Lil weekend recap: 

Saturday was pretty quiet until 4ish when the guys came downstairs practically begging us to go to the trampoline park 35 minutes away. We all kinda wanted to do something, though, so we settled on mini golf and dinner. Mini golf was fun, and then we stuck around at the same place to play arcade games for about an hour. Afterwards, we had a really good dinner at a local Mexican restaurant that’s been recommended by so many people here. When we got back to Freddy, we just played some mario kart and another game that I don’t remember the name of. Sunday was a work day for me. I made some really exciting progress on the LSL stream stuff: I’m able to record the event marker stream from the VR HMD and the EEG data stream from the Muse headband simultaneously, so I can then visualize the EEG data with the event markers on the plot. After I got that figured out, I headed back to Freddy and just relaxed for the rest of the night.

Yesterday was frustrating. I spent the 3 hours in the morning and 2.5 hours in the afternoon split between trying to connect the VR headset to the computer (because it’d been disconnected over the weekend), and trying to figure out how to use a package for writing to a csv file from Unity. I was at a loss with the VR headset for a minute, because I had completed the setup how I had previously, and it seemed like I had tried everything. Rodney came over at one point with a different headset for us to try, which worked, so then I plugged in the other headset I’d been working with, and it decided to start working. It’s still a mystery as to why it started working, but it works now.  By 7, the package that I’d been tinkering with for Unity still wasn’t working. I still don’t understand why, so that is today’s battle. 

We also went to the EEG lab yesterday to conduct our second pilot test. Some of the changes we made to the paradigm and protocol seemed to make the trial go smoother than it had on Friday, so that was good. 

Last night, when I got back, I made dinner, and then Harrison and Rodney came down to our room, and we just ended up chatting until 11:30ish. I love those kinds of nights because they’re chill but so fun. Ruby also made buckeyes – the chocolate and peanut butter truffles – so those and being around everyone made my night.

Today I had a lot to do. I started working on the Unity environment – I’m trying to finish the box interactions so that the user can select a box to rate their curiosity for the answer to a trivia question, and their satisfaction to the answer to a trivia question during the experiment. The tricky part that I was working on yesterday, and that Sophie and I are working on today, is to figure out how to export the value of the selected box to an excel file. It sounds so simple, but the two packages that we’ve tried to use for this task are giving us trouble.  

Anjali also showed me how to enable hand tracking, so the user doesn’t even need to use the controllers for this box interaction. This is really cool because now we can hopefully make the classroom environment and experience more realistic and immersive for the participant. 

At 11, Dr. Elena Cotos met with us for the lunch and lecture. About half of her lecture was spent on her own research and background, which focused on linguistics, and the other half was spent giving advice for approaching and handling grad school. It’s neat that so many of the people who come in for these lunch and lectures spend time giving advice and insight about grad school, but there’s always something new that I take away from them. 

After lunch, I kept chugging along with the classroom environment. The interactive boxes are taking me a lot longer than I had hoped, but I’m making some progress. Ideally, we’ll finish the whole classroom environment by Thursday morning so we can run a pilot test and collect data from the VR and Muse before we submit our poster on Friday. Ahhgh there’s so much to do.

After work today, we had a pasta making session with Eliot. It was a lot of fun to go through the whole process, and the pasta turned out so good and fresh.