Projects

The AWE project explores how wearable technologies can be used to extend human capabilities beyond traditional fitness and health tracking applications. By integrating advanced hardware and software, including augmented and extended reality devices such as smart glasses and helmets, the project aims to enhance human perception, cognition, and interaction with their environment in a seamless and intuitive way. It focuses on developing and researching solutions for industry and defence contexts through collaborative efforts between companies and research teams, while also addressing ethical and societal considerations. Ultimately, AWE seeks to enable broader applications of wearable technology, including supporting the development of metaverse-related uses in both professional and everyday settings.

Project website

The Intelligent Haptic Mediation (IHM) project, funded by Google, advances a new generation of tactile interaction systems by rethinking the haptic channel as a complete end-to-end loop rather than a single actuator output. It addresses the challenge that haptic signals in mobile, wearable, and immersive interfaces often degrade due to material losses, environmental noise, and static actuation. To overcome this, the project introduces a system-level architecture that optimizes signal generation, propagation, and verification in real time through three components: the Active Actuation Engine (AAE), Dynamic Realtime Signal Mediation (DRSM), and a User Sampling Feedback Loop (USFL), aiming to preserve consistent tactile perception across different devices and contexts. The research combines prototyping and empirical validation to improve haptic efficiency and reliability while producing reusable design guidance for multimodal interaction. Additionally, it explores advanced materials and actuation approaches, including rheACT, an implantable actuator using magnetorheological fluids and hydrogel encapsulation for adaptive, localized tactile stimulation controlled by external magnetic fields, demonstrating new possibilities for assistive technologies, prosthetics, and high-fidelity human–computer interaction.

The MEDALLION project focuses on developing advanced tools to help medical professionals analyze data more effectively and improve clinical workflows. By using Extended Reality (XR) environments, it enables intuitive interaction with complex medical data, helping reduce errors while saving time and costs. The project also develops XR metrology for quality control, collaborative XR systems for remote and flexible teamwork, and multimedia annotation tools that support global collaboration on 3D patient data. In addition, MEDALLION emphasizes explainable AI (XAI), aiming to make AI-driven analyses transparent, understandable, and trustworthy, allowing clinicians to review, question, and refine results, ultimately improving decision-making and patient care.

Project website

PathFAInder is an accessibility-driven research project focused on multimodal pedestrian navigation in environments where conventional map guidance is often insufficient, such as complex urban areas and remote, low-infrastructure settings. It combines precise route mapping, adaptive haptic cues, and AI-assisted contextual support to help users navigate safely and confidently with reduced reliance on visual information. At its core, the project investigates how calibrated tactile feedback can provide meaningful path-correction cues while minimizing cognitive load, particularly for people with visual impairments and those in eyes-busy situations. Through real-world route studies, deviation-aware guidance strategies, and integration of haptics, audio, and AI vision, PathFAInder advances both scientific understanding and practical system design, building toward scalable, inclusive navigation solutions that improve route adherence, situational awareness, and perceived safety.

The HapticAugmentation project advances next-generation multimodal interaction standards with a strong focus on haptics across major international standardization ecosystems, including MPEG, 3GPP, and IETF. It contributes to the evolution of MPEG haptics from temporal coding toward richer spatial and interactive paradigms, while supporting interoperability across media and transport systems. The work combines scientific research and practical engineering through evaluation platforms, cross-industry collaboration, and demonstration-driven validation, aiming to transform haptics into a standardized component of immersive media systems. In addition to standardization efforts, the project develops novel haptic interaction systems and AI-assisted multimodal orchestration, creating a pipeline from research prototypes to future standards and innovation assets. Through collaboration with national and international partners, it integrates architecture research, system prototyping, and user-centered validation to support real-world deployment, positioning the project at the intersection of multimodal haptics research, interoperable systems engineering, and long-term standardization impact.

