This is a really delayed final post, but I’m here now. Last Friday was our last official day in the lab 🙁  We started our day by completing the post-REU experience survey. We did this same survey prior to coming to ISU, so it was kinda cool to compare my answers from before to now, and see how much I’ve learned and grown. At 10am, we met with the same woman we met with at the beginning of the summer to offer our reflections on anything regarding this research experience. She also brought up the concerns and expectations we’d shared at the beginning of the summer so we could give our opinions on how we addressed those concerns, or whether … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

Heuristic: Familiarity: when people make decisions based on things, people, and places that are more familiar to them Design principle: Design a study involving components that the intended participants can either relate to or feel familiar with. Design in the curiosity EEG project: Formulate trivia questions to be about topics that the participant enjoys and is familiar with. However, this doesn’t mean that each individual question should be about something that the participant is familiar with, because that would affect our data. Instead, some of the general topics that a question falls into should be something that is familiar. For example, if the participant is familiar and interested in animals, we’d give participants some questions about animals.  Heuristic: Affect: when … Continue reading →

This morning, we started with an HCI class with Yvonne. The focus of today’s class was decision making, and how things like heuristics and biases can influence our decisions. After class, Dr. Adarsh Krishnamurthy talked about his research and interests during the lunch and lecture. His background is architecture and engineering, so while some of what he was talking about was unfamiliar, I could pick up on things and found his work with neural networks and 3D printing really interesting. After the lunch and lecture, Aron came to the VRAC for a bit. The first thing on the to-do list for today was to get back to figuring out how to analyze the EEG data that we collected from the … Continue reading →

We’re back in the lab.  Quick little recap of the long weekend:  On Friday, we didn’t do much until night time. Harrison taught Rodney, Ruby, and I had to play a card game called spades. I enjoyed it. You had to play in teams, but it’s not really playing in teams because you sit across from them and you’re not allowed to talk. You just need really suggestive facial expressions? On Saturday, Angelic had to deal with something at a bank near Des Moines, so we decided to just make a trip out of it and go to the Des Moines farmers market. Unfortunately, by the time we got downtown, the market was about to close. On the bright side, … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

This morning I had a big whoops: I woke up at 10:43am. You know those mornings when you wake up and freak out that you have to be somewhere only to realize that it’s Saturday, and then you can breathe again…that’s how I felt, except worse because it wasn’t actually Saturday, and I was already almost 2 hours late to the lab. I made it to the lab by 11ish and had a chance to talk with everyone about the situation. Everyone was so kind about it, but I still felt so bad for the inconvenience I caused.  Aron came to talk with us for an hour at 11 to tie up some loose ends and answer any of our … Continue reading →

Today I’m writing from outside again. It’s not so humid out today and there’s a breeze, so it actually feels good to sit in the sun.  This morning we met in our deeper dive groups. We had to finish watching the last bit of a tutorial on how to connect the VR headset to Unity and establish basic controls. The hardest parts were getting locomotion, and setting up the trigger controls so that we can pick items up in the VR environment. The video failed us for the trigger control part though because we spent maybe an hour outside of the video trying to get it to work properly. Regardless, I’m enjoying the class and the problem solving aspect of … Continue reading →

Hi hi Today we spent a couple hours working in our deeper dive groups. Andrea, Chu-Chu and I were able to narrow down our focus for our project so it’s more feasible to complete in just a little over a week. We also spent a little bit playing some games with the VR headsets. I played one that had such cool and realistic graphics. The game also helped me see what kinds of features we can implement in our own project in terms of locomotion and user-controlled interaction. On Saturday we all went thrifting for a few hours after breakfast, and then spent a few hours at a mini outdoor waterpark near campus. That night some of us went out … Continue reading →

Today we had our last class spent working with Unity. I actually really enjoyed working with Blender and Unity with Kate and Anjali this week because of the creative freedom that we had to explore the platforms, and to learn about what you can do on each of them. It’s crazy to think about how much I’ve already learned here. Before this week, the process of designing, creating, and navigating a 3D virtual environment was so foreign to me.  After lunch, we had some blog/work time, and then all sat and listened to Alex, Adam, and Kate pitch the deeper dive topics that they’ll be teaching over the next two weeks. The options were 3D printing, machine learning, and XR. … Continue reading →

Hey again, today we started working with Unity. We pretty much learned how to use the platform by importing the scenes we made in Blender last week, and playing around with textures and lighting. We also connected Unity to Virtual Studios so that we could use C# code to control how we moved in Unity. For example, one of our tasks was to find a way to move forwards, backwards, left, right, and turn (by rotation) using the W, A, S, D keys on the keyboard. I was able to get the basics working, but I still have some adjusting that I want to do because I don’t want to be able to go down under my scene when I … Continue reading →

Hey blog. Today I’m writing from outside. The sun felt so good on our way back from lunch so we all just decided to bask. This morning we spent about 3 hours working on our blender projects. I was able to get the grass, basket, and bushes done. The strawberry is a work in progress, but it’s getting there. I’ve been able to find a lot of tutorials on YouTube, and Angelie and Heela have been really great at helping. So far, I’m honestly really enjoying blender – more so than SolidWorks. To me, it’s more fun to use because I feel like I have more creative freedom.  After lunch we’ll get another 2 hours to work on our projects.  Oh … Continue reading →

I’m feeling very drained today. I keep meaning to go to bed earlier and then end up staying up late to chat with people lol. Today we had our final class of SolidWorks. We spent the class assembling all of the parts that our team made. It was cool to see how everything gets joined together.  After class, we went to lunch at the dining hall, and then we went back to the VRAC to have a t-shirt brainstorm session. We’re working on a design that we’ll all get to wear as a reminder of this REU. We want to incorporate our team projects and the cool things we get to do in the VRAC, but also the things we … Continue reading →

Hi, I forgot to post my blog on Friday, so just ignore the fact that it’s actually Tuesday. Yesterday we had our final C++ classes. Nick was a really great teacher this week. Although I had already known most of the concepts that came up, I still took some things away from his explanations.  The art market on Thursday was fun. We spent about 2 hours walking around main street, perusing the shops, and ended up finding a local ice cream shop that served pineapple ice cream. 10/10. By the time the market was over, we were all hungry, so we decided to go to Buffalo Wild Wings for dinner. It was fun until some people completely attacked me for … Continue reading →

Today we started the day with more C++ coding. Then we had an hour break between class and lunch, so I finished my craft of research assignment for next Tuesday and then played some fire boy and water girl with Harrison on the computers. Harrison definitely could use some improvement. Because yikes. The dining hall had grapes again finally, so I got my grape fix in today at lunch. They were crunchy. We also decided to check out the Beyer pool after lunch because it’s only open from 12-2 M-F, so that was good to see inside. Update on my last post: Yvonne offered to sit down with Harrison, Sophie, and me later today to go through the 84 page … Continue reading →

Hi blog! First week in Iowa has been so much fun. This week was pretty chill in terms of workload, which gave us more time to get adjusted to the campus and the people. Going into this experience, I didn’t want to put any expectations on how well I would get along with the other interns because we all come from such different backgrounds, but I will say that I wasn’t expecting to find myself in a group of such amazing people who all get along so well so fast. We’ve been keeping busy with some intense game nights, volleyball games outside, bike rides, group dinners, an escape room, and a (questionable) show. Today we started covering C++ material. I’ve … Continue reading →