Andy Woods Some of my projects

Some of my projects

Emotion recognition inside a VR headset, on a £10 chip

I mounted a Raspberry Pi Zero and a camera on the outside of a VR headset. Via a computer vision model run on the pi, we could tell when someone smiled. This was fed into the VR environment (characters in that environment behaved differently when they knew you were smiling). The first version was made of cardboard and masking tape.

StoryFutures · 2020– Pi Zero, OpenCV, Python · finished rig filmed for AI Spy

The early prototype worn in an office: a Raspberry Pi Zero W and a camera ribbon cable taped to a cardboard frame fixed across a pair of glasses. The finished build in use: a VR headset with a small camera board mounted under the front of it, angled down at the wearer’s face.

A Duplo windmill that answers to Alexa

My son wanted a windmill that turned when he asked it to, via Alexa. A micro servo fits inside a Duplo brick. The rest of the windmill is ordinary bricks.

2019–2020 · Duplo, micro servo, Alexa

A red Duplo brick with one face cut away and a micro servo seated inside it, held above a part-built Duplo tower.

An Arduino you can hold in both arms

An Arduino Uno is about the size of a credit card. Here’s a huge one! Took some days to 3d print.

2026 · 3D printed

Andy standing in a fabrication lab holding a 3D-printed Arduino Uno R3 roughly the width of his shoulders, with the headers, silkscreen labels and microcontroller all reproduced.

A brain that lights up

Full size print done with transparent PLA. The model’s from a brain scan I had a few years ago.

Christmas 2021 · white PLA, LEDs

A 3D-printed brain lit from inside, glowing blue, cyan and pink against a ceiling at the top of a Christmas tree, with a smaller lit print hanging below it and a trumpet bell catching the light.

Helen Falls In

Helen cycles the Wey towpath from West Byfleet to Godalming on a very wobbly bike. Keep her dry with the arrow keys, the left and right halves of the screen.

2026 · play it

A top-down pixel-art view of the game: the blue Wey curving past a sandy towpath and a hedgerow, Helen small on her bike in the middle of the path, and a HUD reading 0:10 and ‘dry so far’.

Wind and haptics you can post to someone

Multisensory experiences mostly live in expensive venues. Here’s a robotic wind generator I built. An awesome PhD student is exploring whether augmenting movies / experiences with additional senses provided by this and other devices, boosts metrics such as enjoyment.

Ongoing · Arduino, servos, 3D printing · gamepad-controlled

A scent release device, also for Unilever

Unilever needed a way to contain scent and release it on cue. An early project of mine.

Unilever · 2012 · badged Xperiment Hardware, Mk 1.0

The front panel of the odour control device: a brushed aluminium case badged ‘Xperiment Hardware’, with red and green indicator lamps labelled Passive and Active, and ‘Odour Control Device | Misty Odour Computer Kit Mk 1.0’ along the bottom. The same device from the side, showing the fan in one end panel and the wide grey duct it blows the scent out through.

A six-channel taste delivery machine

Multisensory flavour research needs precisely timed, repeatable delivery of six liquids to a person’s mouth without them seeing what’s coming. I designed and built this solution.

Unilever R&D · psychophysics apparatus · clip from 2011, early version

My brain, open sourced

I have printed a lot of brains. This one is mine. The raw structural MRI and printable models are on GitHub, under Apache 2.0. You can print it yourself.

Opensourced 2019 · MRIcron, STL, 3D printed · github.com/andytwoods/brain

A teal 3D-printed brain with its folds clearly resolved, sitting on a striped rainbow rug, with a smooth white printed light bulb balanced on top of it. Another brain part way through printing, seen through the printer’s webcam: the print head just above a half-finished purple cortex on a Prusa i3, with a brick wall and a bicycle behind it.

Vibrating HairWare

Hair follicles have tactile sensors. It’s a shame we can’t make use of them when communicating with our tech… that’s where this idea came in. Via gear I had…

· arduino

The Inclusivity Bookshelf

Three physical bookshelves already on campus, plus a website so other places of work can set up their own.

Launched 2025 · inclusivitybookshelf.com

Two shelves of an inclusivity bookshelf, books face-out.

Can I Still Code?

An ongoing longitudinal study of what AI coding assistants do to developers’ underlying Python skill. I was curious (and worried!) about the impact of coding ability due to using AI.

Ongoing · canistillcode.org · Django

The Can I Still Code? site, inviting developers to join a longitudinal study.

