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Software development and design

Discover how projects have benefitted from our research-fluent programming team within and beyond the University.

We're a dedicated resource for innovative software project work within the School of Psychology.

We offer several services, including:

software development: developing research software for you, from start to finish. We are experienced in the University ecosystem and can help you navigate the process of getting your software up and running.
application design workshops: helping you design your application, from the ground up using ‘joint application design’ techniques in a series of workshops. This is perfect for when you have an idea but need to develop a plan.
project resurrection: if you have an existing project that is crucial to your research and in peril, we can help you get it back on track.

Case Studies

Web-based interfaces
Whole School & College Approach Online Tool

An online toolkit to allow educational settings to self-assess their whole school and college approach to mental health. The app was developed over the course of 2 weeks and has had over 300 schools sign up in the first 4 months of release.
Perception Census

An award winning ('Creative effectiveness' category in the CR Annual Awards 2024) online test platform, a collaboration between Sussex and Glasgow Universities and Collective Act. In total, 33,780 people from 133 countries took part, completing 102,689 sections of The Perception Census, making it the largest study of its kind. The findings and insights will impact numerous academic fields from neuroscience, to philosophy, to anthropology. The tests included questionnaires, optical illusions and many different kinds of interactive multimedia-based evaluations of perceptual skills and differences.
Sussex Research Record

An internal tool for the psychology department which streamlines the yearly data gathering for various metrics. A customisable form creation package, with a UI design to help send reminders and encourage users to fill out necessary data before deadlines.
Circles

We are currently working on this real-time video chat project with a unique method of allowing students (and staff) to meet and discuss matters within a course.
Parenting with Anxiety

The Parenting with Anxiety app is an online version of a successful intervention for parents who have anxiety. The aim of the intervention was to teach parents how to manage their anxiety in a way that makes it less likely to pass on to their children. It was built in Moodle with a RCT framework custom programmed. The results of the RCT were positive and the app is currently in the stages of being implemented bu tje Kent Surrey Sussex Academic Health Science Network!
Trial Pigeon

A new service to manage trial related communications (email, SMS, in-app). Researchers can write up emails and use a flow chart to manage sending reminders and integrate with data gathering platforms such as Qualtrics.
Syntoolkit

Syntoolkit started as a series of customisable tests for different types of synaesthesia. It grew into a general-purpose platform for creating and hosting psychology experiments, with a form builder, experiment flow, and results sharing interface. It is now used within the department by many researchers to help spin up psychology experiments quickly and for free, and to share and collaborate with students and other researchers.
Landecker Digital Memory

We are about to embark on creating web software to help preserve the testimony and memories of Holocaust survivors. Design workshop stage will begin June 2024, with the project framework aiming to be online within the year.
Valuable Lives

We collaborated on a series of design workshops with the Valuable Lives team at UCL to produce requirements specifications and design briefs for a new website providing public access to records of enslaved individuals from the 19th century.
Virtual reality (VR) and 3D
Colourmind: VR Colour Shifting

We adapted the latest Oculus rift headset to use 'shaders' which accurately map realistic colours to a transformed colour space, to allow experimentation with the human visual system under different visual colour environments.
VR Streeview

In order to conduct experiments on the effects of street environments on a variety of psychological instruments, we created an immersive platform to allow the use of Google Images within VR headsets.
AI and data science
Language Health Centre

We created a frontend and contributed to the MLOPs behind a new service designed to allow researchers to access machine learning models for categorising hate speech online.
Mass Observation Visualisation

We inherited a website and an important tool using natural language processing to extract and present themes from first-hand testimonies on events given by the public. The site required a careful upgrade, and provisioning on a new service and several tricky bugs to be fixed!
Octopath: Digital Histopathology

We built the React frontend dashboard for this AI-powered software to assist pathologists in performing their daily tasks.
Mobile apps
CALMS

We were tasked with updating a mobile application to be used by parents receiving mental health services for children’s disruptive behavioural problems and by academic researchers in this field. The app required software updates and extensive editing to allow it to be used in a clinical setting to monitor progress of the intervention.
ColourSpot

Colourspot is an iPad game that provides an indicative diagnostic assessment of children’s colour vision. Children tap coloured dots, and it runs statistical models to detect common colour vision deficiencies. It is currently undergoing a certification process for UKCA marking. The app was built in Unity, with animations and illustrations provided by a designer. The game's display required custom shaders to render a controlled presentation of colours.
Soundsight

Soundsight is an iOS app which uses depth information from the iPhone camera to generate sounds, which visually impaired people can use to help with navigation. Depth information from the native iPhone cameras, and from third party hardware is transformed into a real-time stream of parameters which are hooked up to a variety of sound loops. The user has the experience of sound changing as they navigate towards and away from obstacles, as well as the quality of sound changing with colour shifts.
Gaming
Dog-go-nogo

An implementation of classic attentional control paradigms in the form of tablet games. We created a series of tasks to allow experimental study of variants of this paradigm in Unity with C#.

Contact

Dr. James Alvarez, Senior Web Developer: j.alvarez@sussex.ac.uk.

Software development and design

Case Studies

Contact

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