Product & design
Owns the interface, the design system and every word of copy in the app. Sits in on pilot sessions and watches where students hesitate.
Signals are invisible.
That is the whole problem.
Signal Verse AR started from a single observation in a second-year lab: the students who could do the arithmetic perfectly were the same ones who could not picture what the arithmetic described.
A signals and systems syllabus asks a student to hold several invisible things in their head at once — a quantity that varies with time, its rate of repetition, its energy, and the relationships between all three. Then it asks them to reason about what happens when one of those changes.
The traditional supports for that are a textbook diagram, which is frozen, and a lab oscilloscope, which is shared between twenty people and available for two hours on a Thursday. Neither one lets a student ask “what if I doubled this?” at the exact moment the question occurs to them.
That gap — between having a question and being able to test it — is where most of the intuition that should be forming quietly fails to form.
They could all calculate the wavelength. Ask them to predict which of two waves on the board had the higher frequency and half the room guessed.
RK
Dr. Ritu Kaushik
Signals & Systems · Electronics Department
Principles
Five decisions that shaped everything else
01
The instrument must hold still
AR that wobbles is a demo. AR that stays anchored while you lean in and step back is an instrument. Everything in the tracking pipeline — the six-frame confirmation, the world anchor rather than an image parent, the plane search — exists to serve that one property.
02
Explain at the moment of the guess
Every quiz answer reveals its reasoning immediately, right or wrong. The two seconds after a guess are the only moment a student is genuinely curious about why. Batching feedback to the end of a quiz wastes all of them.
03
Gate honestly, retry freely
Phases unlock in order because each one assumes the last landed. But retries are unlimited, the question set does not change, and only your best attempt is recorded. The gate exists to protect understanding, not to manufacture difficulty.
04
The camera is a sensor, not a recorder
No frame is written to disk. No session makes a network call. The Phase 3 face mesh is computed, drawn and discarded inside a single frame. This was decided before the first line of tracking code, because it is not something you can retrofit convincingly.
05
Work on what students already own
No headset, no lab slot, no departmental purchase order. A phone from 2019, a sheet of paper and a lit table. The moment a tool needs new hardware, it stops being available to the students who most need it.
0
Students onboarded
Across six pilot departments
0
Phase-1 pass rate
First or second attempt
0
Questions written
Each with an explanation
0
Minutes median
To finish all four phases
Standards
What we hold ourselves to
The curriculum was reviewed against a standard second-year signals and systems syllabus. The interface is designed against the Apple Human Interface Guidelines and tested against WCAG 2.2 AA. Neither is a badge — both are checklists we actually run.
See the design system- WCAG 2.2 AA — contrast, focus order, target size and reduced-motion paths verified on every screen.
- Screen reader parity — every AR readout is mirrored as a live text region, so waveform values are announced as they change.
- No AR, no problem — every phase has a flat-panel path with identical content and the same certificate.
- Data you can take with you — export as JSON or erase everything, both two taps from Settings.
- Honest certificates — a completion record with a verifiable ID, never described as a formal qualification.
Who builds it
A small team, close to a classroom
Design, engineering and curriculum sit in the same room, which is the only reason a lesson can go from “that explanation is not landing” to a shipped change in a week.
Engineering
Unity, AR Foundation and the signal pipeline. Holds the 60 fps budget and the rule that nothing allocates inside a frame loop.
Curriculum
Writes the phases, the questions and the explanations, and reviews them against the syllabus each academic year.
Run a pilot with your department
One class, one semester, no purchase order. Tell us what you teach and we will map the phases onto it.