How is it already July already. This summer needs to slow down

This weekend was chill, but also productive. On Friday night, we all got together to play some games. 

On Saturday, I went to the library to finish my HCI assignment, and then met up with Andrea and Chu-Chu in the lab to figure out what we wanted to talk about in our presentation for our deeper dive, and how we would distribute slides. Andrea and I stayed a bit later to figure out how to make each of the placeholder cubes in the VR environment have the same functionality as the original cube (turn color when the user hovers over the object and have a pop-up window appear when the user selects the object and disappear when they click the exit button on the window). It was a tedious process, but now that it’s done, I just need to import the unity assets for the flowers, plants, and animals, and replace the placeholder cubes with those assets. After I finished for the day, Rodney and I walked to a grocery store to get some ingredients for dinner. The plan was to go out to grill burgers and hot dogs, and then build a fire and make s’mores at a beach or park somewhere. It was a little late by the time we got back though, so we ended up just cooking dinner in the apartment, eating outside, and then going to a park nearby to cook the s’mores. 

On Sunday, I went into the lab again to finish my slides for the presentation, and then we spent our night just sitting on the couch talking for a few hours.

Yesterday was a long day spent working on our VR environment. Chu-Chu and I spent the whole morning importing assets into the environment…it was not as easy as it seems. And then in the afternoon Chu-Chu continued importing animal assets while Andrea and I worked on the presentation flow with Kate. It was tricky at first to figure out how to tell the story of our project from what we learned in the articles. I was probably overthinking it, but I was having a hard time distinguishing between the information that should go in the intro versus the background. After working on the presentation for a bit, we kept working on the Unity scene. The hovering feature that was working on the cube didn’t work on the plants and animals, so instead, we’re adding a box that will light up above each object so the user can see where interactables are better. I think we’re seeing the end though, there’s still so many things we could improve or add, but time is proving to be a constraint. Those things might be a project for after this deeper dive. 

Today we had another HCI class with Stephen, and then talked with Kimberly Zarecor. Kimberly shared a lot about her research, which involved small towns in Iowa. Her architecture and art history background made her talk really interesting to listen to. Later today, we’ll meet with Aron, and then hopefully finish our VR environment and do a lot of practicing for tomorrow’s presentation.