Eve Gottwald – Summer 2018

Week Ten 8/6-8/10

Eve Gottwald — Thu, 09 Aug 2018 16:06:27 +0000

It is my last week here in Raleigh! I have had an incredible summer, but I am definitely ready to go home. This week I have been working on my paper, cleaning up this website, and wrapping up my coding project! I am really really proud of all the work I have done this summer, and I didn’t think it would happen – but I’m starting to get excited about the possibility of going to Grad School! There are a lot of options to consider but if I have a chance to work with Dr. Martens again I am definitely going to take it. Overall, I have had a really nice experience here in Raleigh. I made a ton of great friends through this program, and it was a great opportunity to practice independence.

Week Nine 7/30-8/3

Eve Gottwald — Wed, 01 Aug 2018 00:12:39 +0000

This week I was able to pick up my poster, and on Tuesday we presented with all of the other REU students at the Symposium. It was amazing to see all the research that people have been doing this summer, and I really loved being able to see work from people in other fields such as biology, food science, and archeology (just to name a few!). I also presented my final PowerPoint for the SRCA program this week, and was so excited to hear the final results of everyone’s project.

Since most people are leaving this week, I am spending my time focusing on presentations, moving out of the dorms and into an Air BnB, and saying goodbye to some of the amazing people I’ve met in North Carolina this summer. Hopefully I will also be able to finish up some of the heat map functionality, and outline my paper. Next week will be spent meeting with Dr. Martens, and finishing up my final paper!

Week Eight 7/23-7/27

Eve Gottwald — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 18:30:49 +0000

This week I finished the heat map for displaying gaze tracking data of each game. I also finished my poster for the symposium! I think that of all the things I have done so far this summer, I am most proud of the heat map. I was able to set a blank image to proportionally match the screen view of the game, and when gaze is detected on a pixel of the screen view, the corresponding pixel of the image is changed. The image starts with all of the pixels being blue, and as a gaze is detected the color is incremented towards red on an HSV color scale. This results in a typical looking “heat map”, with more red spots in the middle of the image – corresponding to the cards that a player was looking at while playing.

So far I am the only one who has played the game with eye tracking, but I am hoping to get more people to try it out this week. I am somewhat disappointed that we weren’t able to get results in time for the poster symposium, but the poster turned out really well any way!

The next two weeks I will be presenting my poster, and working on a paper with Markus for my final milestone of DREU.

Week Seven 7/16-7/20

Eve Gottwald — Sun, 22 Jul 2018 23:54:36 +0000

This week I finished nearly all of the Hanabi game implementation in Unity. I will be spending the next few days cleaning up the code and adding the last few visual elements so that the game is intuitive to play and easy to interact with. From here I will be mainly working on my poster for the SCRA REU Poster Symposium. This includes gathering eye-tracking data, and finding a way to represent it. We have been able to hook up the eye-tracker this week, and made a small object move around the screen based on where the player is looking. Currently I am looking into creating a “heat map” kind of display, where each pixel of the game board gets darker when gaze is detected at that point. I will also begin outlining my paper for DREU in the coming weeks.

Week Six 7/9-7/13

Eve Gottwald — Tue, 17 Jul 2018 17:38:01 +0000

This week we played around with the eye tracker quite a bit. I was able to attach it to the project so that a card was selected (outlined in red, and a menu pops up above or below it), when a gaze was detected on the object. Attaching the eye tracker to the project proved to be fairly simple, as both Unity and Tobii have a lot of built-ins.

We also had several workshops for the REU program that I attended this week. One was about how to write an abstract, which I will be finishing in the coming week, and one was about the difference between graduate school, fellowships, and industry! I am very excited about looking into grad schools, although I think I will take a year or two off to work in industry before I go back to school.

As for the abstract; I feel somewhat concerned that I haven’t been doing any formal research yet. I have done a lot of coding, and nearly completed an online course about ethical research through NC State, but I haven’t put any readings or papers to use quite yet, or designed any sort of experiment for the eye tracking. From what I’ve gathered, however, it seems that many of my peers are feeling the same way, so I’m sure we will all get what we need out of this program in the end – whether that’s formal research experience or just an introduction!

