Mike Oren.com

I was supposed to show my apartment to somebody at four today and now it's five and they haven't shown up, nor have I heard from them (I called, but they didn't answer). So, once again, I wasted time cleaning organizing my apartment to show it to somebody and then ended up not showing it to them. C'est la vie. With that rant out of the way, I'll begin my updates.

First I'll give a quick run down on all my projects. My audio game officially goes into user testing phase (for VI subjects) next week with 4 students at the Iowa Braille and Sight Saving School (more to come later, hopefully) and 2-3 students at Iowa State--so I need to do at least one more push to recruit more people. The poster abstract we submitted about the project to the International Community on Auditory Displays (ICAD) was accepted, so that's good news--but I probably won't be making the trip to ICAD myself (it's in Montreal over the summer and I'll be on the west coast and working for the summer).

We've run into some technical problems with Wiicussion, but one of my group members (Jeremy) has fixed most of them by modifying an open source driver--so we no longer rely on the buggy/proprietary GlovePie plus it should also become cross platform. As stated before, we had to scale back the number of players since we want to have people use two Wiimotes each as opposed to a Wiimote and a nunchuk. The only other updates with that is that we now have a more or less working version of Horse with it so it's pretty much just doing the finishing touches--although we ended up going with button presses to choose the drum your playing as opposed to where you're pointing (location you're standing still changes the drum set).

My 3DJ project (the haptic record player type thing) is also going fairly well, and I'm now mostly just working on getting good mappings between object properties and sound at this point. I may also throw together a method of using a normal map to apply force to the pen to give the object more of an interesting feel even though its essentially a smooth sphere--that's in addition to the friction map that tries to get people to favor the "record grooves". I also removed the automated spin and replaced it with a user controlled spin that's restricted so it only spins around the Y-axis (more like a record). I think it should be pretty fun once it's all done.

In other news, I got an e-mail this morning from one of my professors inviting me to meet with the director of Carnegie Mellon's HCI program and show him a demo of my project--I had gone to his talk the day before so I was excited to have the opportunity to ask him some questions I didn't have time to ask the day before (they only allowed one question due to lack of time). Unfortunately, the meeting was rather brief and mostly related to an exchange of ideas on how HCI programs are run (which is also a topic of great interest to me, but not one in which I felt comfortable voicing my opinion in--I mean it was the assistant director of the HCI program at Iowa State, the director of the program at CMU, and then myself--a first year Masters student). I still enjoyed the experience (and of course the chance to demo my audio game), but I still have my unanswered questions about his talk.

Next week is my last week of "business as normal" before the madness of the Emerging Technology Conference here at Iowa State and then the Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) '07 conference in San Jose. Needless to say it'll be pretty hectic in and of itself since there are projects that have deadlines that week (or else they won't get done due to the time commitment I have for the conferences). I'm actually still waiting on confirmation of funding from the Graduate Student Senate for some of my travel expenses related to CHI, so hopefully that'll be taken care of soon.

I've started talking with some of my fellow Google Interns for this summer, and it looks like there's a decent amount of interest in having some Wii parties over the summer. That should be fun, as the Wii is a lot more fun when you play the games with other people and it's a great chance to get to know my fellow interns. It should be a great summer, and it's just about here.

posted by Mike Oren  # 4:57 PM