This is my last blog post, so I’ll just wrap up a few last things. Thursday morning before the symposium we went to the basement of the Innovation Center to film some reflections about the REU program. I was a little nervous but having the teleprompter helped a lot. The studio itself was very cool, too. I can’t wait to see how the video turns out!
The symposium went well. We got a lot of attraction to our poster, but I think that was mostly from the VR headset. We brought along a monitor and headset for people to try out one of our prototypes. In the virtual environment, we uploaded AI versions of ourselves programmed with knowledge on our research project and added in our physical poster. Basically, as we presented in real-life, our AIs presented in VR, which I think was pretty cool that we were able to do that. We received a lot of good questions about the AI software and NPCs, too. The poster session went a lot faster than I expected, and I’m a bit disappointed that we didn’t get a chance to look at the other presenters’ posters.
Later that day, our team met up at VRAC for one last debrief meeting. We ordered Mr. Burrito (what we ate the day we all first met!) and got to play some games on the VR headsets. It was lots of fun, and I will miss our team.
Of course, I need to add some thank yous as well. Thank you to all the session teachers for taking the time to teach us new software or more about research; thank you to our cross-mentors (Heliya and Imtiajul!) for looking after us during the summer and being so invested; thank you to Sarah, Lynn, and Tiffany for keeping things running smoothly and answering all our questions; thank you to Paul and Glen for IT help and catching all those wonderful pictures; thank you to Dr. Gilbert and Dr. Winer for putting this program together and providing expert advice as we continue our educational journeys; thank you to April and Dr. Dorneich for being amazing mentors, guiding us through our research, and just being overall fun and kind people; thank you to all the other interns for being a great group to work, learn, and hang out with. If I missed anyone else, thank you, too!
I appreciated my time here at the VRAC this summer, and I’m going to miss spending time with everyone! Goodbye!