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College of Information and Communications

  • A male student inside the Baux Lab wearing the eyetracking software.

Biometrics and User Experience Lab

Housed in Davis College, the Biometrics and User Experience (BaUX) Lab is a multi-purpose research facility with multi-disciplinary-foci, including advertising and marketing communication, health communication, human-technology interaction, social media, journalism, to name a few. The BaUX Lab serves as a collaborative space for interdisciplinary groups of faculty, students, community partners, and industry professionals to examine psychophysiological responses to media content and other user experiences.

Lab Capabilities

The BaUX Lab has a unique set of cutting-edge technologies to track facial expressions, eye movement, sweat gland stimulation and neuroelectrical activity.

VR Eyetracking
Virtual reality affords the possibility to test behavior in any environment, creating the opportunity to capture responses in settings that would be too expensive or even impossible to recreate in the real world. The newly integrated Eye Tracking - VR module enables users to connect, record, and live visualize eye tracking data in VR, AR or 360 video simulations. Researchers can explore attentional processes in any virtual environment, opening up a huge range of new research possibilities.

Screen-based Eye Tracking
Uses near-infrared technology and an HD camera to track gaze direction and quantifies the visual attention on images, videos, websites, games, software interfaces and mobile phones.

Eye Tracking Glasses
Allows researchers to understand how respondents view and interact in the real, dynamic world beyond the restriction in the lab settings.

Facial Expression
Measures human emotions through computer-based facial coding, including seven core emotions (happy, sad, etc.) and 21 facial action units (brow furrow, jaw drop, etc.).

Galvanic Skin Response
Measures the electrical activity conducted through sweat glands in the skin, which are triggered by emotional stimulation.

Electroencephalography
Measures electrical activity on the scalp associated with perception, cognition and emotional processes.


Research

Current faculty and student research projects focus on human-computer interaction, message persuasion, social media communication, citizen-compared-to-staff photojournalism, health communication, etc. For more specific information about current and previous research projects, please refer to the Research pages.


Teaching

The BaUX Lab also enriches students’ educational experiences across campus. Undergraduate and graduate students visit the lab through guest lectures, lab tours, and project demos. Students are equipped with strong conceptual knowledge about the lab technologies and gain hands-on experiences to utilize these technologies to assess their creative projects, such as user interface, advertising copies, VR prototypes, etc. Student groups are also benefiting from the lab, including the Ad Team, which used the technology to prepare for the 2020 National Student Advertising Competition. The team took second place.

Undergraduate and graduate courses may be taught in the lab, and students may also access it by assisting with faculty research projects, interning in the lab, and running independent and supervised research projects.


Challenge the conventional. Create the exceptional. No Limits.

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