Whoops. I meant to post this blog last Wednesday. 

Wednesday was a long and tiring day. My focus was pretty much just on the Unity environment. I wanted to figure out the box interactables for participants to use for entering their curiosity and satisfaction ratings during the experiment. I chose to approach this in kind of 2 parts: first I wanted to get it working with the controller (the participant can point the controller, a ray would appear, and they can click the trigger on the controller to make their selection), and then I would get it working without the controller (the participant’s hands would be recognized by the headset, so they could to poke the cube corresponding to the rating they wanted to select) The first part was pretty similar to what I did during deeper dives in the hiking simulation, so that helped. The thing that I got stuck on in the afternoon was writing the ratings out to an Excel spreadsheet. It was so frustrating because sometimes the file would be written, and other times it wouldn’t, and it took me a while to figure out the issue. Once I figured that out though, I noticed that, out of the 3 cubes with different ratings that I had in my scene, only 1 rating was being written to the spreadsheet. Anjali was helping me at this point, and she had a brilliant idea that solved this problem. Immediate relief when this worked. After we established the controller interaction bit, we moved on to the hands. The issue I was having was that the cube wasn’t registering the poke from the hands. Finally, we were able to figure this out though, and then I called it a night. 

At 10am, we also had our last ethics class with Eliot to talk about data falsification. We spent some time on a specific case with a “celebrity” professor who was accused of data falsification, but sued the accusers because the accusations ruined her career and reputation. It was an interesting discussion because there’s so much going on behind the scenes that makes it difficult to take one side over another. After class, I kept working on the Unity stuff that I talked about above until lunch, and then worked from 2 to 8ish. That sounds so long, but in the moment, the time went by so fast because I felt so close to getting somewhere, so when I made progress, I didn’t want to stop moving.