Week Five 7/2-7/6

Eve Gottwald — Sat, 07 Jul 2018 01:24:16 +0000

This week I was able to finish up almost all of the game pieces and logic. I have all of the options that one can choose on their turn implemented, and the game formatted so that we can see everything in the game at a time. The biggest challenge for me this week were implementing the hint tokens so that they were incremented and decremented when the correct actions were performed. After working with Markus for a few days, we figured out how to implement them, and I learned a lot about how Unity works on a more intuitive level.

My next step is to implement a turn structure that allows a player to make a choice for their turn, and then has the computer randomly select a move for it’s turn – which will complete the basic game structure so that Markus can implement the AI in place of the randomly selected move.

Having the game implemented almost in entirety is a huge step, because we can add the AI and the Eye Tracker to the Unity project now. We were actually able to connect Unity with the Eye Tracker on my work computer today, so that next week we can integrate it into the project right away.

Week Four 6/25-6/29

Eve Gottwald — Tue, 03 Jul 2018 14:33:19 +0000

This week I spent a lot of time playing with the set up of the Hanabi game board. I have created all the game objects necessary for play, and am working on making them all intractable, with basic Hanabi logic. I am hoping that since I have all the pieces set up, we can implement the eye-tracker next week and start collecting data.

We read a paper this week, Mental Models: Structural Differences and the Role of Experience, that made me think a lot about how people will interact with my implementation of Hanabi. One of the sources cited in the Mental Models paper is about eye-tracking and mental models, and I plan on looking into it to see what sort of eye-tracking and game-play experiments are out there that we may be able to emulate in the coming weeks.

Week Three 6/18-6/22

Eve Gottwald — Mon, 25 Jun 2018 16:50:20 +0000

This week I was able to get a room in an apartment in Wolf Village on North Campus! I spent the weekend setting up my room and getting to know my roommates. I feel a lot better being closer to the POEM Lab, and I think that I will be a lot more focused in the coming weeks with one less thing to worry about!

Overall I am hoping to finish all of the “Set Up” test cases, which include generating the deck, making each card distinct, shuffling the deck, and dealing the cards. This should take up most of the week, but I am also hoping to find some interesting assets for the hint tokens, mistake counter tokens, and card backgrounds, as well as working on the color scheme and overall UI design of the game.

I am also making my way through a few Unity, C#, and Python tutorials, but I am definitely feeling a lot more comfortable with Unity and C#!

Week Two 6/11-6/15

Eve Gottwald — Mon, 25 Jun 2018 16:42:34 +0000

This week I met with Dr. Martens and Markus to lay out my project goals. We have split the project up into two parts. For the next few weeks I will focus mainly on implementing the game objects and Hanabi logic in Unity. Once I have gotten to a point where we can begin implementing the AI logic, I will shift my focus to designing a research experiment around the eye-tracker.

I began creating game objects in Unity this week. I have spent most of my time drawing out the placement of cards, tokens, and labels, as well laying out a programming plan with the methods and fields I expect to need for the first few functions of the game, which are: generating the deck, making each card distinct with a range and color, shuffling cards, and dealing the cards to each player’s hand.

I also got to use the eye tracker this week for the first time, and it was very interesting to see how it interacts with Unity, as well as the accuracy of the tracker.

Week One 6/1-6/7

Eve Gottwald — Mon, 11 Jun 2018 14:36:37 +0000

I arrived in Raleigh, NC this weekend, and have run into a ton of trouble with housing! The housing I had set up through Craigslist fell through, so I am staying with a family friend until I can get on-campus housing. This has been a stressful beginning to my first week at NCSU, but I am excited to start my research!

This week I was paired up with a PHD Student that I will be working with for the rest of the semester, Markus Eger. He created an AI (written in Python) to play the Japanese card game, Hanabi. The programming part of my work this summer will be to translate his AI from Python, to C#, and implement it in Unity. The research part of my work will be to plan an experiment for adding Tobii Eye Tracking technology to the game, and figuring out what information we get from the tracker. We want to see if any of it could be useful to the AI’s decision making process.

I have been familiarizing myself Hanabi, Unity, and C# this week, so that I can start translating the AI!