Facilities

Tech Commons II

The Sawyer Laboratory sign on the lab door.

Getting here

Park in the lot north of the faculty lot beside Millican Hall, and walk south past Millican Hall to Tech Commons II. We are in rooms 103 and 103A, across from Café Bustelo.

Visitors without a UCF permit need a virtual parking pass.

The Studio, room 103, is where students prototype, design studies and run early tests.

Opened
2026
The lab in Tech Commons II, looking toward the windows onto the café, with the driving simulator on the right.The lab’s round lit sign, Sawyer Laboratory, sawyerlabs.xyz.

Parallel testing

A unique capability of the Sawyer Laboratory is running up to 300 participants in a single session, across several adjoining computer laboratories.

300participants in one session
6rooms, run in parallel
70terminals in the primary hall

Every terminal can be fitted with a study’s own software and hardware, so a large sample can be collected in one session.

A computer lab in Tech Commons: curved rows of desks with monitors and task chairs under round ceiling panels.

The populations available at UCF

Students
70,674 in fall 2025: 60,083 undergraduate, 10,120 graduate, 471 in medicine
First-generation students
21.9% of undergraduates in spring 2021
Older adults
LIFE at UCF, the Learning Institute for Elders, for ages 50 and over, has nearly 800 members, and taking part in research is part of its mission. Legacy Pointe at UCF, a retirement community, is beside campus
Accessibility groups
Student groups for neurodivergent students and students with disabilities, among them Knight PALS, the Society of Innovation and Neurodiversity in Engineering, Best Buddies at UCF and the Special Olympics College Club
Military and veterans
About 4,000 military-connected students, including more than 3,300 veterans; Army and Air Force ROTC on campus
Hispanic-Serving Institution
Since 2019; 31% of students are Hispanic or Latino
Over 25
19% of students
Fully online
7,068 students

From UCF Facts, UCF’s School of Social Work, LIFE at UCF, Central Florida Public Media (2022), Legacy Pointe at UCF, KnightConnect, UCF News and UCF’s 2026 Accountability Plan.

Instruments

The driving simulator: a car seat, a steering wheel and pedals, before three curved screens.

A bespoke driving simulator for readability-while-driving studies and other advanced interface work. It includes an Apple Vision Pro interface.

Which words a reader stops on, and how long a driver’s eyes leave the road. We write our own code to process what the trackers record.

Eye trackers
A custom Apple Vision Pro eye tracker; Pupil Labs Invisible glasses; an SR Research desktop tracker

A virtual cabin around a real seat, or a planning table in the room. We deconstruct and modify mixed-reality headsets to provide new capabilities, and our students build the scenes we test in them.

Headsets
Every Oculus and Meta Quest headset, back to the original Kickstarter Rift
VR space
A dedicated space, 14 feet by 14 feet

We have OpenBCI and B-Alert X10 EEG systems.

Visit and contact

Sawyer Laboratory
Rooms 103 and 103A, Tech Commons II
University of Central Florida
12710 Pegasus Drive
Orlando, Florida 32816

To visit, write to us and tell us who is coming and what you want to see.