Mike Oren.com

I've come to the sad, but late, conclusion that my web site has become a blog. When I bought my domain and started this web site, it was meant more as a place to keep my weekly calendar and provide the latest news about my life to my family and friends--plus providing a place to have my resume online to be found by prospective employers. However as time has passed, i have noticed that the majority of my family rarely, if ever, looks at my web site and while a few of my friends look at it, the vast majority of my readers I know nothing about. Even wit this realization though, I have still kept my blog posts mostly about the happenings in my life (this is mikeoren.com after all), but as I am planning on expanding my scope a bit, I am curious: why do you people come here? My life isn't all that interesting and while I have the audio game that draws a little bit of attention and, of course, a lot of traffic these past two months comes from those searching about internship information for companies I've interviewed with. Still, there is a decent group of people who visit my site and bookmark it or revisit it later. It is these people I ask: what do you want to see more of on my site/blog? What annoys you? What suggestions do you have to improve the site?

With that out of the way, I return you to my weekly update (being posted a couple of days early). The biggest news is that my second niece was born on Monday so there's another March birthday in my family that already has birthdays crowded around late February and March. I'll put a picture of her with my first niece in my photo gallery later this weekend, but I think she's a cute baby.

I also found out I have been nominated for the HCI student of the year award, a new award program started by Iowa State's HCI program. I will find out at the end of April if I won, but I'm assuming I won't win (this is my first year in the program and the winner is determined by peer votes--I voted for one of the people I nominated rather than voting for myself). I still think it's kind of cool getting the nomination though. For those interested the person who nominated me gave the following justification: "Michael Oren is deserving of the student award because of his service and research in the HCI program. In his first year of the HCI program, Michael has made more of a positive impact on the program than any other student. Michael is one of the most active students in the HCI Student Organization. His involvement in the organization has led to changes in the future direction of the HCI program. Michael's research excellence includes a user study on gaming for the visually impaired which was accepted to the student research competition at SIGCHI 2007. Michael's excellence in the HCI program has also led him to a summer internship at Google."

Today I will be heading over the Iowa Braille and Sight Saving School to give a short presentation on my audio game and recruit participants for the usability study. You may notice that I've finally updated that page (partially to remove all links to the SourceForge project and video--since I don't want them to have prior exposure to the game), but also because an update was long overdue.

I also recently did my first demo of Wiicussion to the ISU electronic music student organization, where I was able to get invaluable feedback regarding how to design the future iterations. We got the general idea right of how people would try to play it without having any knowledge of the controls, but it was different enough that our idea of mapping the motion to the different drum sounds isn't feasible. Instead, we're going to use the direction they point at (determined by using the IR sensors) and replace the Wiimote/nunchuk combo with dual wielded Wiimotes (the people who tried it said they think that will allow for more versatility as well as having a better feel to it). This means that the maximum number of players will be cut in half, but there was a general sentiment for fewer players at once anyway (with several people indicating they'd even prefer solo play--but since this is for the forum, where lots of people will be going through, we're keeping with the multi-player). In about another week (hopefully) or two (if things take longer), I'll have a few more people who have never played it try it out and get feedback for the next iteration. The audience had a blast watching the volunteers try it out, so that was very encouraging, and those who tried it liked the idea of it but were clearly frustrated by the controls (which, as I stated, we're overhauling and hopefully the controls will be significantly better in the next iteration).

posted by Mike Oren  # 9:18 AM