The Project
This summer, I and another DREU participant worked with Professor Victoria Interrante at the University of Minnesota. Our project related to haptic perception and visual dominance in the context of Virtual Reality environments. Professor Interrante's research in general focuses on enhancing the experience of immersion in virtual environments, and our project focused on perception of size and the limits of visual dominance in such an environment. Our project was to investigate how people perceived what they felt in relation to what they saw in terms of scale and size of objects.
My Mentor
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My mentor was Professor Victoria Interrante, a professor in University of Minnesota's Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Her area of research is immersive virtual environments and virtual reality technology. You can find much more information at her website.
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Weekly Reports
Part of the requirements of the DREU program is to post weekly reports/journal entries of my experience, in addition to a final report. These are those entries.
Week 1
Full disclosure: I stink at journaling. Always have. My mom despairs that someone who breezed through AP English in high school has such issues stringing words together when it comes to describing myself and what happens to me. So I shall do my best, and try not to A: ramble, or B: despair overmuch.
My first week of the program started, really, the Thursday before I arrived on campus. That's when, at three in the morning, I got in a taxi in front of my parents' apartment and began the long journey to Minneapolis from Singapore, where my dad's been working. The plane flight was... interesting, but I won't go into details. Just keep in mind that my DREU experience began with a twenty-four-hour-long trip pretty literally across the globe and a six-hour drive (cut in two halves) made possible mostly through caffeine, loud music, and sheer willpower.
I moved into my dorm-away-from-home Sunday afternoon, (mostly) unpacked (almost) everything, and showed up bright and early Monday morning, freshly caffeinated, to meet Professor Interrante and the other research students and begin researching. The first step: figure out how to use the software we'd be using to build virtual environments. This meant my first week was spent mostly watching countless online video tutorials and introductions to the software the lab uses to make VR environments and programs, Unreal Engine 4.
Have you ever watched hours of video tutorials while suffering from extreme jetlag? No?
It's not the most efficient way to learn how to use a piece of software, let's just say. I watched, and rewatched, and re-rewatched a lot of introductory video resources. In between obsessive tutorial-watching, I also read a few academic papers concerning virtual environments and people's perceptions of objects and shapes in them.
The week ended with slightly less jetlag than before, a rudimentary understanding of how Unreal Engine 4 works, and a trip to Home Depot for supplies. The study I and the other participant are working on involves investigating how people judge size based on what they see versus what they feel, so we needed to get variously sized blocks of wood, sand them smooth, and paint them black. Our Friday was spent less like computer science students and more like high school students in shop class, between the sanding and the painting, but now the blocks are all sanded and have at least a primary coat of paint on them. Next week we will finish painting them and move on to adapting the VR environment to the needs of our study, as well as getting our program running to test any bugs we may have.
My first week of the program started, really, the Thursday before I arrived on campus. That's when, at three in the morning, I got in a taxi in front of my parents' apartment and began the long journey to Minneapolis from Singapore, where my dad's been working. The plane flight was... interesting, but I won't go into details. Just keep in mind that my DREU experience began with a twenty-four-hour-long trip pretty literally across the globe and a six-hour drive (cut in two halves) made possible mostly through caffeine, loud music, and sheer willpower.
I moved into my dorm-away-from-home Sunday afternoon, (mostly) unpacked (almost) everything, and showed up bright and early Monday morning, freshly caffeinated, to meet Professor Interrante and the other research students and begin researching. The first step: figure out how to use the software we'd be using to build virtual environments. This meant my first week was spent mostly watching countless online video tutorials and introductions to the software the lab uses to make VR environments and programs, Unreal Engine 4.
Have you ever watched hours of video tutorials while suffering from extreme jetlag? No?
It's not the most efficient way to learn how to use a piece of software, let's just say. I watched, and rewatched, and re-rewatched a lot of introductory video resources. In between obsessive tutorial-watching, I also read a few academic papers concerning virtual environments and people's perceptions of objects and shapes in them.
The week ended with slightly less jetlag than before, a rudimentary understanding of how Unreal Engine 4 works, and a trip to Home Depot for supplies. The study I and the other participant are working on involves investigating how people judge size based on what they see versus what they feel, so we needed to get variously sized blocks of wood, sand them smooth, and paint them black. Our Friday was spent less like computer science students and more like high school students in shop class, between the sanding and the painting, but now the blocks are all sanded and have at least a primary coat of paint on them. Next week we will finish painting them and move on to adapting the VR environment to the needs of our study, as well as getting our program running to test any bugs we may have.
