedback Research, Design, and Development (Unity)

Primary Focus: Programming and Design of Visual and Auditory Feedback
The current project will be performed under the umbrella of the research program of the Learning Action-Perception lab at the Dept of Human Movement Science of the UMCG (Groningen). The lab is led by Raoul Bongers and he will be the primary content supervisor of the project usually in collaboration with a MA student or a PhD student. 
The project will be supervised also by our Technical Support group. Jack Sell, a former student from the Hanze will supervise the programming of the games.

The research of the lab focuses on how people learn new coordination patterns in the arms, specifically in the muscle activations. The data might be applicable to training of hand or arm prosthesis use. We have a series of experiments performed in this domain and we setup of the game. The step we want to take in the current project regards the providing of feedback about performance. Currently the game has no augmented feedback.

The research question of this project is what is the optimal behavioral experimental setup to present feedback about co-variation of muscles to healthy and disabled adults to learn to control the muscles to control an avatar on the screen. The project is part of a larger project where participants have to learn to coordinate muscles in the arm in a novel manner (think about what happens when learning a new task such as learning to play tennis).
The current target group is healthy adults. Depending on the experiment also people with an arm deficiency (i.e., an amputation) must be able to play the game.
The game that we currently have implemented shows some resemblance with ‘Beat Saber’. That is, objects that need to be caught are approaching the avatar. The avatar has to be moved by the player to catch the approaching objects. Therefore, the task is a continuous control task in which the player has to learn new coordination patterns in the muscles to control the avatar appropriately.

The feedback we want to provide (and that needs to be developed in this project) is not just based on performance, but it is a particular feedback based on the muscle coordination pattern used to perform the game. In the game, muscles can co-vary and the feedback will relate to the degree of co-variation among muscles. We use a particular technique to compute the co-variation. Unfortunately, this technique is a bit difficult to understand. Therefore, as part of this project we want to develop a demonstration tool to explain this technique. 

This seems to be a great project for a student who wants to improve their programming skills in interaction with the client while working in an academic research environment. Hence the skills learned will be broader than just programming but also, and in particular, how your programs can help the researchers performing the experiment they want to perform.

The desired end product should be: 

1.  a well-functioning and easy to use demonstration tool, and 
2.  a well-functioning game with feedback about the degree of co-variation incorporated. 

Next to these products we want a well-documented source file and a background document explaining the functioning of the game and the steps of the program.