HMI Lab

Our Human Machine Interaction (HMI) Lab is a state-of-the-art environment for studying the interaction between people, humanoid robots and recommender systems, with a focus on social processes such as non-verbal communication, trust, group membership, and sensorimotor synchronisation. The HMI lab comprises the main laboratory and control room.

The main HMI lab is used for setting up scenarios that involve interaction with robots, avatars, AIs or computer based simulations. These interactions are observed and controlled remotely using high performance computers located in the control room, in Wizard-Of-Oz style experiments. This allows our researchers to increase the expressiveness of robots by remotely control them using body tracking and machine learning algorithms. Researchers can also use the control room as an observation area to evaluate non-verbal communication in social robotics situations.

The HMI lab and control rooms are unique at Westmead: the computer workstations are configured so that multiple participants can work on computer-based tasks together. This allows researchers to investigate how human teams collaborate with each other in different scenarios, and how teams of humans collaborate with artificially intelligent team-mates.

Location: West side of Westmead Innovation Quarter, Level 6.
Size: 27 sqm
Room Type: Testing Room
Acoustics (partition to adjoining room): DnTw 40
Acoustics (partition to corridor): DnTw 40
Acoustics (door): Rw 34
Mechanical Services Noise Limit: LAeq, T 40-45 dB
Reverberation Time Limit: 0.4 – 0.6 s
Ceiling NRC: 0.7