Andy Woods Some of my projects

Some of my projects

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.

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.

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’.

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.