Mike Oren.com

So I think it's been over 2 months since my last update. My longest hiatus from an update yet. After finishing my conference paper submissions (two to CHI '08--a methodology paper I co-authored with some of the people I worked with at Google, and a paper detailing the findings of my audio game studies), I went into interview mode and have had at least one interview per week for about 6 weeks now. The initial round of interviews are over, for now--I've had a couple of follow up interviews already as well and I'm waiting to hear back from a few companies. I had been using online job boards and such initially, but it seems most of those are for immediate openings and as I still have until May before I graduate I decided to focus more on the companies that come to Iowa State. Unfortunately, most of the recruiters and interviewers that come to Iowa State don't know much about their openings in user experience, which makes things difficult (although I did land interviews with every company I talked to at the career fair). Still, it's not very encouraging when I want a position doing interaction design or user experience research and I'm being interviewed for a "code monkey" position--I don't mind doing some programming or even doing a lot of programming (if the programming relates to something of interest--particularly some experimental interface). However, I did have a couple of pleasant surprises with on campus interviews. The most recent of which was Epic Systems Corporation as I thought I was going in to interview for a PM position, but they ended up interviewing me for an interaction designer position--PLUS they actually knew what the position entailed and they had a plan for the growth of user experience within the company.

In other news, the H3D project I've been working on now has an official name: M4 (multi-modal mesh manipulation system). We are currently in the process of setting up for a "virtual pumpkin carving contest" for the purpose of producing a YouTube video to get the word out about it (the program uses haptics and stereo graphics to allow uses to cut, deform, and paint triangle meshes--all based on the H3D API). My work on that project is now primarily focused on high-level programming (python and front-end/UI code), which I enjoy considerably more than some of the low-level programming I was working on before the summer (I still do SOME lower-level C++ program when I need to modify some of the base UI C++ code, but most of the work I can get done fairly quickly and easily with Python). In case I haven't said it before, I really love the H3D API--it makes it incredibly easy to control the graphics and haptics in the XML based scene graph using Python, reducing my work in C++ simply to the creation/modification of nodes when I need base functionality that (currently) isn't provided by default (such as the triangle cutting node that Sean and Adam worked on over this summer--and that Adam has made huge improvements to this semester).

I've also been trying to recruit some more visually impaired participants for my audio game in order to increase my statistical significance/narrow my confidence intervals. So far that's proven to be fairly difficult. In the mean time, I am doing some additional literature review of spatial awareness/perception--particularly any differences between visually impaired and sighted individuals. I'm also in the process of analyzing the mapping data we collected but have yet to properly analyze. My program of study committee has all been approved (as well as the classes I chose for my program of study--after this semester, I am taking just one additional class, which is a design course that focuses on usability).