HIT Lab NZ

📣 USER STUDY VOLUNTEERS NEEDED!
Participate in our study exploring how people engage with multiple historical perspectives using immersive VR.

Who can participate?
✅ Aged 18 years or older
✅ Able to understand and communicate in English
✅ No history of severe motion sickness or photosensitive epilepsy
✅ Able to comfortably use a VR headset

📍 Location: HIT Lab NZ, Level 2, John Britten Building, 69 Creyke Road, University of Canterbury
👉 Find out more and book a session: https://bookwhen.com/v3qqg
📩 Contact: [email protected]

University of Canterbury UC Engineering UC Product Design

🏆Congratulations to Team PatchIQ on a fantastic result!

It's wonderful to see HIT Lab NZ's MHIT students Asha Veach, Anya Krupp, and Quinton Buckley among the winning team. A great example of how human-interface technology skills can be applied to real-world challenges.

Over two days last weekend they competed at the UCE Future of Health Disrupt Challenge to explore complex problems, challenge assumptions, collaborate across disciplines, and develop bold, impactful ideas.

This challenge reinforced an important lesson: entrepreneurship is not just about pitching a solution. It's about deeply understanding the problem, embracing systems thinking and human-centred design, and creating solutions that can generate real social and societal impact.

As part of PatchIQ (Team 9) they came 1st Equal with a pitch for smart wound monitoring to facilitate earlier intervention and fewer home visits.

💥NEW PUBLICATION💥

F. Faruqi, A. Sulaiman, J. Yin, D. Degraen and M. Nisser, "Vis2Touch: Perceptually Grounded 3D Printing of Visual Art With AI-Driven Depth and Texture Estimation," in IEEE Transactions on Haptics, doi: 10.1109/TOH.2026.3717908.

👉 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11627676

Visual art offers a rich expression of its subject's color and form, but lacks the haptic cues of depth and texture central to understanding its physical characteristics. We present Vis2Touch, a system that transforms color images into textured 2.5D models for 3D printing by combining depth and surface texture while preserving the original color appearance. Vis2Touch composes 2.5D objects by combining a monocular depth estimator to reconstruct macroscale depth and a fine-tuned diffusion model to generate microscale textures from semantically segmented image regions. These two heightfields are superimposed to produce composite colored 3D models that reflect both the structure and feel of the source image. Through psychophysical experiments informed by a gallery exhibition, we investigate how tactile expectations vary with depth and show that perceptual accuracy improves when texture is modulated as a power-law function of distance in the image. Our results demonstrate new possibilities for physicalizing visual art by conveying spatial scale through 3D-printed haptic artifacts.

University of Canterbury UC Engineering

💐Congratulations Ellie Adams! So great to see our MHIT graduates taking their skills out into the world and doing great things!!
👉

Doc Edge award for UC Banks Peninsula project | UC A UC-led immersive installation won Best NZ Immersive Impact Project Award at Doc Edge, bringing Banks Peninsula’s lost forests to life.

🏆Congratulations Anna Treffer for winning UC's Faculty of Engineering Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition heat for her presentation, "Dance Training with Augmented Reality"!!
💃 Anna will go on to represent the Faculty at the UC Research Student Showcase on Wednesday, 19 August 2026.
👉 Register to attend the event at https://events.humanitix.com/whakaturanga-rangahau-or-research-student-showcase-2026
💐Once again, great work Anna!!

🎉Congratulations to Kieron Wall (Human Interface Technology PhD candidate), Professor Heide Lukosch (HIT Lab NZ), Professor Ben Kennedy (SEE), and HIT Lab NZ game developer Rodrigo Dias-Takase on a great project!
🌋A free online game developed by UC researchers is helping students, teachers and the public learn about New Zealand’s volcanoes through play.
👉https://www.canterbury.ac.nz/news-and-events/news/2026/free-digital-volcano-game-brings-disaster-learning-to-life-

UC Engineering

Free digital volcano game brings disaster learning to life | UC A free online game developed by UC researchers is helping students, teachers and the public learn about New Zealand’s volcanoes through play.

