Mike Oren.com

I managed to miss about two months worth of updates to the site. Needless to say I have a lot of updates. Since my last update I got a Nintendo Wii, have been working on getting into several conferences, have begun applying to several summer internships, started my new classes, have some research updates, and have some general updates about my life. So feel free to use the links in the previous sentence to jump to the portion of my update you're most interested in.

My mom gave me enough cash for Christmas that I was able to afford a Nintendo Wii. I've been a big gamer since the age of five, but since entering college I haven't really had the time/money to invest in gaming all that much. Plus, after playing games for over 15 years, you kind of get tired of the formula. The Wii, however, is a refreshing change of pace. The games tend to be short enough that I can just play them for a few minutes and then get back to work (with the exception of games like Zelda... which eventually I'll have to find time to beat). Plus, it was nice to see some of my friends and family who normally don't get into games all that much getting a big kick out of games like Wii Sports. WarioWare: Smooth Moves also makes a great party game with its support for up to 12 players and 3-5 second micro games. The virtual console has also been a great way for me to play games that I never got around to playing when I was younger, and I've already sunk $60 into getting classic games. So I have to say I'm a big Wii fan... but my wallet isn't...

I ended up submitting an abstract about my audio game to the CHI '07 student research competition hosted by SIGCHI. I won't know if my abstract has been accepted into it though until February 9th, so stay tuned for updates on that. I'm also currently working on revising an abstract that's due Thursday for International Conference on Auditory Displays (ICAD). Needless to say, writing and revising these abstracts have been keeping me fairly busy, but it'll be fun to go to these conferences if my abstracts get in and see what other people are working on.

I ended up redoing my resume. I sent it off to Google in hopes of getting an internship as a user experience researcher. Originally, that was the only internship I was going to apply for this summer. However, I ended up applying for a few more internship opportunities with other companies that had usability/user experience internship openings, as well as an internship with Apple doing software development (they were the only software development position I applied for), and Microsoft for a program manager internship. My top choice is, of course, the Google internship with the other internships involving usability/user experience following that. I figure the Apple/Microsoft internships would just be interesting experiences in general, but I'm really much more interested in user experience/usability then any type of development work.

My classes for the spring semester began in early January. This semester I'm taking a class on Computational Perception, which so far seems like a fairly interesting class, although it'll likely be a considerable amount of work (which is what I'd expect from a graduate level class). I'm also taking Research Methods of Human Computer Interaction, which has been fun so far, with just a moderate work load, and very interesting topics. That class requires weekly blog posts and presentations, so if you want to read my posts (and comment on them) then they can be found here. My last class is an independent study on electronic music, where I'll be creating a synthesizer that will accept OSC messages from a haptics program I'm working on.

Due to the considerable amount of time the conference submissions have taken, I haven't gotten that much work done in January. However, in December we finished up the user study for the sighted subjects of the audio game. Along with that, I used the new UI toolkit for H3D to improve the usability of the Multi-Sensory Deformation System. I also ported a tcl/tk script my professor wrote over to python/tk in order to provide users with more control over the audio signals produced through MIDI. This system is likely to be expanded to work with the audio synthesizer I'm creating that will use OSC for message passing. We're also working on the IRB for the second phase of the audio game user study where we'll be having visually impaired and blind students in Iowa.

I spent about 2 weeks of Christmas break in Houston, TX with my relatives. I had fun hanging out with my cousins, aunt, uncle, and immediate family. Didn't get half of the stuff I had planned on doing over break because I spent the time hanging with my family instead of working on my various side projects (like beating Zelda and I was going to write the first draft of the abstracts over break), but I only get to see my Texas family every few years, so it was worth it to spend time with them. After break, Danielle spent a week with me in Ames, IA during my first week of classes. She's decided to become vegetarian, so we cooked lots of healthy dishes as opposed to my usual unhealthy greasy dishes. Of course, near the end of the week I had a huge craving for meat, so when we went out for Italian instead of getting a nice pasta dish, I ended up getting a steak and shrimp. I'm clearly not cut out to be a vegetarian, so more power to her for sticking it out. I also recently starting donating plasma, there's a place in Ames. I figure I've been donating blood to the Red Cross for years and this is just like that, it just takes slightly longer, I replenish the fluids they take faster, and I get paid for it. So it works out nicely and gives me some extra cash to go out to the movies, go out to eat more, eat healthier, and get a new game every so often.

posted by Mike Oren  # 3:41 PM 0 comments links to this post