This week, I moved from College Station, Texas (Texas A&M University) to Chicago, Illinois (University of Illinois at Chicago) in order to work with Dr. Debaleena Chattopadhyay. I have to say, moving from Texas to here has been somewhat of a culture shock, so right now I’m mostly getting my bearings. I only had about two weeks to find an apartment here, but Craigslist did me well and I found an apartment close enough to campus that I can walk to work within about ten minutes. There’s also a grocery store, Target, hair salon, and convenience store near enough to walk to. Not having a car is odd, but all the walking is good for me.
As far as work goes, for the last few days, I have been getting a grip on what research in Human Computer Interaction entails, and what kind of project I might be interested in for the rests of the summer. My mentor’s class slides have been very helpful.
Today, I will be working on an exercise to verify Fitt’s Law using an XBox One Kinect as an input device. The purpose of the application I (and another DREU student, Mariko Kamiya) will be building will be to track time elapsed and distance traveled as a user points and clicks targets of various size. Once the data is collected, determining whether or not it follows the (well documented and well proven) Fitt’s Law will be the next step.