Tina Chan, an MSc candidate in the School of Public Health and Health Systems, discussed how she uses gamification to study Peer-to-Peer (P2P) support as a strategy for bolstering mental health treatments. Chan developed a digital game entitled "Merlynne" to simulate P2P support: players offer empathy to in-game characters in order to save the kingdom and win the game.
Jason Lajoie, English PhD candidate and member of the Critical Media Lab, presented his doctoral research on how technology influences queer identities in his video, "Making gay identities: Queer media practices queering media technologies". Lajoie studies how queer identities have been and continue to be constructed and communicated through technological tools. His video gives the examples of typewriters, carbon copy paper, and cell phones as tools that afford and constrain how queer people form, define, and express their identities.
Siyavash Izadi, MSc candidate in Kinesiology and member of the Multisensory Brain and Cognition lab, explains how he studies motion sickness and Virtual Reality (VR) in his video "Virtuality of motion sickness". Izadi collects biometric data - like nausea, perspiration, and heart rate - from people while they use VR and uses machine learning to take that data and predict and score someone's sickness.
Rina Wehbe, PhD candidate in Computer Science from the Cheriton School of Computer Science and member of the HCI games group, presented her doctoral research in a video called "Playing with space". Wehbe's work looks at how social factors influence how people use large, multi-touch displays. She specifically focuses on understanding social cues around large displays.