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 0 comments links to this post

Before I get into the week's update, feel free to check out these photos of my nieces (the youngest of which was born on 26 March:

Nieces 3/31/07 10:42 PM

Since my last update I gave an introduction of my audio game project to the students at the Iowa Braille and Sight Saving School--they seemed pretty excited about it, which is encouraging, so hopefully they'll have their parents sign the permission slips so we can conduct a usability study and get their feedback on the game. After giving them my introduction to the game, I drove back to Chicago for the weekend where I had the opportunity to see my new niece (and take those pictures). I also had a chance to see Danielle and go out to dinner, a movie, and Dave and Buster's with her.

When I came back to Ames on Sunday, it was April and time to begin tying up loose ends and such, and since somebody had scheduled a viewing of my apartment for Wed. my first order of business was to clean things up because I'd really prefer to sublease my apartment instead of having to pay for it while not using it. Due to lack of cleaning motivation, that was a slow process that took me part of Sunday, Monday, and a decent amount of Tuesday evening. It looks great now though. The person who I was going to show it to on Wednesday ended up canceling, but that evening somebody else contacted me about viewing it and I just showed it to them today--hopefully they'll decide to rent it so I don't have to concern myself with it anymore.

On Tuesday, I received the official paper copy of my offer letter from Google so I signed that and sent the signed copy off to them. I also officially withdrew my application for an IBM internship--I had withdrawn my application with Garmin the previous week when they called me to schedule an on-site interview. So that concludes my internship hunt and in a way that I'm extremely pleased with--it doesn't get much better than Google--especially when it comes to user experience research

This week I also demoed the latest version of my haptic musical instrument/record player for my electronic music independent study--I think it's coming along nicely now, and I've even added it as yet another demo to show at the Emerging Technologies Conference at the end of the month. So that gives me a total of four demos for the three day forum, counting the Wiicussion demo for my class project that I'm working on with two other students.

There are now roughly three weeks left before the end of the semester and my trip out to San Jose for CHI, so I need to make sure I keep the ball rolling here and redouble my efforts on all my projects. And since I just found out the person I showed my apartment to today decided not to rent it, I now also need to redouble my efforts to find somebody to sublease it. I think everything will work out fine though.

posted by Mike Oren  # 2:02 PM 0 comments links to this post