Week 2
My second week was spent much like the first, in that I spent most of it still trying to familiarize myself with the software and hardware in the lab, but there were two key differences:
Being a research lab at a big university, it turns out, means your lab occasionally has to give demos to various tour groups, summer camps, et cetera. (I go to a small liberal arts school. This was completely new to me.) Because our lab has two lovely DREU students, we were asked to give an extended, hands-on demo to an all-girl high school coding camp UMN was hosting. The idea was to show them the VR headsets and the software, and then show them what we could do with the software and the headsets. I made a relatively simple time attack racing game: using an Oculus Rift headset and the usual WASD keys on the keyboard, you sat in the driver's seat of a little red convertible and made three laps around a track as fast as possible. It was a pretty basic game, and a lot of the visual elements came straight from Unreal Engine's stock packs, but the behind-the-scenes work to implement a timer and a lap counter was very good practice for a complete novice like me. The game itself is pretty cool, too, if I do say so myself.
During the evenings, being no longer jetlagged, I started trying to explore the area a bit more. There's a nice used bookstore a short walk away, and the area around UMN and the dorms has a bunch of nice little restaurants and coffee shops. There's even a Chatime, which is probably where I'm going to spend far too much money on pearl tea. During the work day, our lab has started trying to connect with other REU students (and just other people in general) by organizing a weekly lunch out with anyone we can get to come along. Like I said, there are a ton of nice little restaurants around the university; the only issue is, if the group gets too large, finding a restaurant large enough to seat everyone. So far, we've had Japanese and Chinese.
Next Monday the girls' camp is stopping by in the afternoon; hopefully they like my game.
- I was no longer jetlagged out of my mind, and
- Instead of watching video tutorials obsessively, I was able to actually use the software and hardware, as I'd finally sorted out internet and computer accounts for UMN.
Being a research lab at a big university, it turns out, means your lab occasionally has to give demos to various tour groups, summer camps, et cetera. (I go to a small liberal arts school. This was completely new to me.) Because our lab has two lovely DREU students, we were asked to give an extended, hands-on demo to an all-girl high school coding camp UMN was hosting. The idea was to show them the VR headsets and the software, and then show them what we could do with the software and the headsets. I made a relatively simple time attack racing game: using an Oculus Rift headset and the usual WASD keys on the keyboard, you sat in the driver's seat of a little red convertible and made three laps around a track as fast as possible. It was a pretty basic game, and a lot of the visual elements came straight from Unreal Engine's stock packs, but the behind-the-scenes work to implement a timer and a lap counter was very good practice for a complete novice like me. The game itself is pretty cool, too, if I do say so myself.
During the evenings, being no longer jetlagged, I started trying to explore the area a bit more. There's a nice used bookstore a short walk away, and the area around UMN and the dorms has a bunch of nice little restaurants and coffee shops. There's even a Chatime, which is probably where I'm going to spend far too much money on pearl tea. During the work day, our lab has started trying to connect with other REU students (and just other people in general) by organizing a weekly lunch out with anyone we can get to come along. Like I said, there are a ton of nice little restaurants around the university; the only issue is, if the group gets too large, finding a restaurant large enough to seat everyone. So far, we've had Japanese and Chinese.
Next Monday the girls' camp is stopping by in the afternoon; hopefully they like my game.
Week 3
I ended my second week in Minneapolis with two things: mailing my computer to HP to get repaired (thank you extended warranty), and going to the Stone Arch Festival, a music- and art-oriented festival about a mile from campus. I had some amazing jerk chicken and listened to a bunch of cool local bands whose names I unfortunately cannot remember.
Monday brought with it the girls' camp for whom we'd spent last week preparing, and the Head Mounted Displays and Oculus Rifts were a big hit with them. Everyone in the lab had a demo to show, each with either an Oculus Rift headset or one of the bigger HMDs in the lab, and the girls all seemed to enjoy themselves.
With that tour/demo finished, however, we could no longer ignore our project, or the research that needed to be done. My lab partner, having arrived earlier, had already begun working on the physical program, ironing out bugs and tweaking it to fit our needs, and so I, once again, began to comb through academic papers. For a relatively new technology, there are a ton of papers, articles, books, etc., on immersive virtual environments, and even more on the relationship between our various senses, and it was (and continues to be) my job to read through abstracts and summaries and Google Scholar snippets to find those papers relevant to our project. I've made a fair amount of progress so far, actually, even if Google Scholar's seemingly endless number of pages of search results make me feel otherwise at times.
