Mike Oren.com

First off, I just thought my readers might be interested in knowing that I found out yesterday that I was invited to do a 2nd phone interview with Google for the user experience internship, so I guess my first interview went alright. The second interview isn't until March 14th (during Iowa State's spring break), so I have plenty of time to stress out about it so hopefully by the time of the actual interview I'll have gotten that out of my system (it seemed to work alright for the first interview). Once again, I was able to borrow a room and a land line phone for the interview--although this time I'll have to remember to bring a glass of water since my throat became fairly scratchy toward the end of the first one. Not quite sure what to expect with this 2nd phone interview but hopefully it will all turn out well.

I now return you to your regular scheduled weekly update. The IRB application is just about finalized now so we should, hopefully, get to start conducting the usability testing of the audio game with visually impaired subjects sometime in March. I'm looking forward to doing that, since I'll finally get a chance to talk with the target user group regarding the program. We also made a new video of it, so hopefully I'll be replacing the old video that's currently on the project page (sorry about the lack of updates...) with the new video--the old video is from the version I did as a senior at DePauw and a lot of changes have been made since then.

This week, I also received the various e-mails from the CHI organizers so I now have all the details in terms of my participation through the student research competition. The poster session is on the Monday of the conference and then if I advance to the next round I'll be doing a ten minute presentation on Wednesday of the conference. The cost of the conference is going to run somewhere around $1,300 or so for me (registration, flight, hotel, and food), but I have a $500 travel grant from ACM, $240 from my department, my professor is covering conference registration ($375) through the funding, and then I'll hopefully be getting an additional $110 from the graduate student college. That should cover pretty much everything other than the food while I'm there, and I have no problem covering that myself (I also decided to buy a conference shirt for $20). I'm hoping to get most of the poster and presentation done during spring break.

I gave my first presentation about the project I'm doing for my independent in electronic music this week. I showed the other people doing the independent study how to use open sound control (OSC) to communicate between an application and the Reaktor synthesizer program. I also went over some of the limitations and unique rules in regards to Reaktor's implementation of OSC (it's in my plans to do a write up on this since there's not really a great resource anywhere online about this--and the Reaktor manual was almost entirely useless in this case). After that, I showed them my H3D project, which I had adapted to send OSC signals using python to control Reaktor oscillators for sound output. The class really seemed to enjoy playing around with my program, and it was a good experience for me as well as it gave me further indication as to areas that need improvement--they were fairly impressed with it since it was their first time using haptics so they didn't really complain about it, but I noticed some portions of it where they consistently struggled. I think if I could find the time to implement a gesture recognition system then that might help, since it will be a lot more natural with the haptic pen then trying to tap the buttons in 3D space (that's just a theory at the moment--I need to get a prototype built and some users to test it out before I make a decision).

I'm finally getting a chance to play around with developing something with the Wii controllers since my group for my computational perception class decided to build a program that uses the controllers to play music--where the movement of the controllers will control the various sound parameters and a camera will be used to locate the users and track them in space. Depending upon where the user is in space determines which instrument they are playing with the controller. That's the plan at least, and we think it will make a pretty cool demo for Iowa State's Emerging Technologies Conference. Including this demo, I'm going to have a total of three demos there (my audio game and the H3D project I'm doing make up the other two demos). That conference is right before I fly out to San Jose, CA for the CHI conference, so the end of April should prove to be incredibly hectic.

My last update is that my birthday is coming up--on Friday (March 2nd)--I'll be 23. No real plans for it (although next time I'm back home I'll probably end up going to Melting Pot, and I'm looking forward to that). I was hoping to have some web site redesigns ready to unveil on my birthday, but I think those redesigns will have to wait until I can find the time to do them (which probably won't be for awhile).

posted by Mike Oren  # 7:06 PM