Listen to RNZ interview with Dr George Stillwell at

VR headsets allow engineering students to be better designers Immersive virtual reality headsets are giving mechanical engineering students a glimpse of what life is like for people living with tetraplegia, so they can be better, more empathetic designers. University of Canterbury Mechanical Engineering lecturer, Dr George Stilwell spoke to Lisa Owen.

Congratulations to HIT Lab NZ programmer Ryan McKee on this outstanding achievement!

Ryan developed the VR technology for an impactful University of Canterbury Mechanical Engineering project, led by Dr George Stilwell, that helps students experience some of the everyday challenges faced by people living with tetraplegia. By building empathy into the engineering design process, this innovative tool is helping future engineers create more inclusive, user-centred solutions.

It's a great example of how immersive technology can make a real difference—bridging the gap between technical expertise and human experience.

Well done, Ryan, and congratulations to everyone involved in this fantastic collaboration!

Read more about the project: https://www.canterbury.ac.nz/news-and-events/news/2026/vr-tool-helps-student-engineers-create-more-inclusive-designs-
UC Engineering University of Canterbury

VR tool helps student engineers create more inclusive designs | UC UC Mechanical engineering students are using VR to experience what life is like for people living with tetraplegia as part of a design challenge focused on inclusiveness and empathy.

💥NEW PUBLICATION💥
Abdollah Baghaei Daemei, Nima Izadyar, Ehsanolah Assareh, Heide Karen Lukosch, Matthaios Santamouris, Mona Abd Al Salam, Amirhosein Ghaffarianhoseini, Ali GhaffarianHoseini. (2026). Serious games for energy applications in the built environment: A systematic review, Energy Research & Social Science, Volume 138, 2026, 104826.
👉 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2026.104826.
Energy use in buildings is a major global challenge because it depends not only on technologies, but also on how people understand, operate, and respond to building systems. Serious games and gamified applications have been used to improve energy literacy, encourage energy-saving behavior, and support energy-related decision-making. However, evidence remains fragmented across building contexts, user groups, technologies, design approaches, and evaluation methods. It is still unclear how these interventions are designed, who they serve, and whether they produce measurable energy outcomes in real built-environment settings. This systematic literature review examines serious games and gamified applications for energy-related purposes in the built environment. The review analyses 69 empirical studies published between 2008 and 2026. Studies were examined according to application context, target users, learning objectives, game design features, interaction mechanisms, technologies, evaluation approaches, reported outcomes, and limitations across residential, educational, professional, and urban energy contexts. Findings show that most interventions target non-professional users, especially students and household residents, and are mainly evaluated in educational or controlled settings. Game design is dominated by accomplishment- and social-influence-based mechanisms, including challenges, points, feedback, progression, badges, competition, leaderboards, collaboration, and social comparison. More advanced approaches, including real-time building data, adaptive feedback, artificial intelligence, immersive environments, and professional decision-support tools, remain limited. Some studies reported short-term energy reductions, but evidence of sustained and independently verified real-world energy impact remains weak. The review contributes a hierarchical taxonomy linking system purpose, motivational design, user-building interaction, technological integration, and evaluation strategy, supporting future real-world, data-driven, and longitudinally validated interventions.
UC Engineering University of Canterbury

This Monday we were delighted to host a visit from Prof Chia-huei Tseng from the Research Institute of Electrical Communication (RIEC) at Tohuku University in Japan. Prof Tseng is a cognitive scientist focusing on infant learning, interpersonal communication, and perception and attention. She is part of the collaboration group working on the 'Improving Immersive Telecommunication by Increasing Comfort in Virtual Reality' project which also includes Prof Rob Lindeman, and was very interested to learn more about staff and student projects at HIT Lab NZ.