Zhuang Chang

Zhuang Chang

PhD Student

Zhuang Chang is a Ph.D. candidate at the Empathic Computing Laboratory, at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, under the supervision of Prof. Mark Billinghurst and Dr. Huidong Bai. His research is about empathic mixed reality with emotional agents.

He received a master’s degree in advanced manufacturing engineering from the Northwestern Polytechnical University, China in 2018. His master research topic was about designing and evaluating Augmented Reality systems for occluded assembly tasks in narrow spaces. He visited the Empathic Computing Laboratory, at the University of South Australia, in 2017 and conducted research on eliciting and sharing emotions in collaborative Mixed Reality.

Projects

  • TBI Cafe

    Over 36,000 Kiwis experience Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) per year. TBI patients often experience severe cognitive fatigue, which impairs their ability to cope well in public/social settings. Rehabilitation can involve taking people into social settings with a therapist so that they can relearn how to interact in these environments. However, this is a time-consuming, expensive and difficult process. To address this, we've created the TBI Cafe, a VR tool designed to help TBI patients cope with their injury and practice interacting in a cafe. In this application, people in VR practice ordering food and drink while interacting with virtual characters. Different types of distractions are introduced, such as a crying baby and loud conversations, which are designed to make the experience more stressful, and let the user practice managing stressful situations. Clinical trials with the software are currently underway.