CHSEL
Facilities

Equipment that lets us study people, not just build systems.

The lab is equipped for the full cycle: building an immersive or robotic system, running sessions with participants who have never used one, and measuring what happened. Most of it travels — a good deal of our data is collected in homes, schools and clinics rather than here.

Access
Open to lab members and students on lab projects
Available to collaborators by arrangement
Training provided before independent use
What is here
01Extended Reality02Social Robots03Wearables & Physiological Sensing04Usability Lab
01Immersive

Extended Reality

Headsets, tracking and the compute behind them — used for therapeutic and training studies rather than demos.

The XR facility supports room-scale study setups with participants who are often unfamiliar with the technology, which shapes how sessions are run: short, supervised, and instrumented for later analysis. Dedicated GPU workstations handle scene authoring, real-time rendering and offline analysis of session recordings.

Meta Quest headsetsStandalone and tethered, used for participant-facing sessions and pilot testing.
HTC Vive with base-station trackingRoom-scale setups where precise position tracking matters.
GPU workstationsScene authoring, real-time rendering and model training for study analysis.
Motion & hand trackingController-free interaction for participants who struggle with handheld input.
VR headset in use during a study sessionVR headset in use during a study session
Pepper robot in the labPepper robot in the lab
02Social robotics

Social Robots

Two humanoid platforms used in studies with children, older adults and classroom groups.

Both robots are programmable for Wizard-of-Oz and autonomous conditions, and both have been used in sessions where the participant has never met a robot before — a condition that turns out to matter more than the platform's capabilities.

PepperFull-size humanoid with a chest tablet, speech and gesture. Used in classroom and group settings.
Misty IIDesk-scale robot with a mobile base and expressive face. Suited to one-to-one sessions and home deployments.
Wizard-of-Oz toolingOperator interfaces for controlled studies before autonomy is introduced.
03Sensing

Wearables & Physiological Sensing

Instruments for the parts of an experience people cannot easily report — attention, arousal, effort.

Physiological measures are used alongside interviews and observation rather than in place of them. The wearable equipment travels: much of it has been used in homes, schools and clinics rather than only in the lab.

Meta smart glassesFirst-person video and audio capture for in-context studies.
EDA & heart rate sensorsArousal and stress markers during interaction.
EEG headsetsAttention and workload measures in controlled sessions.
Smartwatches & activity trackersLongitudinal data from field deployments.
Environmental sensingAmbient conditions logged alongside participant data.
Wearable sensing equipmentWearable sensing equipment
Usability lab observation roomUsability lab observation room
04Evaluation

Usability Lab

A dedicated observation room for moderated sessions, with the recording setup a study needs and nothing more.

Sessions run with a moderator and an observation feed, capturing screen, face and audio in sync. The room is also used for participatory design workshops and for training students in moderation before they run field sessions.

Observation roomModerated testing with a separate observer feed.
Synchronised captureScreen, camera and audio recorded together for later coding.
Eye trackingScreen-based gaze data for interface studies.
Workshop spaceParticipatory design sessions and student moderation training.
Working here

How the equipment gets used

Students

Course projects and RA work get supervised access after a short training session. Most students meet this equipment for the first time here.

Collaborators

Researchers from other institutions and industry partners can run studies here as part of a joint project.

In the field

Wearables, robots and headsets are regularly taken out to schools, homes and clinics where the actual work happens.