Monday, though, also brought a baseball game with the computer science REU students at UMN: the Twins against the White Sox at Target Field. Because I am, among other things, an immature sports fan who holds grudges, I cheered for the Twins. (The Sox routed the Astros in the 2005 World Series and I will never forgive, nor ever forget.) They ended up winning 13-2 in an amazing game. (Yay! Go not-really-my-team!)
Thursday's lunch with the other labs took place at another Chinese restaurant near campus. The good thing about these weekly lunches, other than meeting new people (obviously), is that I get a fair amount of leftovers from the lunch specials, and since this is the first time I've been the sole person responsible for making sure I A: have food, and B: actually cook and eat it, leftovers are my best friend. (I am learning how to fend for myself. Slowly, maybe, but I am learning.)
Saturday I spent at the Twin Cities Pride Festival; Sunday was, once again, spent reading and drawing, as my computer remained in a repair facility in Texas. This weekend, I mixed it up a bit by spending the majority of Sunday in the basement waiting for my laundry to cycle through.
Monday brought with it the girls' camp for whom we'd spent last week preparing, and the Head Mounted Displays and Oculus Rifts were a big hit with them. Everyone in the lab had a demo to show, each with either an Oculus Rift headset or one of the bigger HMDs in the lab, and the girls all seemed to enjoy themselves.
With that tour/demo finished, however, we could no longer ignore our project, or the research that needed to be done. My lab partner, having arrived earlier, had already begun working on the physical program, ironing out bugs and tweaking it to fit our needs, and so I, once again, began to comb through academic papers. For a relatively new technology, there are a ton of papers, articles, books, etc., on immersive virtual environments, and even more on the relationship between our various senses, and it was (and continues to be) my job to read through abstracts and summaries and Google Scholar snippets to find those papers relevant to our project. I've made a fair amount of progress so far, actually, even if Google Scholar's seemingly endless number of pages of search results make me feel otherwise at times.
Monday, though, also brought a baseball game with the computer science REU students at UMN: the Twins against the White Sox at Target Field. Because I am, among other things, an immature sports fan who holds grudges, I cheered for the Twins. (The Sox routed the Astros in the 2005 World Series and I will never forgive, nor ever forget.) They ended up winning 13-2 in an amazing game. (Yay! Go not-really-my-team!)
Thursday's lunch with the other labs took place at another Chinese restaurant near campus. The good thing about these weekly lunches, other than meeting new people (obviously), is that I get a fair amount of leftovers from the lunch specials, and since this is the first time I've been the sole person responsible for making sure I A: have food, and B: actually cook and eat it, leftovers are my best friend. (I am learning how to fend for myself. Slowly, maybe, but I am learning.)
Saturday I spent at the Twin Cities Pride Festival; Sunday was, once again, spent reading and drawing, as my computer remained in a repair facility in Texas. This weekend, I mixed it up a bit by spending the majority of Sunday in the basement waiting for my laundry to cycle through.
Week 4
Much like last week, I spent the week trawling through academic papers, reading abstracts and summaries and either discarding the paper as irrelevant-- while I'm sure it's interesting, our project doesn't have anything to do with the perceived staleness of pretzel sticks (yes, that was an actual paper)-- or sorting it into one of a number of bookmark folders for further investigation. In addition to reading, I got to be a human debugger: the tracking wasn't working the way we wanted, so I would periodically put on the VR headset and the hand trackers and test out the program, reporting what went wrong or looked weird and how as my project partner looked at what the program did in Unreal Engine.
By Thursday, I had made my way through almost 1000 Google Scholar entries, the hand tracking was working much better, and my computer arrived back from the repair center just in time for the long weekend. This meant, of course, that I got to spend the Fourth of July watching the most patriotic movie my family owns: the musical 1776. (It's tradition.) In the evening, I packed a small backpack and a water bottle and walked down to the Stone Arch Bridge, where I sat for the better part of four hours, guarding my small spot of bridge so as to see the fireworks. (I brought a book. And my iPod.) All in all, a good Fourth of July weekend.
By Thursday, I had made my way through almost 1000 Google Scholar entries, the hand tracking was working much better, and my computer arrived back from the repair center just in time for the long weekend. This meant, of course, that I got to spend the Fourth of July watching the most patriotic movie my family owns: the musical 1776. (It's tradition.) In the evening, I packed a small backpack and a water bottle and walked down to the Stone Arch Bridge, where I sat for the better part of four hours, guarding my small spot of bridge so as to see the fireworks. (I brought a book. And my iPod.) All in all, a good Fourth of July weekend.
