RICELab Rethinking Interaction Collaboration and Engagement

RICELab (Rethinking Interaction, Collaboration and Engagement) designs, builds, and studies novel interactive systems for human communication and collaboration. We are faculty, students, and researchers working at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, and Ubiquitous Computing.

The prototype is the research artifact. We build a working system, study it with people in the lab and in the field, and abstract what we learn into design frameworks that outlast the particular system. Depending on the question, that means a controlled study, a technology probe, interviews and thematic analysis, or co-design with the people we are designing for.

Our current work spans three themes:

• Embodied interaction techniques for AI. As AI agents take on physical form — robots, and situated agents that share our space — we design the techniques people use to direct them: pointing and deixis, gesture, gaze, speech, and manipulating an image of the scene, alone and in combination. See Human-Robot Interaction.
• Non-verbal communication, sensing, and expression. We work on the non-verbal channels of embodied interaction from both sides: how a system senses and interprets human expression, and how an agent makes its own interpretation, intent, and attention legible in return. When an agent misreads a gesture, the person should find out before it acts rather than after.
• Conversational agents and communicative experiences. Language-capable agents open up experiences that break the assumptions of one-to-one dialogue, particularly in groups, where turn-taking is contested and whatever the agent says to one person is heard by everyone. See Human-AI Collaboration in Groups and AI in Learning and Feedback.

We often run these explorations in mixed reality. VR and AR give us control over what people can see, share, and point at, which makes them a useful place to build an idea and test it. Mixed reality is also a subject in its own right: we study what breaks in remote and mixed-reality meetings, where participants are distributed, or in the same room wearing different devices.

This work builds on the lab’s earlier research in remote collaboration, multi-surface environments, and personal informatics, which you can find under past projects.

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