Back On Track

After all of the breakdowns in the lab over the past weeks, I have finally gotten back on track. The final equipment issue that we had, with the computer we use to stream Autodesk MotionBuilder, ended up being a simple faulty wire so after that was replaced I was ready to debug and get my experiment ready to go.
The other undergraduate in the lab, Stephen Bailey, helped me out by being a subject and I got my throwing experiment ready to the point where I will show my adviser, Professor Bodenheimer, tomorrow and hopefully start running subjects later in the week.

I will also work this week to get the experiment ready for the object interaction task. I think we will be measuring real world and virtual world performance for a sorting task. The measure of task performance will be the time it takes to sort the objects (most likely cups with numbers on them). There are, however, number of other measures that we will use to evaluate user performance. For example, a human hand's acceleration profile while reaching and grasping an object is a well-documented behavior and something that would be interesting to draw a comparison between in the virtual and real worlds. I think that the acceleration profiles will obviously differ; it will be interesting to see how they differ and if it is a consistent difference across subjects. I will also be administering a questionnaire to the subjects in order to gather some information that I cannot quantify. I want to measure the participants' feeling of presence in the environment and also get their feedback about what they liked/didn't like about the interface. It will also be interesting to see if the type of gesture (fist or pointing the index finger) affects their performance.

I hope that this coming week will get me started with running subjects so that I can focus on analyzing and writing up my results after spring break. Wish me luck!