Meet UBalt's 2019 NASA SUITS Team: The Poegrammers
A team of students from the University of Baltimore has been invited to travel to NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas, to test heads-up display prototypes they designed within an augmented reality environment to enhance task communication during spacewalks. The online Merriam-Webster dictionary defines augmented reality as "an enhanced version of reality created by the use of technology to overlay digital information on an image of something being viewed through a device."
The team of students is one of 12 teams out of 19 advancing to the testing phase in NASA's Spacesuit User Interface Technologies for Students—NASA SUITS. The students have spent the past several months coding their augmented reality-based prototypes and preparing for the test, which will take place in NASA's Human Integrated Vehicles and Environments, a facility used to develop and build human interfaces for human-in-the-loop testing. Teams are traveling to Houston in mid-April for the test.
The NASA SUITS challenge addresses an authentic, current space exploration challenge. Upon successful testing, each of the proposed displays has the potential to aid in a future NASA spacewalk or exploration mission.
The UBalt team—who call themselves the "PoeGrammers"—have proposed a way to implement multiple modes of interactions to navigate the heads-up display and to toggle between different menus using eye tracking and hand gestures. Their design concept ensures that the user interface is as minimalistic as it is informative, and that spacewalk missions are as efficient as possible.
Members of the University of Baltimore's PoeGrammers team work in the Digital Whimsy Lab on their entry for the NASA SUITS challenge.
The team is made up of seven students from UBalt’s undergraduate Applied Information Technology and Simulation and Game Design programs:
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meet the poegrammers
Karl-Heinz Gilbert-Wason, B.S. '19
role: UI designer/programmer -
meet the poegrammers
William Hyland, B.S. '19
role: programmer/interaction designerWilliam is also a member of the Astrobees, UBalt's 2020 NASA SUITS team.
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meet the poegrammers
John Manlucu, B.S. '19
role: programmer/systems managerJohn is also a member of the Astrobees, UBalt's 2020 NASA SUITS team.
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meet the poegrammers
Osman Martinez
major: Applied Information Technology, Information Security and Assurance Track
role: systems and communications -
meet the poegrammers
Larysa Paliashchuk, B.S. '19
role: UI designer/programmerLarysa is also a member of the Astrobees, UBalt's 2020 NASA SUITS team.
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meet the poegrammers
Juan Pablo Soto Medico, B.S. '19
role: programmer/project manager -
Meet the poegrammers
Eric Yang Ra, B.S. '19
role: UI designer/3D animator/modeler
Other 2019 NASA SUITS schools are Harvard University, the University of Colorado-Boulder, Virginia Tech, the University of Michigan, Boise State University, Bradley University, Riverside City College, Stevens Institute of Technology, the University of Akron, the University of North Texas, Texas A&M University-College Station, the University of Wisconsin, Stout, Inter-American University of Puerto Rico at Bayamon, Valencia College, Santa Monica College, and the University of California, Santa Cruz.
NASA SUITS is managed by the Office of STEM Engagement at JSC. The program helps support the agency's education policy of using NASA's unique missions and programs to engage and encourage students to pursue science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) careers.
Learn more about NASA SUITS.
Read about the PoeGrammers in
Technical.ly Baltimore
.
For social media updates, follow @NASAedu, #NASACodes and @poegrammers.
Learn more about NASA's STEM Engagement programs and NASA EVAs.
Learn about UBalt's undergraduate programs in Applied Information Technology and Simulation and Game Design.
Check out the PoeGrammers' video.
'Reward After Reward'
When it comes to space, there is no room for error—not a micrometer, not a nanosecond. That's why UBalt's PoeGrammers, a team of undergraduate students from the Applied Information Technology and the Simulation and Game Design programs in the Yale Gordon College of Arts and Sciences, took a rather dramatic approach in crafting their ideas for the NASA SUITS challenge. Instead of dry, purely data-driven solutions to NASA's proposal (see main article), the seven-member team, led by
Giovanni Vincenti
, associate professor and director of the AIT program, relied on a "what-if" mentality:
"We're designing an interface for a device that will help someone who has not been trained to fulfill a task to do it," says programmer and project manager Juan Pablo Soto. "So we created a story based on that: What if you are medical, and you need to go [on a spacewalk] and fix the solar panel, but you've not been trained for that? The guy in engineering is sick, and he can only guide you through another device. We're designing that, too."
Soto and the team are using an augmented reality platform called Magic Leap, a newly available product that offers a lighter headset and is capable of delivering 3D models, Voice Over IP, telemetry and more.
"This is the Iron Man thing," Soto says. "This is the helmet from Iron Man, that's what we are trying to do. And it’s been super challenging, and it has been reward after reward."
The team says that UBalt faculty and staff have provided consistent support—something that the team needs in order to compete with larger, better resourced schools in the challenge's finals.
"We have been achieving things that probably we would never see until we are master's students or PhDs," Soto says. "We are learning on top of what we need to do and we have the support of the University."
Prof. Vincenti believes the team's accomplishments are a true testament to their dedication. "Their hard work, collaboration, and especially positive attitude allowed them to achieve magnificent results in a rather short time," Vincenti says. "I was already proud of them when they decided to participate in this challenge, and the invitation to NASA is a result that goes beyond all dreams. They will be working for a week with some of the best technologists in the world! I have great confidence in each one of them, and I look forward to updates on their personal and professional successes after graduation."
Soto and the team are traveling to Houston at NASA's invitation, with the goal of grasping what it is that the agency likes about their approach.
"We think we have something that other universities are not paying enough attention to, which is design," Soto says. "We have guys that work on game design [on the team]. So we bring things from a part of computer design that maybe NASA just skips—they just want something that works. When they create something that works, they sometimes forget about how beautiful the user interface is going to look, the functionality, the experience with the UI."
-Kyle Fierstien