Facilities

 

Sawyer Lab develops research infrastructure for large-scale studies in user experience and human-AI teaming. Across our computer workstation laboratories we run up to 300 participants in parallel, supporting applied research on industry timelines alongside academic and government-funded work.

The Studio

Sawyer labs tech commons II
The Studio is our collaboration space, makerspace, and experimental testbed. It supports prototyping, student collaboration, and early-stage study design and testing. It provides dedicated desks for selected student researcher projects, high-performance workstations, and a growing set of instruments available to lab members, including eye-tracking hardware, biosensors, and VR equipment. The space accommodates the full research process, from study design through data collection and analysis.
 
Resources available to members:
  • High-performance workstations
  • Eye-tracking and biosignal recording equipment
  • Virtual and augmented reality platforms
  • Collaborative desk and prototyping space for graduate and undergraduate researchers

Computer Workstation Laboratories

TCII computer lab
Our computer workstation laboratories provide large-scale, PC-based experimentation capacity, with up to 300 participants running in parallel across six rooms. The primary hall, adjacent to The Studio, provides:
  • 70 participant terminals
  • A flexible layout for large group studies
  • Capacity to outfit stations with experiment-specific software and hardware
 
Five additional laboratories provide a further 230 terminals. Running participants in parallel rather than in sequence is the core advantage of this capacity. A study that would otherwise require weeks of sequential scheduling can be fielded in a single session, at the sample sizes needed for adequate statistical power and on timelines compatible with applied and industry-sponsored research.

Specialized Experimentation Facilities

We have additional specialized and naturalistic experimentation spaces for sponsors, supporting applied neuroscience, driving simulation, psychophysics, and readability research.

Industry Collaboration

Industry’s central question about university partners is whether an academic lab can keep the cadence its research culture demands. We can, and we do. In this, we point to our proven track record of successful collaboration with Fortune 50 companies.