Week 5
As with the two weeks previous, I split my time in the lab between reading and sorting academic papers and functioning as a human debugger. My role as the latter consisted mainly of putting on the Head Mounted Display, reporting whether I saw anything weird or "not right" about the virtual environment, then following my lab partner's instructions: "Wave your hands"; "Look to the left"; "Can you see your left hand?"; et cetera. Reporting back what I saw took some interesting explanations; it is sometimes hard to quantify what is "off" about an avatar hand's movements in conjunction with your own and then to convey that "off-ness" to someone else outside the virtual environment.
As the summer progresses, more and more of us REU and DREU students have started regularly going out/hanging out together. Thursday, per usual, a group of us went out to lunch at a very nice Indian restaurant near campus. We also went out Wednesday night, though; a Mexican restaurant further into town has an unlimited guacamole happy hour, so ten of us went there to take advantage of that. On Saturday, one of the REU students held a belated Fourth of July celebration, which mostly consisted of playing video games and listening to any and every song we could find with "USA", "America", or some variant thereof in the title, regardless of actual lyrical meaning or content. (This is presumably why "Born in the USA" is so popular around the Fourth, though in our case we weren't seriously looking for actual patriotic content.)
("Born in the USA" was definitely on our playlist, right before "Party in the USA" and above one of the countless versions of "God Bless America".)
As the summer progresses, more and more of us REU and DREU students have started regularly going out/hanging out together. Thursday, per usual, a group of us went out to lunch at a very nice Indian restaurant near campus. We also went out Wednesday night, though; a Mexican restaurant further into town has an unlimited guacamole happy hour, so ten of us went there to take advantage of that. On Saturday, one of the REU students held a belated Fourth of July celebration, which mostly consisted of playing video games and listening to any and every song we could find with "USA", "America", or some variant thereof in the title, regardless of actual lyrical meaning or content. (This is presumably why "Born in the USA" is so popular around the Fourth, though in our case we weren't seriously looking for actual patriotic content.)
("Born in the USA" was definitely on our playlist, right before "Party in the USA" and above one of the countless versions of "God Bless America".)
Week 6
This week I moved away from exclusively reading academic papers to working on the experiment design for our project. In this instance, experiment design consisted of considering our experiment goals-- testing the limits of visual dominance in visual-haptic perception within virtual environments-- and evaluating various ways of conducting studies while minimizing bias, maintaining structure, and conducting a study in such a manner as to get useable data from it.
Outside the lab, I began to branch out more with my cooking. Up to this week, I'd been living mainly off turkey and cheese sandwiches and basic stirfrys. Stirfrys are easy: chop up vegetables, boil noodles, throw it all in a fry pan together with some soy sauce or similar. I can do stir fry in my sleep, practically. To challenge myself (and to use up a tomato that had been sitting in my fridge for almost a week and a half), I decided to make a potato and tomato-based curry, because I really needed to get rid of that tomato and I'd never tried the recipe before. It turned out really good, especially considering I had to substitute a fair number of ingredients based on what I had on hand. (Pro tip: flour cooked with butter and milk makes a decent substitute for yogurt in a pinch. The flour acts as a thickening agent.)
(Credit goes to my grandmother for sharing that trick with me. Thanks, Mima.)
My adventures in cooking aside, this week and weekend were pretty quiet, which was nice. I got some drawing done, read a bit, and, significantly less fun but more pressing, continued prepping and studying for the GRE come September. I have a test prep book. It is about as thrilling as you'd expect, which is to say not very much at all. GRE prep aside, it was a nice week overall.
Outside the lab, I began to branch out more with my cooking. Up to this week, I'd been living mainly off turkey and cheese sandwiches and basic stirfrys. Stirfrys are easy: chop up vegetables, boil noodles, throw it all in a fry pan together with some soy sauce or similar. I can do stir fry in my sleep, practically. To challenge myself (and to use up a tomato that had been sitting in my fridge for almost a week and a half), I decided to make a potato and tomato-based curry, because I really needed to get rid of that tomato and I'd never tried the recipe before. It turned out really good, especially considering I had to substitute a fair number of ingredients based on what I had on hand. (Pro tip: flour cooked with butter and milk makes a decent substitute for yogurt in a pinch. The flour acts as a thickening agent.)
(Credit goes to my grandmother for sharing that trick with me. Thanks, Mima.)
