Tuesday, July 9

After I blogged on Tuesday, we were scheduled to have the MCA presentations, but that did not happen unfortunately.

Wednesday, July 10

I was out sick yesterday. Not much happens at Freddy when everyone’s gone…but at least our laundry machines came back!

Thursday, July 11

This morning, I went over the paper again and looked at Lucia’s edits. It finally got compiled into one document, and seeing that happen was very fulfilling. It made all of our progress feel very real. I’m going to keep working on the paper and have it as ready as possible for next week’s draft that’s due.

Today’s luncheon lecture was with our project’s mentor, Dr. Jon Kelly. I really appreciated his talk on space perception in virtual environments. I already had learned before that people underestimate distances in VR vs. real life, but now I know its implications on space perception in addition to navigation. An interesting test he described was “blind walking,” where the subject walks the distance they perceive to be the object. Everyone asked great questions, and I could tell that they were really trying to imagine the experiments in their minds.

We had our MCA presentation, which was postponed from Tuesday. Veejay chose that the 3D printing group go first — and I was the first person to go in our group, so I went very first. But we were all going to go eventually within those two hours, as Eliot said. I think I presented my product well. I think it really helped to have Abby there as a person who could share her experience with her broken finger. It made my product, Fispli, prove that it was made with her input in mind. All of the presentations were really fun, and I had a great time finally hearing about what everyone was working on in depth. Our group, 3D Printing, also won the MCA contest, which was an added bonus. 🙂

Friday, July 12

We had a lot of much needed time to work on our projects today. I was assigned to improve our existing draft of the poster. It was fun to create! I kept adding small elements here and there. I changed the poster a lot, now looking back at the previous draft. Now, I also have a better idea of what’s going to be written on the poster. Lucia came by after lunch and gave me notes on how I can improve it, but she said I had made something that I can easily work off of. I’m finishing those edits now.

We’re going to start testing next week! On Monday we’re going to run through the procedure and test ourselves to practice. Once everyone’s comfortable with the equipment, we’re going to start testing! I’m a bit intimidated because I know that we’ll test at least 10 participants, which will take ~10 hours. We have all week to get it done, but it still seems like a lot of work. But I remind myself that we’ve accomplished a lot this week, and Lucia told us the rest of the experiment should run smoothly and easily. She’s probably right.