This morning I had a big whoops: I woke up at 10:43am. You know those mornings when you wake up and freak out that you have to be somewhere only to realize that it’s Saturday, and then you can breathe again…that’s how I felt, except worse because it wasn’t actually Saturday, and I was already almost 2 hours late to the lab. I made it to the lab by 11ish and had a chance to talk with everyone about the situation. Everyone was so kind about it, but I still felt so bad for the inconvenience I caused. 

Aron came to talk with us for an hour at 11 to tie up some loose ends and answer any of our questions. We talked about how we can improve the trivia question experiment, and decided to add a slider during the question and answer phase for the user to enter how confident they feel about their answer to the question. This data will help with data analysis, because there’s a lot of data showing that people are more curious if they feel like they are closer to knowing the answer to a question. 

After meeting with Aron, I started working on the VR project until about 6:30, and now I’m just writing this blog post before I head back to Freddy to shower and eat dinner. We made so much progress on our environment today. Andrea was able to figure out the teleportation and locomotion so that a ring appears on the ground to identify where you will teleport to. We can also now move around with the joystick smoothly. This way is less appealing for most users, however, because it can make them feel more motion sick. Chu-Chu worked on the environment and terrain. The $60 asset that was kindly bought for our use is so so beautiful and realistic. For now, there are just blocks around the environment, which are acting as placeholders for the plants and animals that will be put in later on (probably on Monday). My job was to then finish setting up the interaction element. I made a panel that will pop up whenever the user selects an object, and then the user can press the exit button on the panel for the popup window to go away. I got it working on a cube, so now I just need to duplicate this functionality to each of the placeholder blocks that Chu-Chu added and change the blocks to the plants and animals. Overall, I’m really proud of everyone in our group. A lot of this unity XR stuff isn’t easy to learn, but we’re figuring it out little by little. I need to give a huge shoutout to Kate and Anjali though because we wouldn’t have been able to do a lot of this without their help. They’re both so patient and supportive of our ideas, which has made this whole process more exciting and enjoyable.