Week 2: Post 1

After speaking with the PhD student in my lab, we have come to a conclusion about what my research topic will be, which is the role of nature virtual reality and how it can impact the wellness of a person. The research would require me to create a highly realistic virtual nature environment and an equally appealing non-realistic virtual environment. I would then compare various measures of well-being after immersion in each environment. I have already decided that I will be doing a forest environment for both using Unreal Engine and Maya Autodesk. 

Since this is my first research project that I will solely be working on, it brings up a lot of questions; so I am thinking of ways that I can answer those questions and bring insight into my project and what I need to be focusing on. Some general questions that I have for the research are: How are these two environments going to compare? How many participants do I need? Do I need different virtual environments to test different levels of well-being rather than just one? How am I going to measure the results? 

For me, I feel as though the hard part is not creating the environments but how I am actually going to be conducting the research. I am going to read some other research papers that have similar topics and see how they proceeded with taking results from the environments. I am also going to discuss with Ville, the PhD student, how I need to go about my research and if I can make similar studies like the papers or if it has to be completely original. I am still unsure of the entire process so I am hoping he can guide me partially through it. 

I am feeling overwhelmed as I will be creating an entire research project within 9 weeks. From my understanding I was going to be working on continuing research instead of starting from scratch. With that being said, I need to work with my research in sections and not think about one issue until I have completed the first. I will also have to work quite diligently because of the time crunch and I know that I may have some obstacles come up along the way.