When things go wrong...

My goals for this semester:

• Turn both of my conference papers into journal articles. 
• Create and execute the experiment that I outlined in my last post. 

In order to turn a conference paper in to a journal article you need to demonstrate that you have added about 30% more work to the conference paper. This is up to interpretation by the individual and can come in many different forms. For example, in one of my papers we performed an additional small experiment so that we can make comparisons between task performance in the real world and the virtual one. We also plan on adding in a lot of detailed analysis that we had to leave out of the original paper due to length. We analyzed eye gaze of each of our participants and made some conjectures on what that meant to our results. Also, in my other paper we have performed another experiment and have one other one planned so that we can make some claims about the ties between and importance of motor and visual feedback.

This was a week that reminded me of the patience needed in order to conduct research; equipment breaks, timelines are flexible and new obstacles seem to appear at every turn.

I started the week off by talking to one of my co-authors on the first paper I published. She has worked closely with Professor Bodenheimer and I in all parts of the paper. She also conducted the real-world Stepping Stone task and I need her to help us analyze the data so that we can begin the journal paper. We setup a Skype call for Friday so that we could get the analysis finished, but she had to leave the office early and the call was rescheduled for Monday, January 30th.

The rest of the week I spent in the lab trying to get a good start on conducting the third throwing experiment and also beginning to implement object interaction using the Cyberglove. I had done some work with the Cyberglove when we first purchased the pair of gloves 2 years ago so I pulled up that code and wrote a short script in Python, hoping to have a quick and simple initial implementation of my system. Unfortunately, it seems that the use of the Cyberglove crashes the Vizard executable and I will have to contact the Vizard support team in order to see if they have a fix for this problem.

Putting the Cyberglove work to the side, I brought in a subject to perform a pilot study of the throwing experiment. This experiment will involve asking the users to judge alterations in trajectories of their own throws and other people's throws. I had my subject all suited up (so that I could provide him with an avatar character) and began the experiment when I realized that our head-tracking system had an error and was not receiving/sending out the appropriate orientation data. Without this data the Virtual Environment is useless, as the user cannot effectively interact with the environment. I was unable to come up with a quick fix for this issue and will now have to work with the graduate students in the lab to solve this problem, as it will effect all of our research.

I was able to make some progress in developing code, and there is always something to learn when solving a problem in the lab; this week's biggest lesson, however, was a reinforcement of Murphy's Law: If anything can go wrong, it will. And this only gives me more motivation to spend time in the lab this coming week and get my projects back on track!

A New Direction

Classes started one week ago, beginning my last semester as a Vanderbilt student. I am taking two classes, Topics in Software Engineering and Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Both classes are very interesting and I'm looking forward to the work that I will be doing this semester.

As I have mentioned in the past few posts I am switching the focus of my research topic from dyadic interaction to user interfaces in the virtual environment and this ties in very well with the HCI class. The class is based around helping each student develop a semester long project. The project is split into many different design phases, beginning with initial design descriptions followed by prototype developments and finally user testing. We are all encouraged to tie our project into the research that we are currently working on in other areas of our studies, so I will be using the work for this CREU project to build my HCI assignment. 

I had a meeting with Professor Bodenheimer on Friday so that we could talk about what we would like to get accomplished this semester and came up with a plan that I am very happy with. I will turning both of my previous papers into journal articles, which means expanding on the material that is presented in each one. The difference between a conference paper and a journal article is that there is usually about 30% more material in the journal article. And of course, we also discussed the work I will doing in the LIVE lab. I have mentioned that I am interested in object interaction within the virtual environment and my project will be targeted at this aspect of virtual reality. 

I want to investigate interaction with purely virtual objects. In my past research projects the objects have had virtual representations paired with physical counterparts. This meant that when my subjects were completing the object interaction task in the first paper or throwing the ball in the second paper they were actually holding the stamp tool or the ball and were therefore presented with haptic information which more than likely aided in the completion of both tasks. I mentioned in my blog post that it is not always going to be possible to provide users with physical representations of all of the objects they need to interact with, for a number of reasons, and therefore developing an intuitive way in which they can interact with the virtual objects in important. The interface that I currently have in mind is one in which the user wears a Cyberglove and must first 'touch' the virtual object and then make a fist in order to move the objects to a different location. We will be looking at how variations of the grip (making a tight fist, pointing one finger, a loose grip etc.) effects the user's feelings of ownership of the virtual object, do they believe that the object is actually there? 

I think that this project will be very interesting and that virtual reality has reached a point where this kind of project is feasible and necessary.