Tag Archives: Jack Carroll

Apps and art: New version of app ready for festival

The fields of arts and sciences will connect on the streets of State College and Penn State’s University Park campus this week to help visitors get the best of the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts.

The College of IST’s Center for Human-Computer Interaction is again working with the Arts Festival to develop a mobile application. Over the years, each version of the app retained its core features, such as a schedule and program of events, location data, and profiles of the visiting artists and performers. The researchers have experimented with various types of social features and interactions in previous versions. In 2014, for example, the app was used to play a “selfie” game among attendees, and last year’s app included a set of profile-style interest categories and a series of social media inspired interactions, such as the ability to create custom events for the festival program.

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Keeping the end user in mind

[Note added July 8: If you’re having trouble getting the video to run on this page, try it at the full story on the Third Eye project, here. We’re sorry for the inconvenience–]

Lesson number one for those who design high-tech devices: Make sure they actually fit the needs of the people who will be using them.

Penn State video producer Curtis Parker recently visited Jack Carroll, Distinguished Professor of Information Sciences and Technology, and Penn State IT consultant Michelle McManus, who is visually impaired, to talk about designing for end users with a disability.

Carroll is part of a research team that is designing a “smart glove” that can help visually impaired people do their grocery shopping. It recognizes items on the store shelves and guides the shopper to pick up items he or she wants to buy. The glove is part of a massive, multi-institutional project called “Visual Cortex on Silicon.”

Read the full story about this work in the April issue of Research/Penn State (available around campus) or online here.