The Spring semester is complete here at the University of Florida and so is the setup of our interactive spherical display from Pufferfish Ltd. To celebrate the completion, the TIDESS team hosted an open house for members of the University of Florida to come and interact with both the spherical display demos and the tabletop prototype we have been working on.

The open house was a success and was attended by both students and faculty from The Department of Agricultural Education and Communication (AEC) as well as the College of Engineering. Some of the attendees were also people who helped us bring the sphere to the University through the logistical challenges (e.g., customs, importing, and heavy lifting).

The TIDESS team was excited to see people interacting with the spherical display’s onboard demos, as well as to thank those who worked so hard to help bring the sphere to the lab. The attendees’ enthusiasm to interact with this novel technology was interesting to see, and we look forward to tapping into that for our own research on the sphere.

The end of the Spring semester also marked the end of our data collection for the tabletop user study. As we move towards the summer, we will begin analyzing the data from the study, as well as exploring what will transfer from our tabletop prototype to the sphere platform.

I am a rising junior working in the INIT lab. This was my first semester working on the TIDESS project and my first time seeing a lab study. It has been incredibly exciting to watch the prototype develop and see each stage of research for the first time. I look forward to our continued partnership with Pufferfish as we move forward with the development of our first application on the sphere, and am very excited for the day that we have an open house with our own prototype displayed on the sphere.

Photos from our open house:

by Alice Darrow

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