Week 1
I arrived in Gainesville, Florida on a sunny Sunday afternoon. After checking into the dorms at the University of Florida, I set out on an adventure to find supplies at the local Wal–Mart. On the first day of work, Dr. Lisa Anthony gave a tour of the Lab building and introduced me to the projects she has been working on. Given the option of five different projects, I was asked to choose my top three preferences and the reasons why I would like to work on them. Using this feedback and considering the Lab’s needs, Dr. Anthony will assign the projects I will be working on for the summer. In the meantime, I have built the DREU website that I will be using to log my experience this summer.
Week 2
On Monday morning I was assigned my projects. I spent most of the day discussing the project and catching up on what needed to be done for each one. The rest of the week I spent learning about each project. The Kinect Pose Project will use the Microsoft Kinect to record and recognize full body gestures made by children. For the Kinect Pose Project, I was able to get the Kinect running and learn about how the software works. The IPES Museum Learning Project aims to determine best practices for designing interactive interfaces in educational settings. For the IPES Museum Learning Project I had to learn how to run the program with the Windows Surface Simulator, as well as begin to learn the Microsoft Surface SDK. The Wacom Project will examine how children interact with the larger, more sensitive Wacom tablets, using both pen and touch input. For the Wacom project I was able to test the software we will be using and begin to help with the process of getting ready for user studies.
Week 3
During this week I was able to add features to our Kinect Pose software. It was great to work with a new language, as I had not worked with C# before, and there is a lot of helpful information online for the Microsoft Kinect SDK. There is a lot less information online for the Microsoft Surface SDK, and I spent most of the week trying to get the IPES project running on both my workstation and the Microsoft Surface. For the Wacom study, we discussed possible methods for conducting the study, and are in the process of designing the experiment. In addition to this work on the lab projects, I had the opportunity to demo the IPES project to some prospective students that where visiting the lab, which was great practice presenting the technology we are working with.
Week 4
It is hard to believe I have been here for a whole month! It has been a problem solving week, and I am learning a lot about the research process. The Pose project team began brainstorming potential gestures to use for the Kinect Pose project. I was tasked with searching through other research papers to identify gestures that are being commonly used. I am adding greater detail to this. My project partner and I have been working on implementing the final features of the Pose data collection software, and we are hoping to have the program ready to go in the next week or so. The IPES project continues to be a challenge. My project partner, Dr. Anthony and I all met with an expert on museum learning to brainstorm features we would like to add to the prototype. I helped my partner get the program working on his workstation so we can both begin developing features. The Wacom project team spent the week developing an experiment design. We chose a design based on what would give us the best data for the questions we want to answer. Now that we have decided on the experiment design, I will begin to build the experiment script, which will be a new and exciting experience.
Week 5
It is week five and I am getting more involved in the projects. I had the opportunity to build a first draft of the experiment script for the Wacom project. This was a new experience for me and I am looking forward to getting feedback building a finalized script. The Pose Project team spent the week organizing possible gestures to use when running user studies. I am also working on building a program to playback the data that we collect from the user studies, which is a good experience learning how to build a project from scratch in C#. The IPES project is starting to gain some momentum, and I was able to implement the Gesture Toolkit, creating a zoom feature. I spent a lot of time going through the current code and figuring out what was working and what was not, and I hope to be able to streamline the code and make it easier to have dynamic content. I am looking forward to see all the hard work come together in the next few weeks as we organize and begin user studies.
Week 6
It has been a very productive week six. As we get closer to the end of the summer, we are on full throttle trying to get projects done and conduct user studies. The Wacom project is almost ready to take off. The team will be practicing running the study next week, and starting to recruit the week after. The Pose Project Playback app is getting close to being finished. The team is looking for the best solution to display the coordinate data that we saved from the Kinect. Unless we can find a way to use the Kinect's scale, we will likely be building a scale to convert the x, y, and z coordinates in meters to x and y coordinates in pixels. The IPES Project is progressing slowly but surely. I was able to get both images and text to appear in the ScatterViewItems, but I am still working on getting the ScatterViewItems to format with the content inside them. The next step for this project will be to create a better zoom effect, format the ScatterViewItems and create a way to organize the dynamic data we want to use. There is still a lot of work to do, but I am confident that it will get done!
Week 7
Week seven went by like a blink of an eye. I have begun building a presentation about the work on the Pose Project to present at the DREU Student Showcase at the University of Florida. The Pose Project playback app is coming along nicely. The program will now play an animation of a skeleton based on the x and y coordinates, but it ignores z, the depth. This should be in good shape to move forward with the study. To give the participants instructions on how to perform the gestures we chose, we are building slides with pictures of the team mates doing the gestures. The IPES project is coming along, and I have managed to get the ScatterViewItems to show both images and text in a formatted way. The Wacom project is getting exciting. We have spent the week practising the user studies. Doing a practice run through with a volunteer has helped figure out areas what need to be worked on, or things we need to adjust. We will continue to practice this user study, and we hope to start recruiting soon!
Week 8
It is week eight and things are really coming together. I am very excited about the DREU Student showcase next week, and I have been working hard to get everything prepared. I have also been working on a presentation about how to use a haptic pen, which I will present as a demonstration to the lab. The Haptic Pen the lab has is a Geomagic 3D Touch. For the Pose Project, I have been finalizing the slides for the gesture guide and working on the experiment script for the Pose Project user studies. We are making plans to recruit in week 9, and we really hope to get to run a few user studies in week 10. After many practice runs, the Wacom Project user study is ready to go, but we are putting this project on hold in order to shift resources to the other projects. The IPES Project continues to trudge along, and I have added the labels on the map to the items that are read in dynamically from the JSON file. Now all the elements on the screen are read from the JSON file, and anything can be changed from this file. We have just a couple weeks left, and I am looking forward to seeing how the summer concludes.
Week 9
Week nine has led to the beginning of wrapping up of projects. We have been scrambling to finalize the features for the IPES project. In the last week I have managed to implement an up and down gesture in addition to the back and forth gesture. Now when the user swipes back and forth the display will change to show images over time, and when the user swipes up and down, the program changes maps. The final feature that we have wanted to add is a zoom feature, using the traditional pinch gesture. My teammate has been working on this, and he got the zoom-in to work, and now needs to finalize the feature so it zooms smoothly. The Pose Project has taken up a lot of my time as we are attempting to iron out details for the experiment protocol. We have a list of 53 potential gestures, and in order to get an idea of how different people might interpret the gestures, we have been asking our fellow lab mates to perform them. So far, for most of the gestures, we have gotten the response we expected. We have gathered notes on our test-runs and we will discuss the details of the experiment next week. I almost forgot to mention the DREU showcase that took place on Monday. Even though I was nervous, I thought the presentation went really well. I enjoyed seeing what everyone was working on over the summer, and presenting what I was working on was a great experience.
Week 10
Week ten has been happy-sad for me. I am looking forward to going home, but I will definitely miss all the wonderful work that I have been doing. I have been working to finalize all of the projects before I leave. For the Pose Project, we have added final details to the script and prepared all the documents for the study. I have made sure all the documentation for the programs is up to date, and I have pushed them to the repository. Fore IPES, we spent the next week working out bugs and finalizing the features we were working on. I have updated the documentation and pushed the latest version to the repository. Overall, it has been an amazing summer working in the Init Lab. I have learned so much about research and human-computer interaction. Florida has been amazing, and it was great to live on the University of Florida campus. Dr. Anthony was an amazing mentor, and I would like to thank her for all her hard work. Now, I am off to find my next adventure!