Nikola Banovic
M.Sc. Student
Department of Computer Science
University of Toronto
10 King's College Road, Room 3302
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 3G4
nikola (at) dgp.toronto.edu
I am an M.Sc. student at the University of Toronto studying under the supervision of Prof. Khai N. Truong. And I am a member of Dynamic Graphics Project (DGP) and Prof. Truong's Toronto Ubicomp Research Group.
My research interests lie in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Ubiqutous Computing (UbiComp). I explore new sight-free interaction techniques and develop and evaluate assistive technologies for the visually impaired. My other academic interests include Cognitive Science and practical applications of Machine Learning.
More information on me can be found in my curriculum vitae.
This research involves design and evaluation of new sight-free text entry interaction techniques for mobile devices. The work examines the speed and accuracy of using gestures to enter text in sighted and sight-free conditions.
This project resulted in the Master Thesis.
In this project, we examine the specific practices that visually impaired individuals use to learn about their environments and the challenges they encounter. Through field studies with various stakeholder groups, we uncover processes used by the visually impaired and establish requirements for sight-free spatial learning. The research also explores design opportunities to assist the visually impaired in spatial learning.
This project resulted in the following publications: C.2.
In this project we explore challenges involved in empirically studying customization behaviors, and propose methodologies for formally measuring the impact of potential customization factors. Then, we use these methodologies to study the impact which different customization factors have on customization behaviors.
This project resulted in the following publications: C.3.
In this work, we investigate how to design context menus for efficient unimanual multi-touch use on tabletop surfaces. We investigate the limitations of the arm, wrist, and fingers and how it relates to human performance of multi-targets selection tasks on multi-touch surface. We show that selecting targets with multiple fingers simultaneously improves the performance of target selection compared to traditional single finger selection, but also increases errors. Informed by these results, we present our own context menu design for horizontal tabletop surfaces.
This project resulted in following publications: C.1.
I am or have been a Teaching Assistant (TA) for the following courses.