FinnGen is a large public–private genomics and personalized medicine project that has gathered genetic and health data from around 500,000 Finnish biobank participants to better understand the genetic basis of diseases. Now in its third phase (2023–2027), the project focuses on deepening existing data rather than expanding the cohort, aiming to study disease onset, progression, and treatment response through longitudinal analyses. It investigates biological mechanisms behind genetic variants across selected disease areas, such as neurodegenerative, cardiovascular, and inflammatory conditions. By integrating new clinical data sources, including laboratory results and treatment information, and incorporating advanced omics analyses (e.g., proteomics, metabolomics, and sequencing), FinnGen seeks to identify biomarkers and provide deeper insights into how genetic factors influence disease development, ultimately supporting advances in prevention, diagnosis, and treatment.

Project website

INDUSTRY X involves the understanding of how events, information, or own action influences objectives and goals immediately or in future in factory environment. The INDUSTRY X project focuses on topics such as intelligent algorithms for Industry 4.0, audio-visual environment sensing, analysis, and spatial computing, visualization and virtual asset management for digital twins, and real-time edge computing solutions for Industry 4.0.

A major task of the INDUSTRY X project is to create an “INDUSTRY X Ecosystem” in order to support and strengthen Finnish industrial companies and academia in becoming a global leader in edge computing research and technology enablers. This leadership will be realized in different fronts such as academic research, product R&D, technology development and related international standardization.

Tampere University is the academic partner of the INDUSTRY X project. Three research groups with complementary expertise take part in co-innovation activities.

Link to the final report of the project

XAI: Explainable AI, one area of AI research that seeks to make AI functions understandable for humans.

Acceptance of artificial intelligence (AI) applications requires that the developers of AI solutions consider end-users’ needs and concerns. This project focuses on co-creation of AI solutions and their design methods with companies utilizing applied research on human-centred technology. The aim is to create knowledge and skills in the design and development of AI solutions that are meaningful, understandable, acceptable and ethically sustainable for their users.

KITE is funded by the European Regional Development Fund.

More information on VARPU web pages: https://varpu.info

DIGILE Digital Services program is a huge investment in the future of digital services business in Finland. The academic coordination of the research program is at the University of Tampere. TAUCHI’s main research topics in this program are connected to different kind of education services.

In UXUS project, we develop advanced user interfaces for machinery industry and study the resulting new user experience in this context.

The Tekes-funded project develops innovative and multimodal learning spaces for various education levels.

In the DREX project we use theatre work and interactive spatial technology to study new types of evental spaces. We build demonstrations and applications and work in close collaboration with industrial partners (including STX Finland, Heureka, Turku 2011 -foundation, SKS Mechatronics). In DREX we collaborate with Centre for Practice as Research in Theatre and Theatre and Drama Research. The project is funded by Tekes Spaces and Places programme. Internation co-operation partners include Trinity College Dublin, University of Queensland and Teesside University.

Do-it-Yourself Smart Experiences is an Eureka ITEA2 consortium project. DiYSE aims at enabling ordinary people to easily create, setup and control applications in their smart living environments as well as in the public Internet-of-Things space, allowing them to leverage aware services and smart objects for obtaining highly personalised, social, interactive, flowing experiences at home and in the city.

The Tekes-funded project develops scalable smart space interoperability solutions and novel user interfaces.

The project develops new ways of utilizing automatic face analysis in social-emotional human-technology interaction (HTI) and vision-based user interfaces. The main objective is to design and implement a new type of user interface that incorporates different machine vision techniques for the purpose of analyzing global facial information received from the user.

The development program creates multidisciplinary collaboration and new projects.

The objective of TERVI project was to carry out user-centered research and apply the newest interaction and software technology to developing interactive games that are designed to have an impact to health awareness and habits of young people. The aim was to have an impact on the whole life cycle by educating the young through gaming into awareness and care of their personal health.

The joint research project between TAUCHI and Stanford University, USA, was focused on haptic feedback in unimodal and multimodal user interfaces. Novel device and software prototypes from constructive research were studied.

We created applications with haptic feedback for teaching physical phenomena. Research was conducted in Ylöjärvi comprehensive school in collaboration with teachers. By mimicking real world physics, and by enabling the sense of touch as a new way to sense and control objects, forces and material, applications offer new methods for learning.