This past semester, I taught a course called “Natural User Interfaces” as my first course at the University of Florida. It was supposed to be a small, research-oriented seminar designed to help me recruit PhD students, but the course was going to cover platforms like touch interaction on Android and whole-body interaction on the Microsoft Kinect, so enrollment quickly reached non-seminar numbers! In the end, I had 54 students. The course was a cross-listed graduate and undergraduate special topics course. We covered the latest advances in research on user interactions with these new input modalities, and students worked in groups to prototype an application with a NUI as a central component. They performed user-centered design of an initial version, evaluated it in a user study, and then improved their prototype based on user feedback.
You can see more information about the course here, including the syllabus, assigned readings, my lecture slides, and the assignment overviews. But perhaps the most fun outcome of this course were the 17 NUI projects developed over the course of the semester. You can see the video demos of each of the 15 projects who agreed to let me share their video online here.
Based on the popularity of the course, we have submitted the course for an official number from the University of Florida system, and it will soon get an official UF catalog entry! We anticipate this course may be taught in the future every other fall semester.
Lisa Anthony 