LiveQual – live qualitative research that runs itself

A WhatsApp based research platform I’m proud of, made with Django. Paper coming shortly!

Current · Django

The LiveQual site, showing a live WhatsApp voice note arriving from a participant in the field.

Simulating a psychology study with ChatGPT4o

I asked ChatGPT4o to simulate a psychology study with a complex multilevel design (here’s the final code). I wanted to check whether an effect we observed was down…

· simulation · psychology · chatGPT · python

InclusivityXR – finding accessibility problems in the pixels

There are many ways of making a button or other UX element in VR, making it hard to figure what UX elements by looking at underlying code. InclusivityXR gets around this by examining pixels. A developer uploads a screen recording of their experience. A computer vision pipeline then finds the interface elements, and a set of detectors flags issues of inclusion such as text too small, targets too small, crowdedness, and contrast that fails for regularly sighted people as well as for the three commonest forms of colour blindness. Built with Umar Farooq and Marco Volino at Surrey’s CVSSP, and James Bennett at StoryFutures.

StoryFutures with CVSSP, Surrey · CVMP 2023 · paper

The InclusivityXR computer vision pipeline: video frames go through greyscale and gradient stages to a binary image, then text and non-text detection, with matched bounding boxes tracked across frames into an object database.

Story Starter – driving a room full of headsets with no internet

StoryTrails toured fifteen UK towns in the summer of 2022, bringing six VR experiences to thousands of people. Every off-the-shelf system for managing a fleet of headsets required a live internet connection—something a library cannot always provide reliably.

Story Starter works over a local network instead, using a small dongle housed in a 3D-printed case that sits discreetly in the corner of the room. From it, an onboarder can start or stop an experience, install a new experience, adjust the volume, and check the remaining battery level—all without having to put the headset on. The result: faster-moving queues and one fewer thing to wipe down between users.

Written with Laryssa Whittaker, Neil Smith, Robert Ispas, Jackson Moore, Roderick Morgan and James Bennett.

StoryFutures · StoryTrails 2022 · paper in Virtual Worlds

The StoryLinker dongle: a small pink 3D-printed enclosure with StoryLinker embossed on the lid, two USB ports showing through cut-outs in the side. The Story Starter control screen, listing four headsets by where they are in the room, each with its battery percentage and Apps and Stop buttons, and a volume slider beneath.

DnD ability scores chance

I felt bad about rolling an 18 amongst 5 other 3d6 scores. I wrote this browser based probability checker to show that chances do happen.

· probability · dnd

IDE+browser-refresh hotkey productivity tip

Do you have your IDE and your browser open side-by-side? Do you want explicit control of when your browser refreshes with a single shortcut key? Auto-reloaders are…

· productivity

Trumpet note / valve learning tool

I’ve made this tool help people like my son and me, who have trouble learning notes and fingerings. I have no formal musical training, except for 4 years of…

· trumpet · js

django htmx modal popup loveliness

I thought to share a pattern I’ve been using recently, for providing modal popups, via HTMX. I’m using Bootstrap5 but this is straightforward to implement in…

· bootstrap5 · django · htmx

TestXR – a platform for running VR studies in the wild

A platform I developed for coordinating at home and central location VR base research.

StoryFutures · Django, AWS · £200k secured

The TestXR participant site: ‘The home for immersive audience research participants’.

Pizero arty alexa-powered sunblind controller

I need to be careful with sunburn, so we installed an electronic sun-blind that extends out from the house to cover part of our garden. I was excited to hear from…

· art · servo · pizero · alexa

OK google, are there parking spaces — my PiZero, computer-vision, voice-assistant, parking-space detector

Situation

· raspberry-pi · computer-vision · ok-google · pizero

Setting up google-actions to control python gadgets

I am using PyCharm so I used it’s GUI to create a new project and a Virtual Environment. I also:

· google-action · voice-control

Xperiment – millisecond timing in a browser, before that was possible

Back in 2011, not a lot of research was done online. I spent seven years developing software to make this possible, rewriting the engine three times as the web platform caught up: ActionScript, then Haxe, then ES6. Conducting perception research over the internet came out of it.

Founded 2011 · ran to 2018 · AS3 → Haxe → ES6 · archived site

The Xperiment site as it stood in 2012: ‘Portable behavioural science studies at your fingertips’, and a diagram captioned ‘One script to rule them all’ showing one experiment running across a laptop, tablet and phone.