EE Professor Ian Oakley’s Lab’s Jiwan Kim and Hoheon Jeong
Win Best People’s Choice Award at the ACM UIST Student Innovation Contest
< (From left) Jiwan Kim (PhD candidate), Hoheon Jung (undergraduate) >
PhD candidate Jiwan Kim, and undergraduate Hoheon Jung from Professor Ian Oakley’s lab in the Department of Electrical Engineering, won the Best People’s Choice Award at the Student Innovation Contest held as part of the ‘ACM UIST (ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology)’ in Pittsburgh, USA, from October 13 to 16. The Best People’s Choice Award is given to the project that garners the most enthusiasm and support from attendees during the conference.
The ‘ACM UIST’ is a leading international conference in the field of human-computer interaction. Each year, the Student Innovation Contest invites teams to present innovative ideas using cutting-edge hardware just before its release. This year’s theme involved creating and demonstrating interactive devices for the future using the Gen-M Kit from Seeed Studio. After a competitive preliminary round, eight teams from prestigious institutions, including Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Toronto, and the University of Hong Kong, reached the finals alongside our university’s team.
Jiwan Kim and Hoheon Jung cited the famous quote by novelist Arthur C. Clarke, known for works like 2001: A Space Odyssey: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Inspired by this idea, they developed a wearable device that provides an experience similar to superpowers.
The glove they developed uses surface acoustic waves, radar, and ultrasound to create features such as eavesdropping to hear sounds through walls, enhanced senses to detect nearby movements with closed eyes, and telekinesis to levitate small objects in the air.
Jiwan Kim remarked, “Some might view this as simply implementing technology for amusement, but I believe that fun is also an essential direction for scientific and technological advancement. We focused on interpreting various sensing technologies in the most entertaining way possible and demonstrating them accordingly.”
