It’s been a very productive week so far for us…although c++ is something that I feel is the only thing I am actually good at, yet I got to learn very interesting and new techniques form Adam. I went to check out the gym yesterday and it felt pretty good working out after so long. I did my regular cardio and never felt so fresh ever before.

Apart from that, we also checked out the VR lab which I forgot to blog about the day before. So this post is a cumulative of the past two days. Our mentor Lucia gave us a small tour of the lab and also gave us access so that we can go and get comfortable with VR games in general. I personally felt really nice since we will be using the HTC vive as opposed to the Rift I was using since the past year.

Talking about rift, I don’t think I have ever mentioned in detail as to what I am currently involved in outside of the REU. So I am working with my team back in California to make a Virtual Reality Game that is based on sustainable education. This past year, we (my team mainly, as I am not as proficient in sketchUp) replicated all the buildings of our campus and imported those to unity. My role is to write the code behind for all unity scripts. What we aim to do by the end of the summer is that to enable the user to walk around the campus and when the user comes across a particular building, he can click on a canvas/banner/button that gives him various sustainable options each building can have.

The sustainable options will have the total cost, the green house gas emitted and the energy saved right next to each options. For example, a user can chose what kind of windows (triple, double or single-pane) are suitable for a particular building, what kind of bulbs (Fluorescent or Incandescent) are better, if solar panels are required or not on that building. It’s more like a test on the user’s higher order thinking skills to help him understand and apply the concept of sustainability.

We eventually aim to make this game available for all incoming freshmen to get an enhanced virtual tour of campus, the college administration to help them implement sustainability. We will also be including this game in future introductory engineering classes as as example of what they can do on their final project.

I don’t have any pictures of my game right now, but what i have right now is some of the pictures of a day when we hosted an event for high school students to make them experience Virtual Reality, with my professor Dr. Fadi Castronovo and teammates Karan Monga and Durodoluwa Odumosu.(In the pictures we are using the Oculus headset connected to the Alienware laptop.)

My research on Teleportation is something that fits perfectly with my past experience and I hope I am able to contribute my skills and experiences in the research and take with me not only new skills but also strong and friendly relationships with fellow REU interns.

Apologies if my blog looks like a Statement of Purpose haha, but I just thought I should share with everyone what I do. The posts ion the following week will be about my story and how life takes unpredictable turns..

Looking forward for the rest of the summer.