Today we had an hour before our HCI discussion. During that hour I started working on inputting the birds into our game so that we can have their birdsongs coming from them.

During our HCI discussion, we learned about the the importance of creating interfaces that account for user error as well as how different people think. It was fascinating to see, because it’s always talked about how older people are worse with technology, when really the technology isn’t developed with them in mind.

The lunch lecture today was from Dr. Zarecor, one of the faculty members on the STEM XR team. She told us about her journey to working in the position she holds now and about the research she is conducting currently with rural Iowa. It was interesting to hear her take on growth in rural Iowa: my mom’s side of the family is from a rural town, and so I grew up visiting there and have seen it go into worse and worse disrepair, similar to much of rural Iowa. She said that the key part of making more people want to stay is by improving the town’s quality of life by increasing bridging social capital, either between immigrants migrating to small towns and the current residents, or between similar small towns in close proximity to each other. I agree that this is key, but I’m not sure what will encourage the residents to attempt to bridge relationships, since from what I’ve seen they’d rather watch their small town die with them then bridge relationships with people outside of their town. But that’s my own biased experience. I definitely think there is potential, and that not every small town is the same, but it is hard to picture a change in attitude in rural Iowa towns.

This afternoon we’re going to present our topic to the faculty, and we’ll hopefully leave the meeting with a final decision so that we can finally begin work on the app. However, that work will not start until after deep dive presentations tomorrow; tonight is for finishing the deep dive app.

That was a lot more writing than I expected XD

Until next time 🙂