Some of the (I'd like to believe) cool projects that I've worked on while at Georgia Tech:

A project that looked at the problems faced by people with color vision deficiency.

This was a class project for the Introduction to Human Computer Interaction Course. We initially performed formative evaluations through personal interviews and online surveys. After we identified the prime problem areas, we picked a niche area and brainstormed to identify possible solutions. We then created a wizard-of-oz android-based mobile prototype and had it evaluated through a cognitive walkthrough and a heuristic evaluation involving 4 evaluators.

Home Screen
The home screen for the Color Vision App.
Settings Saved Screen
The one-time configurable screen for color vision impaired people.
An application written for the Argon Augmented Reality Browser.

This is an application that allows users to post and view augmented reality content using any iOS device with the Argon Augmented Reality Browser installed. When one person posts a message at a location, others who pass by the same location will be able to see the same message on their devices as well. We believe these kinds of applications will find takers in the future as augmented reality comes to stay, what with google glasses and the like coming out. This application was demonstrated at the 2012 Convergence Innovation Competition. Right now it is a simple text-only system, but I hope to work on it further in the future and allow authoring pictures and video as well.

A Re-design of Georgia Tech's buzzport system for better course planning.
A class project for the Principles of UI Design and Evaluation course. We created a prototype of a new course planner system to be integrated with existing systems. This was driven by observing students register for courses. Some of the inputs that went into the design include - Students didn't have a centralized place to look for required and/or recommended couses, a place to look for completed courses, a place to look for courses that are offered in near future semesters, and a way to create plans for those future semesters. There were two iterations of summative evaluations. Initially, paper prototypes were used. Later on, we used power-point to come up with high fidelity prototypes.
Home Screen
The home screen. On the left is a quick completed courses view. On the middle is the current semester's calendar, upcoming academic milestones and messages (with linkedin integration and professor reviews), and on the right is list of 'planned' courses as set out by the student.
Picture 2 The detailed overview dropdown.
Picture 3 The future planner screen. The 'Required', 'Recommended' and 'All' courses are listed by category. Smileys indicate other students' course survey feedback results. The pane on the left allows students to drag and drop courses into future semesters.
Sign Management System sponsored by US Dept. of Transportation.
I'm developing a user application that plots the position of every sign in Georgia on a map. Users can interact to query for signs along particular routes/counties, look at photos from recent inspections and will also be able to predict when sign maintenance will be necessary. I also occasionaly help out a team that does some similar work to facilitate better road-pavement evaluation.
A game developed using the Unity3d Game engine.
This was a game that we designed and coded as part of the Video Game Design course. We initially brainstormed within our team to come up with the concept of Cars Vs. Zombies. Essentially the objective of the game is to control a car and run over as many zombies as possible as well as complete the course as soon as possible. In the two-player game, each player tries to finish with as many points as possible, but for every second the second player stays on track his score keeps decreasing. This puts the player in a dilemna as to whether to go for a quick finish or to try and run over as many zombies as possible.

We first put together a quick software prototype with the basic game mechanics. We were then able to drive the design behind such game-play aspects such as zombie-density, car (which later became a hover craft) speed and control sensitivity by play testing with three people with moderate to high gaming experience.

An interesting finding from our play testing sessions was that most players seem to want to compare any racing game with Need For Speed. They felt most comfortable with game play mechanics similar to NFS!

You can try this game out here.