My adventures in cooking aside, this week and weekend were pretty quiet, which was nice. I got some drawing done, read a bit, and, significantly less fun but more pressing, continued prepping and studying for the GRE come September. I have a test prep book. It is about as thrilling as you'd expect, which is to say not very much at all. GRE prep aside, it was a nice week overall.
Week 7
The project has begun winding down. Now we're mostly debugging the code we have and working on our poster, as we are presenting our project with the computer science REU here at the university. Debugging our program consists mainly of me putting on the HMD and trackers and seeing what happens when my partner starts the program. I have seen some odd virtual reality environments through this process. When I wasn't debugging or working on our project presentation, I continued sorting through the academic papers I'd collected together.
I finished the week by rushing to the airport Friday night to fly back home for a couple of days. As of this summer, my parents are moving back to the States and my new address is in Houston, Texas; I spent the weekend in Houston, getting to know my new house and neighborhood and catching up with some friends. It was hot and muggy and I loved it.
I finished the week by rushing to the airport Friday night to fly back home for a couple of days. As of this summer, my parents are moving back to the States and my new address is in Houston, Texas; I spent the weekend in Houston, getting to know my new house and neighborhood and catching up with some friends. It was hot and muggy and I loved it.
Week 8
This week really marked a turning point in the summer, as everything slowed down and focused less on the project and more on presenting the project. We knew at the beginning of the summer our project would have to be continued during the semester, after the summer ended; the project and user study was just too big to fit into one summer. My partner and I focused on creating and submitting our poster for the campus-wide REU poster presentation. The coming week marks both the end of the REU program and my DREU partner's stay at UMN, so activity in the lab really began to focus on wrapping up everything for the end of the summer. Most of my time spent not in the lab was spent studying for the GRE; I've gone over most of the prep book I bought, but I still have over half of the 500 vocabulary flashcards to go through. My favorite word so far is "cachinnate".
Week 9
This week really focused on wrapping everything up; the REU program on-campus finished Friday, so the entire week for the rest of my lab was spent wrapping things up and preparing for the poster presentation Thursday, followed by flights home Friday and Saturday. Next week will be a lonely week for me in the lab.
On Thursday, we participated in the REU poster presentation; my partner took the first half-hour of our slot, and I took the last half. Presenting work, especially in a public setting such as a poster presentation, is not my strong suit, but the presentation went surprisingly well. I explained our poster and project and was able to field questions with a lot more ease than I feared.
With the GRE getting closer every week, I spent most of the weekend and my time outside the lab focusing once more on GRE prep and vocabulary, as well as cleaning out my mini-fridge in preparation for moving out next week. Next week will be interesting, food-wise, as I need to unplug and dry out my mini-fridge; I think I'll be living mostly off pasta and cereal.
On Thursday, we participated in the REU poster presentation; my partner took the first half-hour of our slot, and I took the last half. Presenting work, especially in a public setting such as a poster presentation, is not my strong suit, but the presentation went surprisingly well. I explained our poster and project and was able to field questions with a lot more ease than I feared.
With the GRE getting closer every week, I spent most of the weekend and my time outside the lab focusing once more on GRE prep and vocabulary, as well as cleaning out my mini-fridge in preparation for moving out next week. Next week will be interesting, food-wise, as I need to unplug and dry out my mini-fridge; I think I'll be living mostly off pasta and cereal.
Week 10
This week was my wrap-up week, a week after everyone else. I compiled and organized a list of all the academic papers I've read and collected over the course of the summer, and generally cleaned up and wrapped everything up neatly for the students who will take over the project in the fall.
Being the only person in the lab is kind of creepy at times, just because the lab is so big and cold. As my work is all on my computer, I don't necessarily need to work in the lab this week, but I've found I work better if I set up in a place I designate or associate with work, as opposed to my dorm or the lawn outside, even if the lawn is warmer. I've been listening to a lot of upbeat music to keep myself entertained and slightly less lonely while I work.
Overall, I definitely learned a lot this summer, especially about research in computer science, and more specifically about virtual reality and how the brain processes information both in VR and in the real world. It's been an interesting summer.
Being the only person in the lab is kind of creepy at times, just because the lab is so big and cold. As my work is all on my computer, I don't necessarily need to work in the lab this week, but I've found I work better if I set up in a place I designate or associate with work, as opposed to my dorm or the lawn outside, even if the lawn is warmer. I've been listening to a lot of upbeat music to keep myself entertained and slightly less lonely while I work.
Overall, I definitely learned a lot this summer, especially about research in computer science, and more specifically about virtual reality and how the brain processes information both in VR and in the real world. It's been an interesting summer.
Final Report
My final report can be found here.