Thursday morning, we had HCI class with Amanda. Afterwards, Jack Miller came to talk with us for the lunch and lecture, which I found really insightful. He talked a lot about the potential avenues to take post-grad, highlighting the differences between a master’s and a PhD, as well as between industry and research careers. He emphasized the fact that going after a master’s or PhD will open so many more opportunities, not just because it’ll make you look good on paper, but also because the skills you develop are the skills that employers value, and will help you stand out in hands-on, application settings. Jack also talked about his position at Mayo Clinic as an engineer working with XR. It was really cool to hear about his role and what he does because, like I’ve said, I have an interest in the medical field, but it was hard for me to see how I could weave this interest and my interest in computer science into a profession. While he was talking about his job, he brought up a really good point about the difference between industry and research for his role specifically: As a researcher, you’re integrated into the hand-on projects, and you can understand what is best for a case, and for those who will use your contributions and ideas. Companies, on the other hand, will more likely offer conceptual ideas that may seem helpful in theory, but are really just an added interference to solving the problem or making improvements.

After the lunch and lecture, Sophie, Harrison, and I each split up to work on separate parts of our project. My job for the afternoon was to figure out the Lab Streaming Layer for the Muse headband side of things. Like I said in my last post, we were able to get an LSL stream of event markers from Unity, but we also needed to get an LSL stream of EEG data from the Muse headband. This was way more complex than I thought it would be because there are so many pieces that need to work together. First, I had to download an app called BlueMuse that allows you to stream EEG data from the Muse headband over LSL. Then, I had to download a program called LabRecorder to capture and record that EEG data stream. LabRecorder will save the recording as a file type that can then be read by a package called EEGLAB on MATLAB, and analyzed to produce a plot. A majority of the headache was just installing, downloading, and managing the packages and apps and programs and…, but it also took me a minute to figure out how to get them to communicate with each other. I ended my day with a success though because I could finally see the LabRecorder and BlueMuse windows on my screen. I didn’t have time to connect and record my own data with the Muse though. Sorry that was a lot of detail lol. 

At 5, we all headed to the food science building to make baklava with Heliya and Yvonne. Heliya shared her amazing recipe and baklava-making-strategies, and it ended up being a lot of fun. I’ve only ever had the Greek version of baklava, so it was interesting to see how else they’re made – like these had a lot of saffron and cardamom which gave them a really unique and yummy flavor.  

Later that night, Andrea, Ruby, Harrison, and I finallyy finished season 1 of game of thrones. It’s funny that we thought we would be able to finish all 8 seasons by the end of the summer at one point. Oh well. I don’t think I’ll keep watching the rest of the show, but it was fun to watch it together this summer. 

Yesterday, we had all day to work on our projects. I started working with the LSL again, and I was able to record and plot EEG data from the Muse while I was wearing it. WOO. After I got that figured out, Anjali and I spent a good amount of time trying to connect the VR headset to the unity environment…turns out we were using the wrong cord all along…ugh. The next step is to finalize our unity environment so we can start using it for testing purposes. After lunch, Harrison, Sophie, and I went over to the EEG lab to run our first pilot test. Unfortunately, the data we collected doesn’t look usable, but we have 3 more pilots to run next week, so hopefully those go smoother.