Yesterday we had our final project presentation with where we got a chance to meet some other REUs around campus and show off what we had been working on all year. There were topics from every discipline and there were people working on some really interesting stuff. It was also really cool to see all of our faculty and student mentors come out to support our poster. I am really going to miss our lab. It was a fantastic summer. Thank everyone who helped me along the way.

Today Braden and I worked on the poster and have finished a rough draft. We still are waiting for the results so there are some gaps in our poster. We also finished the abstract and registered for the symposium in August. We have another participant to run at 3:00. We are still trying to find people to get to our goal of 20 people.

I think of the most interesting and important aspects of her talk was when she explains how to adopt these practices in the real world. She has examples about how companies have implemented these this practice and the impact that it has on the success of the newly adapted product. It seems like people often throw the words diversity and inclusion around without actually doing anything about it. As she explains, just putting these buzz words in the mission statement of a company doesn’t mean that any change will come. Her process is a proven way to make tangible changes in products and companies. As she says, a way of “walking the walk”. This is so important, because addressing gender bias is very difficult and often overlooked especially in this type subject where few people know it is a problem.

Beach patrol Captain Jack has been leading with valor and integrity. We have been working on writing a script that generates beach patrons. After a given range of time, one of them will start to drown and the lifeguard will have to find them and save them. We have most of these scripts working on test objects. The next step will be implementing this functionality to a few different prefabricated 3d models. We are making really great progress and I am really excited to see our final product come together. After building the first project for the stress task, I am feeling a lot more confident and the project is moving a lot faster. I really think that we will build a really solid application that will be a fantastic example of the practicality of VR.

The weekend was fun and relaxing. On Saturday we went to the farmers market in Ames and on Sunday we celebrated Emanuel’s birthday with some cake and Uno. We have been continuing our progress on our project fine tuning the details for our first trial run tomorrow. in our deeper dive group we have started brainstorming ideas for what we want to build for our final project. I think we have a lot of processing ideas so far and am excited to see what we build. I am also excited to start working on a different project now that I feel more comfortable with Unity.

Today we had another Unity class where we went over a few more important skills. We learned how to make UI stuff and some more scripting techniques. Our stress model is almost at a place where we can start testing the different elements that we will need to fine tune. We have a lot of animation work to do, specifically how to effectively control animation flow from the script. Once we get a good handle on this I think that the rest of the model can be built with the skills that we have already learned. We also think that once we get a preliminary model working, we can begin making the code more efficient and more detailed. We would like to implement some game managers to control the flow of our game. Right now the scripts call each other sequentially. We would like to implement one overall class organizing all the subscripts and their timing. We have drawn out how we want to organize this hierarchy and will implement it once we get a working prototype to show our mentors. We also need to write a draft of our methods so that we can get in reviewed by our mentors. We think that this will put us on the same page as far as our experiment.

Today is the first day of learning Unity, Our group has been teaching ourselves unity for a few days now and are realizing that there are a ton of complexities that we were not anticipating. We have a basic framework for our project build, but linking it all together with animation is tricky. We are hoping that the classes this week will help us finish our project. We spent some solid time this weekend learning some of the skills that we will need, but we still have a lot to learn. I hope that we can finish the project by Friday.

We have just finished our third class with solid works and I no longer hate it. It was very annoying to learn, but I am getting better and it has started becoming more fun. We are about to start learning our next 3D modeling software “Maya”. Our group is also working on teaching ourselves Unity in our free time and in the evenings. We have been given a soft deadline of next Tuesday for our completed VR model. We will see if we can do it, but we are not sure if we will be able to learn the skills and finish the model in time. We have almost finished planning the model and drawing out the schematic of our game. We think that it will be very effective in eliciting a stress response in a wide variety of people. It will also be more fun to administer than other traditional stress test models like public speaking or mental math. We had a fun and productive team yesterday at Birdie’s house where we went over the model, ran a hot sauce stress test experiment, and went for a goat walk. (with real goats…)

Today is the last day of c++ with Adam. We are finishing up with some classes and multiple inheritance principles. We wrote a “shape” class with square, circle, and triangle subclasses. I really enjoyed these classes and have learned a lot. It has been some time since I wrote in c++ and I was nervous when the classes started. I now feel much more confident in c++ and feel like I do have the background knowledge to meaningfully contribute to my group and to the program. We had our first wet lab class with Lotte about how stress hormones are regulated and the adverse effects of both too much and too little cortisol in the bloodstream. Our group has also been given some very interesting literature about the effects of stress, the best ways to elicit a strong stress response, and some of the other important research in the field that we will be building upon. Tomorrow we will be doing a team building activity and a ropes course. I am excited to see how well our team performs together and what we can learn about each other. Yesterday we tested a few VR models on the vive to get a better feel for the equipment and the possibilities. We first experimented with a model where the participant walks on a plank high above a city. This was very unnerving and far more realistic than I would have expected. Next, we experimented with a zombie model. In this model, the participant has to shine the light and spot the zombies before they get to you and eat you. This was scary as well. Lastly, we were in a model of a room that had just caught on fire. This was by far the more real experience, but not as stressful as the first two models. We have a lot more research and brainstorming to do before we come to any conclusions about what we are going to build. one of our latest interesting ideas is a virtual dance battle with a crowd watching. We think that this would elicit a strong social evaluative threat as was as uncontrollably and unpredictability. These are the key ingredients for a strong stress response. This is why the traditional public speaking test works so well. We also have tossed some other ideas around like getting pulled over by a police officer and defusing a bomb. Hopefully, we will have time to make a few different models to test before we pick one to collect data with.

Today we started with a class lead by Abby about some of the fundamentals of IRB process and writing a problem question paragraph. We spent some time as a group deconstructing the nuances of our experiment in order to build the foundation for our problem question. After this class, we spend some time with Eliot and talked about his path to where he is today. This an inspiring talk with the takeaway message being that there is not one right way to where you want to go. The fact is you probably won’t even end up where you think you will. Keep an open mind and doing the things that you love. After this talk, our research group went to our faculty mentor’s house for a team meeting. We got to meet the rest of the team that we will be working with and plan some of the upcoming goals. After our meeting, we came back to campus and took some pictures with Paul for the website. Now we are going to have a cookout at Ada Haden park and doing some Geocaching.

Today we got to experience some of the different resources that we will be using this summer. First, we got to use the C6, a room-sized virtual reality machine. We were able to take a walk on a full-sized aircraft carrier and watch F-18s take off and do fly-bys. This machine is the only one like it in the world. It has a higher resolution than any other VR machine. Next, we got to take a look at the 3D printing lab. We looked at different printed objects and talked about the skills we will be learning this summer like 3D modeling with various different software. We also looked at the oculus rift and vive, two of the virtual reality systems that we will be using and doing research with. Yesterday we got to use and test the vive in our research lab. I am very excited about this project. We will be building virtual models designed to stress people out. We will then test these models on subjects and measure their stress response. We will measure their response by collecting heart rate data and testing cortisol levels in saliva.