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Mem-Pano: Constructing Individualized Panoramas Final Project for CS347 (Human-Computer Interaction: Foundations and Frontiers)
Spring 2022

Edited panorama of NYC Chinatown with digitally inserted personal photograph of school and parents; the original building was destroyed by fire.

Role

Frontend Developer, User Researcher

Description

As physical spaces evolve, the gap between digital representations of a location and individual memories widens. This is particularly acute for individuals who have experienced places that have drastically changed due to natural disasters, gentrification, and displacement.

With a team of 3, I developed Mem-Pano, a panorama-editing web app that enables novice users to perform low-level panorama edits to reconstruct locations to better reflect their personal memories and experiences, bridging an inaccessible past and accessible present.

Methods

Built a React-based panorama editor that integrates Google Street View data and a panorama viewer to enable novice users to perform and view low-level image manipulations
Conducted 20 hours of user research studies (interviews and usability testing) with 16 participants to evaluate user experience and the systems’ impact on both creators' memory preservation and viewers' understanding

Outcomes

Our evaluation showed that (1) Mem-Pano allowed users to create panoramas that they felt better represented their perspectives and memories of the location, and (2) individualized panoramas provided distinct narratives of the represented location to viewers but required contextual framing for clarity. We presented our findings at Stanford's Human-Computer Interaction Research Forum.