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Final Reflection

This summer I got a taste of what graduate school is like. I definitely had, many ups and downs with this experience, some for the better and some for the worse.  I had multiple issues during the internship, which included not having communication with my advisor, not knowing what my actual research was (which was a result of no communication), and general issues with the software that I was working with. The main issue that I faced was no communication, which really bothered me. I didn't expect us to have our hands held the entire time, but I expected some sort of guidance, especially in the early weeks of the experience. Because of this, I had to learn many things on my own. I had to read other research papers to know the general idea of how research actually worked in the field of computer science. I had to figure out how they formed their own theories, how they developed their studies, and what questionnaires they used in them. Along with this, I had to teach myself the program...
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Week 10: Post 2

On Thursday, we had our poster symposium. I was very nervous to actually speak to people about my project because I'm not really a public speaker. But it went way better than I thought it would. Quite a few people showed up and people were actually interested in my research and asked me questions about it, which I was very delighted to answer. However, there was one person who was a little rude, but I guess it checks out because the methodology didn't make sense. He asked me, "why were the participants sitting down instead of standing up? Wouldn't it make more sense if they actually walked?" But in order for me to actually do this with VR I would have to have a massive room so that people could walk through it. And another option that is possible is redirected walking but that takes forever to do, and I'm not knowledgeable enough on the topic to know how it actually works. But other than that I thought that the presentation went really well.  As for my ongoing...
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Week 10: Post 1

I have had a very hectic week so far. I have started to run participants in my study. It is harder and more work than I had imagined. I have to keep track of all the participants, make sure the questionnaires are in the right order and have everything to successfully run the experiment. I have messed up a couple of the experiments so those are just throw-away ones. I still don't necessarily feel like my study is all the way complete. It just feels like it is missing something. I'm sure what it is but it's probably the way that I am running people though because it doesn't feel very professional. But I am having fun running people and seeing how they react to the environments that I have made.  Vicki also changed the way that we are running participants through the environments. As of right now, I have coded the program so that I can record the x, y, and z coordinates of the player as they move through the environment. With these coordinates, I can essentially play it so...
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Week 9: Post 3

 I am feeling more relieved than  I was at the beginning of the week. I finally got my code to compile correctly. It kept giving me an error that said that the patch kept failing when I would create a C++ class with dependencies. But when I would create an empty class it worked fine. So I decided to yet again, copy my content and put it into a new template. Doing this allowed for the code to compile for some reason. I really believe that the Unreal Engine program has a lot of bugs in it. It really doesn't make sense that all of my issues have been resolved by copying my content folder and putting it into a new template. But with this being said, I was able to code for my passive movement finally. I just had to get the x,y, and z location as I moved the camera around, put that into a CSV file, and then parse the file. It now works exactly like I wanted it to and I'm not as stressed about it anymore. I'm so close to finishing everything. I still have to download the program f...
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Week 9: Post 2

 I finally got the controllers for my active movement to work. It took a lot longer than I had hoped for; and it's not exactly how I wanted the movement to work. I wanted the user to be able to go left and right and to be able to move forward. I only got the controller to move forward and the user point the headset in the direction that they want to go. I feel as if this may cause the user to get cybersick, and I know that this will affect my data.  We also finally got IRB approval, but I don't think that I am exactly ready to start fully testing. Vicki seems to be very adamant on doing real testing but I'm personally not ready to make that step. I'm still not sure if my questionnaires that I made are up to par or if they will get the correct data that we need. Another reason that I don't want to test so soon is because everything is still not complete. I haven't been able to get the Empatica wristband to work, and it seems that no one in my lab or other labs ha...
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Week 9: Post 1

I have had a frustrating start to my week. To start off, I attempted to work Sunday but I couldn't get the headset to work correctly and the frames per second were awful, so Monday I attempted again. Whenever I loaded my environment into UE the frames per second, which determines whether or not it will lag, were 40. This isn't bad considering that my environment is very large. But after I ran it in the headset the fps dropped dramatically. I couldn't figure out the issue for a few hours but I finally resolved it. Apparently the VR setup for Unreal Engine has a bug that makes the fps awful. So I had to put my project into a first person setup; and my environment ran great. I didn't have any lag and everything looked exactly the same. I was quite upset that it was the reason why nothing would run correctly. You would think that Unreal would have resolved that issue considering that it affect the VE greatly. But I'm glad that I finally figured it out.  Today, I attempt...
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Week 8: Post 3

I finally resolved the issues with my computer. I tried to compile C++ but it wasn't working in Unreal Engine 4. The only issue was the name of my project so I changed it and then uploaded the project to UE 5 but now my lighting is extremely off in this version. I'm going to work this weekend to fix that issue. There are a lot more things that are going wrong than I had hoped for. I knew that this would not be a smooth process but it's a lot of things to get done in the two weeks that I have left.  The one thing that I do almost have complete is my poster and I'm quite proud with how it turned out. I have most of the information that I need I'm just waiting on the results of my pilot test.  The list of things that I have left to complete are getting my computer to work correctly with the headset to ensure that it looks the same, coding my controllers and also the video, getting the emaptica (the skin conductance wrist band) to work correctly and be able to get data ...
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