Author: Tim Yu

Today is the beginning of the third week of this REU! Time is going so fast, yet we are still learning many of the tools we will be using as we conduct our research.

This morning, we spent time learning about SolidWorks, a 3D modeling program used for engineering. We began with a lecture on the principles of the program before giving us some time to work on the included tutorials (image is below).

Through learning this new software, I was thinking about how I familiarize myself with interfaces I haven’t encountered before. For example, I had trouble what each function did and where it was located, as there were many different toolbars and menus. As a result, as I worked on the tutorials, I tried to make a mental map of where each function was located until I was able to navigate to the basic functions by myself. By that stage, I could do basic work by myself, only asking others occasionally for help on tools I am less familiar with.

While I was learning, I felt that using the software with guidance at the beginning was the most helpful for familiarizing myself. By only listening to others talk, I found it difficult to develop a sense of intuition that helps me navigate SolidWorks consistently. At the same time, working by myself is too unstructured for me to explore at a decent rate, but this might help me develop stronger mental connections if I need to use SolidWorks in the future.

Today, we continued to get ourselves oriented with the 3D scanner that is set up inside VRAC and we learned from Eliot about the benefits of grad school on our careers.

This morning, everyone in our group finished running our 3D scanners. Unlike when we needed twenty minutes to explain how to run everything, we were able to run the whole sequence in a few minutes.

We were also able to capture parts of a fingerprint. Yesterday, Micah set the camera and projector so they captured images much faster than before, so our fingers would move less and we can get a more accurate result. It’s a little scary how this might be used to make realistic replicas of our biometrics, but look at the details that we scanned!

Our next steps after this would be to figure out how to stitch several of these scans together and convert this to a 3D model to print. Ultimately, we will also figure out how to automate this process by writing a script.

After scanning our fingers, we continued with a lecture by Eliot Winer, who gave great advice about going to grad school. I feel like I can better verbalize my reasoning to go to grad school, which is so I can learn to tackle more interesting problems, develop myself across different fields, and ultimately work on what I love. Through this understanding, I hope to become a better advocate for the decisions I make in the future.

One last thing that I am becoming more conscious about over the past few months is how I react to mistakes. In high school, I was very risk-averse, but over the past semester, I have been more inclined to take risks. For example, I am trying to apply to different opportunities (like this one!) or take responsibility for larger changes in group projects. Although I might feel devastated after a negative outcome, even if I try to prepare for these outcomes, the good thing is that I remain calm and search for solutions more often than not. I hope to understand the role of my emotional responses as I take more risks and embrace making mistakes. At the same time, I seek to improve how I recover from mistakes and failures so I can move closer to solutions.

Yesterday, we primarily learned about C++ as well as how to operate the structured-light 3D scanning device that we will be using to conduct our projects over the next weeks. I will talk more about the 3D scanner since I have prior programming experience which made learning the basics of C++ relatively easy.

The scanning system consists of a camera and projector that is connected to a laptop computer. After turning on the camera and testing that it works, I take a set of pictures of the object I want to scan. Then, I process the pictures and use a software to visualize the processed results.

While I was learning how to do each of these steps, I noticed that the programs that did each step were found in locations scattered throughout the laptop. Because of that, I took notes from my notebook to remember what I needed to do in the future. I don’t think that cleaning up the software is our priority for this summer. However, I hope I can spend a little bit of time documenting these steps so that I can help future students build on our work this summer.

Although I have been at some kind of college for a year already, this summer I was handed a few more responsibilities than before. During the last school year, most of my meals I ate came from my college’s dining hall. However, this summer, I have to cook most of my own food instead.

Right now, I’m trying to keep my food simple. For example, I’m mainly eating foods that can be prepared in a “set and forget” manner, like vegetable rice made in a rice cooker, or overnight oats left in a fridge. However, I hope to treat myself to more complex dishes over the course of the next few weeks. But before I do this, I want to streamline the process of bringing food to the table.

There’s a lot I need to think about before and after I cook food, like:

• Planning what food to buy
• Traveling to buy food
• Buying food
• Traveling back to campus
• Planning what to eat
• Preparing the ingredients (defrosting)
• Washing dishes
• Cleaning up unexpected messes I make

Altogether, this can take up a large portion of my time, and I hope I have a firm grasp of this as my group’s research begins to pick up.

I can understand why my college would require everyone to buy a meal plan, considering how busy most students are when classes are in session. Yet I feel conflicted about whether my college should do this, since preparing food is another responsibility adults should take as they mature. After a year of only cooking once a week, I am realizing that not only am I here to learn how to do HCI research, but I am also here to learn about adult responsibilities away from home.

Today is the end of the first week! After several days of jet lag and waking up at 4am, I finally got a full day of sleep. I hope I’ll have energy for the entire day (I’m a little bit worrying about the post-lunch crash I had yesterday after I ordered a large sandwich at the deli, since I forgot how big American food portions were after not eating at an American restaurant for a while).

This morning, we did some more orientation things. First, we looked at what other people at VRAC were working on. I was impressed the most at the mixed-reality welder training. I loved how I could feel all the knobs, buttons, and frames that I saw through the VR headset in the real world. I like to press buttons, but being able to interact with real-world buttons in virtual reality felt satisfying and fulfilling. I wonder if this technology will be used in the

We then moved on to a lecture by librarian Eric Schares. He told us that hand-typing citations was discouraged when working on academic papers. In the past, I hand-typed citations on all my papers (even on my AP Research paper in high school, which I worked for a year and had almost 50 citations!). I saw a demo on how convenient a citation manager would be for changing styles. I will be learning how to use a citation manager this summer.

Finally, I did a Myers-Briggs test and found out that I was INTJ. Since this might change the next time I take the test, I won’t comment much on this.

For the past few days, my main preoccupation besides getting started doing research is on how to deal with my jet lag.

Before coming here, I was on a trip organized by my college to somewhere that had a time difference of about ten hours. I have heard that to recover from jet lag, one needs one day per hour of time difference. Because of this, maintaining focus during the first few days have been difficult for me, especially during the afternoons.

There have been a few things that are helping me get through the first few days. First, a lot of our activities have been about getting to know each other and the projects that we will work on, so we haven’t started working on our projects yet. Second, our housing has been pretty comfortable so far, since I have a little bit of privacy beneath my bunk bed and I have a lot of space in our apartment-style rooms.

I hope that in the next few days, I can recover as we start to dive into our projects. I am excited to try to scan our fingers and fool phone fingerprint scanners!

Hi everyone! My name is Tim and this will be my first blog post for the REU. One thing that I remember from yesterday’s lecture was about how human-computer interaction (HCI) consists of both creating things and helping others. I remember that I went over both of these topics in my application, and I feel like this is why I’m here. I’m excited about how I can both create things and help others over the next ten weeks, and I hope I can discover more about myself and the world as well. If anyone is reading this, I will be blogging multiple times each week over the course of the program, so please come back often for updates.