RICELab Rethinking Interaction Collaboration and Engagement

RICELab (Rethinking Interaction, Collaboration and Engagement) designs, builds, and studies novel interactive systems for human communication and collaboration. Our approach: build a working prototype, then study how people actually use it. We are faculty, students, and researchers working at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, and Ubiquitous Computing.

Our current work spans three themes:

• Human-AI interaction. AI systems are increasingly capable collaborators — but how should we design the interfaces between people and AI? We study how people prompt generative AI, how AI can support creative work (fiction writing, VR scene design), and how to build tools that augment rather than replace human judgment. Recent work includes designing prompting UIs for embodied AI agents and studying how people direct generative AI to build interactive environments.
• Mixed reality collaboration. AR and VR open new possibilities for how people work together across distance and in shared physical space. We design and evaluate MR interfaces for remote collaboration, movement guidance, spatial presentations, and shared awareness — asking what it means to truly share a space when participants may be distributed or wearing different devices.
• Human-embodied AI interaction. Robots and AI agents are entering workplaces and everyday environments. We draw on principles from human-human collaboration to design how people work fluidly with embodied AI. Our work explores how proxemics, gesture, natural language, and image-based communication can make human-robot collaboration feel natural — with the long-term goal of making embodied AI a genuine collaborative partner.

We are located in the School of Computer and Information Systems at the Singapore Management University.