I’m back. 

Week 10…I‘m already sad thinking about leaving this Saturday 🙁

So much has happened since I last blogged.

On Thursday, I kept working on the Unity environment in the morning. After lunch, we had our event with CUNY, and they presented their projects to us. Their projects dealt with VR, so it was interesting to see what they’ve been up to. After the event, I worked on Unity again. I was able to figure out how to have the poke from the user’s hand register as a trigger that would record the value of the cube they poked on. Yay. Once that was done, I put my 6 cubes on the table in front of where the participant will “sit” in the virtual classroom environment. Now, when the participant pokes the cube, it will highlight to a orange color, the value associated with that cube will be appended to a list (I have separate lists for the question number, the curiosity rating, and the satisfaction rating), and the values in that list will be written to an Excel spreadsheet once the participant has completed all 60 trivia questions. That night, Harrison, Sophie, and I finalized our presentation for the CUNY event, and ran through it to make sure we weren’t going to go too short or too long. 

When I got into the lab on Friday, I started editing the poster that Harrison had been working on last week, and Harrison and I made some last minute tweaks to the classroom environment – adding labels to the cubes (1-6), changing the size of the cubes, that kinda thing. After lunch, we met with CUNY again, but this time, it was our turn to present. I think our presentation went well. It was honestly kinda fun to present because it felt like a good culmination of what we’ve been doing – especially because we had just made huge physical progress that we could talk about. After the meeting with CUNY, we talked with Aron about where we’re at, and then let him demo the virtual environment. He seemed blown away, which was fun to see. I’m proud of our team for getting the whole VR setup and connection with the Muse headband done within the short time frame we had, because it definitely felt like an ambitious goal at first. Now that our virtual environment was done, we wanted to run an experiment so we could have data from the Muse & VR to put onto our poster. I volunteered to be the test subject, but unfortunately, we didn’t actually get any usable data from me. Turns out, there was an error in the way the trivia was being presented, and none of my curiosity and satisfaction ratings were exported to the Excel file because I hadn’t gone through the 60 questions prior to exiting VR. Also, I got the worst headache while I was wearing the Muse headband with the VR HMD. I think it must’ve been the way I had positioned the Muse under the headset, because when Sophie did it later, she didn’t have that issue. It’s probably good that we didn’t use my data, because I was so distracted during the experiment from the headache.

After work, I went out to record my study abroad video application. 289348 tries later, and I finally settled on a video that I was happy with. Spoiler: I ended up retaking that video on Sunday anyways…

On Friday night, Rodney, Harrison, Angy, and I biked to get froyo and culvers with Sophie and Ruby. We were going to go stargazing but the sky was cloudy again. Lately, it’s been like hazy-ish during the day and cloudy at night, so we haven’t been able to see the stars that well. 

Now that the CUNY presentations are done, we need to process and visualize the data from Friday’s experiment with Sophie, submit our poster, and finish our paper. The end is in sight.

On Saturday, I worked on my study abroad application, went for a long walk around campus, and Angy, Ruby, and I sat outside in the “courtyard” at Freddy. Angy turned on some music, I made another bracelet, and we just chatted and chilled. It was toasty out though, so we didn’t last long. At around 4ish, Angy, Rodney, Harrison, Andrea, Sophie, and I headed down to Ankeny, because the guys wanted to go to the trampoline park and the gals wanted to go shopping. The trampoline park was too packed apparently, so the guys ended up joining us. They had no interest in T.J.Maxx though, so they went off to eat food and keep themselves busy. After a bit, we texted them that we were done at the store, and they replied saying they’ll head over to us. Maybe 5 minutes later, they appeared as if they’d come back from building a house. I’m not even joking. A lot of things those two do doesn’t surprise me, but that was an exception. Please stop reading and go look at the picture so you see what I mean. They had two planks of wood, like 30 or 60 ft of bubble wrap, 1 construction hat, and a patch of grass the size of a hand. They told me that they were gonna buy me a shelf as a thank you for the driving that I’d been doing, but they decided not to…so inconsiderate…

After shopping, Angy, Rodney, Harrison, and I drove south a little more to get dinner at a Mexican restaurant we found. It was pretty good. I enjoyed my chicken fajitas. On the way back, we all made the last minute decision to take a detour to High Trestle Trail, which is a 25 mile trail that runs through Iowa, known for its LED-lighted bridge. By the time we got to the trail, it was around 10pm, so it was dark, and we had to walk on a trail in the woods with no lights besides our phones for ~10 minutes to get to the bridge. We made it though – just a little scary. The stars were beautiful though. The bridge itself was what you’d expect of a bridge with LED lights, but it was still fun, and I’m glad we went. 

Once we got back, we all hung out in our living room, and (somehow) ended up watching Harrison and Rodney play with the wood slabs. I don’t really even know how to explain what they were doing in words. We all had to put on our bike helmets and hold pillows over our heads to avoid getting bonked by the wood slabs that they’d drop. Luckily no one was hurt.

On Sunday, I woke up kinda late, and then I met Sophie and Harrison at the VRAC to finish our poster. I’m happy that we were able to get data from the VR experiment onto the poster. After we finished, I finally submitted my study abroad application, and then I watched some of the olympics. Table tennis was on, so I had it playing in the background as I made my dinner and chatted with Ruby and Angy in the kitchen. Our upstairs neighbors were making it sound as if there was a murder taking place, so the three of us went upstairs after a while to see what the commotion was about. For anyone curious, they were just playing Super Smash Bros. We ended up staying to play this one video game board game on the switch, and I actually won for the first time ever. The last time I got close to winning, Chu-Chu sabotaged me by stealing my “points”. After a game, Angy, Rodney and I hung out for a little bit and then I went to bed. 

Today felt long, but also short at the same time. I feel like I didn’t make much physical progress, but I still got a lot out of today’s discussions with the team. Aron came in right away in the morning until 4ish to help us with anything that came up as we finalized our poster, and worked on the discussion and results section of our paper. The goal was to get a draft of these two sections done by tonight so we have time for rounds of revision before we submit it on Wednesday afternoon. Dr. S also came into the lab today, so we could share with her what we’ve accomplished, and give her a demo of the VR classroom we created. We hadn’t chatted with her about our progress for a while, so we had a lot of ground to cover with all the LSL and VR stuff.

After work, I went with Andrea, Alee, Rodney, and Sophie to the gym to go rock climbing. There was only 1 guy to billet for the five of us, so I only went once with the harness, and then went on the bouldering wall for the rest of the time. The bouldering wall looks like the rock climbing wall, except you have no harness, so you just climb and try not to fall as you get to the top. I ripped up my hands kinda bad, but it was actually a lot of fun. I’m mad at myself for not going with Andrea and Alee sooner because they normally go twice a week. When I got back to Freddy, I ate dinner, and then Harrison, Sophie, and I continued to work on our paper.