End of year extravaganza

On 7 July 2002, a giant 21st inflatable and white balloons personalised with UCLIC's iconic logo greeted students, staff, former colleagues, alumni and collaborators in the stylish environment of the North Orangery, Wilkings Building. Attractively displayed were also copies of the recently-published UCLIC News, a poster selection with UCLIC's past and present achievements, and a range of eco-sustainable freebies, such as 'oaky cork' wireless chargers and reusable coffee cups. The event was a celebration of our newly-graduated MSc students as well as an opportunity to share ideas and memories, while reflecting on UCLIC's milestones over the past 21 years, looking forward to the future and relaxing over a glass of wine.

A number of current PhD students presented demos of their cutting-edge research to a totally bowled-over audience:

PhD student Jitesh Joshi showed an application of a thermal infrared imaging camera to extract physiological signals (e.g. breathing) in a contactless manner. The demo showed an initial piece of work that identifies distinct portions of the face (e.g. nose, chin, etc.) with the aim to extract the signal from a specific region of interest.

Dr Diego Martinez Plasencia and his team showed various types of multi-modal content using ultrasound acoustic boards. This included volumetric 3D content, audio and levitated displays.

PhD student Jing Xue showed a demo of different material textures (e.g. metal, fabric, pavement, rock and wood) using an ultrasound acoustic board.

PhD student Zak Morgan presented two demos:

• Bentley AI Comfort system: In this system there are 4 components, an Arduino attached temperature and humidity sensor. An RGB Camera and FLIR Ax5 thermal camera and an Empatica E4 wristband. The RGB camera performs facial detection and alignment, and thus can extract the nose-tip and forehead location in the image. The thermal camera can then take the average temperature from these regions. The wristband then takes some physiological measurements including BVP, GSR and IBI. All these measurements are then combined and fed into an AI model which predicts the thermal comfort of the user, including their thermal preference, for example, the user is warm, they feel comfortable but they would like to be cooler.
  See: ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9597393
• Acoustic Meta-Material hologram Visualisation using thermography: Here a phased array of transducers (PAT) is used to approximate a plane wave. This wave then passes through an acoustic meta material, providing selective phase delays according to the location in space of the wave. This can be used to form complex pressure distributions out of the ultrasound. This is then visualised by absorbing the ultrasound with sound absorbing foam, thus heating up the foam in proportion with the sound pressure. A piece of thermochromic film on the back of the foam then changes colour with the temperature change, allowing for the visualization of the acoustic hologram.