Developing and Evaluating XR for Show Lighting System

Open Human-Computer Interaction Bachelor Master Project Thesis Industry Cooperation

Motivation/Goals

Enter the world of the biggest live events, concert tours, theaters and musicals and become part of MA Lighting Technology – an international leader in lighting control technology for theaters, shows and events. We offer insights and opportunities to work with devices that are used worldwide.

Projects can involve but are not limited to user interaction, improvement of user experience, conceptualization of completely new workflows as well as testing and evaluating them.

MA Lighting is thrilled to explore innovative approaches such as artificial intelligence and extended realities. This is a unique opportunity for students to work with real-world applications and hardware devices and collaborate with us.

Applications include teaching and learning as well as how to create good stage lighting. Other areas of interest are finding ways to evaluate the quality of a light show and possibilities to support modern user workflows with intelligent assistants.

This could include the preconfiguration of common lighting scenes and the evaluation of their impact on the emotions of the observer.

Overall, we expect students to perform: Research, Evaluation of the Use case, Documentation and Conception, Implementation, and Finalization/Testing/Approval of conceptualized use cases.

Project and Thesis Themes:

1. Learning and Teaching Lighting Design in XR: Interactive XR Tutorial with training and examination for novices in lighting design. Besides technical aspects regarding specific console controls, general design guidelines and practices should also be covered.

2. Small Device, Huge Impact: Improving User Experience for a small piece of hardware: The xPort Node by MA Lighting. Conceptualization and redesign of a user interface that is controllable by only one rotary knob (only inputs possible: press, left, right).

3. Multimodal Interaction/Interface for the MA consoles: Focus on user needs and workflow optimization. Current interactions require many configurations and setting up, especially big shows demand time and knowledge. This project is interested in evaluating multimodal approaches to reduce cognitive load for users and improve the overall workflow.

4. XR Show Planner: Focus on creation of initial stage, fixture, patch and positioning setup. Optimizing the current workflow and expanding the concepts for future challenges is the overarching goal.

5. XR MA hardware device: Focus on hardware design and prototypical development of a small piece of hardware that could replace the VR controllers and focus on MA context specific interaction devices.

6. XR Particle Effect Editor: Focus on creating cutting edge VFX effects, that are currently widely used in cinema and theater production. An innovative and intuitive way of telling particles what to do over time could be accomplished in an XR setting.

7. Creation of a benchmarking system for in-house development and hardware: Focus on automatic detection of bottlenecks and automatic adjustments for better performance and user experience.

8. Investigating and analyzing the use of Large Language Models as context-aware assistants : What can the next generation of a user manual look like? Will a human-like answer assistant be perceived as helpful and timesaving? Is it capable of adapting to the users’ specific needs and prior knowledge? The assistant has to remember conversations and chat history, but also needs to have context-related knowledge of products as well as user-specific knowledge.

9. Measurement and investigation of the effects of stage lighting on people: To which extent do lighting attributes influence the evaluation of a show? With the help of user studies, identify lighting attributes that can be associated with measured human responses and/or metrics.

Contact Persons at the University Würzburg