Bridget Baird: Research Projects

Multimodal Integration and Way-finding, with Ozgur Izmirli, Ann Devlin, Fahad Shams '06, Hale Ekinci '06. The roles of multiple modes such as visual, audio and haptics, are explored to enable a better understanding of spatial cognition.This multidisciplinary research is at the intersections of computer science, psychology and music. Applications of this research are planned in the area of way-finding, particularly in hospitals.
Virtual Reality and Archaeology, with Andrea Mendoza '08.Virtual reality is used to explore and illustrate archaeological sites. The homestead of Venture Smith, freed slave, who lived in Haddam Neck, CT in the late 1700's and early 1800's is currently being excavated. A virtual reality simulation of this site is being developed.
Multimodal Connections: Haptics and Audio, with Ozgur Izmirli, Don Blevins, Brad Heacock '06, Dessi Peeva '05. This research seeks to answer the questions of whether there are connections between the audio properties and haptic properties. Experiments are being conducted to test the presence of innate correlations and also whether correlations can be learned. The results of these experiments will have implications for user interfaces and will shed light on the nature of haptic/audio relationships.
Interactive Exploration of Multi-modal Objects in a Virtual Gallery, with Ozgur Izmirli and David Smalley: The virtual gallery places sculptures inside a 3D environment where the user can explore with eyes, ears, and hands. Tactile feedback permits the user to interact with objects, feeling their surfaces and textures, bumping into them and navigating through them, and setting them in motion. Auditory feedback is synchronized with the visual and tactile feedback and also responds to the user's investigations. This new kind of virtual gallery allows the user to explore relationships among the senses of vision, audio, and touch in an interactive and artistic manner.
Conducting a Virtual Ensemble, with Ozgur Izmirli: Experienced conductors of music ensembles are not metronomes: their hand movements and the speed at which the players perform exhibit a complex time and context dependent means of communication. The aim of this project is to analyze this relationship between the conductor's movements and the actual tempo as performed by the players, and apply the results from this analysis to construct a computer based system that will mimic the salient behavior of a real ensemble.
Visualization of Musical Sound, with Ozgur Izmirli: A model for the visualization of the attributes of musical sound is developed. The model consists of two concurrently functioning parts: a sound processing front-end and a visualization module. Various envelope and spectral characteristics of the input sound are extracted in the sound processing front-end. This information is then utilized by the visualization module. At the interface point, a transformation has been defined that maps a blend of perceptually prominent sound attributes to discernible characteristics of visual objects. The evolution of sounds can be observed through a visualization that encompasses moving objects which trace the history of the sounds. Color, shape, position, movement, and surface texture are all used to visualize the attributes of sounds.
Immersive Modules for Scientific Visualization , with Andrea Wollensak,Steve Loomis, and students. Supported by a grant from National Science Foundation, students and faculty worked on modules to create scientific visualizations modules for use in the curriculum. Students have created virtual reality environments to illustrated scientific principles in physiology, chemistry, astronomy, physics, and mathematics.