Surprise, surprise! Another few months have come and gone with naught in the way of activity hereabouts. Go figure.
So this quarter has been…interesting…if nothing else. Certainly the busiest quarter I’ve had in a long, long time. And that’s saying something, considering I’m rocking a schedule sans-MSE this quarter. I suppose I’d better try to break down recently goings here in one giant chunk, because infrequent and massive content dumps seem to be my status quo. So it begins…
In the interest of readability, I think I’ll attempt to organize this somewhat to avoid a narrative-style rambling that would likely go on for pages.
Class #1: HCDE 411 – Visual Communication
This class is really solid. I’ve learned a ton about what we see, how we see, and why we see what we see. See? To be honest, the only real weak point of this class is the textbook: “Basic Vision: An Introduction to Visual Perception”. It’s not bad necessarily, but it tries way too hard to be witty to the point of tackiness. I’d honestly rather read a really dry but concise explanation than a book full of bad puns and cartoons. But that’s just me…
The quarter-long project in this class is great, too. We’re designing an informational poster targeted at students living in the dorms talking about how to prevent the spread of Swine Flu (hey, remember when that was relevant!?!). Expect to see the final product here at the end of the quarter. Err…not here as in here. Here as in my portfolio, and probably linked in a new post. Whatever.
Class #2: HCDE 419 – Concepts in HCI
Ah, remember good ol’ 411? Seems like so many lines ago now. It was good. This class? Not so much. It’s kinda terrible. I guess that’s not really a fair statement, though. The class itself is good. I’m learning a ton about ethnography, fieldwork, use scenarios, etc., and I actually have enjoyed the barrage of readings over the first two thirds of the quarter. The problem comes from the class’ quarter-long group project (that’s right, this one has one too!).
My groupmates and I were tasked with working on an aspect of an already existing project from the CSE department called the “MDPhone.” As envisioned, it would be a program that runs on a smartphone (android-based at first) and can take input from medical device peripherals. Want to take someone’s blood pressure? Plug a special MDPhone blood pressure cuff peripheral in. Want to measure someone’s heart rate? Hook up a stethoscope and bam. If you’re having trouble picturing it, just think *tricorder with less snazzy sound effects that you can’t just magically wave over someone*. All sounds well and good, right? It is, to an extent. There’s just one small problem. Project’s cursed as shit. I’m not talking slightly problematic cursed. I’m talkin’ this project is clearly not meant to be and every force of man and nature is conspiring against it to ensure its continued failure cursed.
Let me elaborate. First of all, I wasn’t even supposed to be on this project (I have a Clerks moment at least once a week, and no, not one that involves a dead dude). It was the last item on my preferred project list. But that’s just bad luck more than evidence of a curse. Then, the night before my group’s first presentation, we find out that one of our group members dropped the class. That was fun. Then, about 36 hours before the group’s first progress meeting with the instructors, another group member got hit by a stolen car and wound up out of commission for a few weeks. But there’s more…a couple days before our second presentation, group member #3 came down with some nasty stomach virus. Finally, and this is more of a cumulative bit of evidence, all but one of our efforts at carrying out fieldwork (which is…like…something like half our grade) were complete and utter failures. No one would answer our calls, no one would respond to our e-mails, no one would meet with us. Even one of the instructor’s friends who was one of our contacts wait until the absolute last minute to give us what we needed.
Fortunately, the instructors know what’s going on, and they aren’t really blaming us for the sad-ass state of our project. By the end of the quarter, we’ll deliver *something*, but it sure isn’t going in my portfolio. That’s fine, though. At this point, all I’m worried about is getting out of this class in one piece with a decent grade. Any after that is just icing on the tricorder.
Class #3: HCDE 437 – Web Design & Publishing
This one’s really just a matter of going through the motions. I’ve done so much web work over the years there’s not much left to learn, aside from stuff on the technical end, and this class is all theory. I did end up having to give an impromptu lecture about assistive technology, though, which was…well…random. Not much else to say about 437.
Research
This has been a super-productive quarter for research. Last quarter was just a lot of e-mail-tag and scheduling (for me), but this quarter we got to do some actual data analysis. In the end, we put out two solid papers. The first, a shorter one, was accepted to HRI 2010 and is being presented by Sarah on Tuesday at the conference’s HRI and the Arts workshop. The second one was more in-depth, and we’re still waiting to hear back whether it’s going to be accepted to CogSci 2010. Fingers crossed…
Now, we’re starting to work on the next HRCL research offensive, which involves making Bucky look a bit more like a cool robot and a bit less like a monitor sitting on a ladder (sorry Bucky). Exactly what that’s going to involve remains to be seen. I put out a nice proof of concept test showing that we can produce fairly high-quality animated facial avatars lip-synced to dialogue using Steam, so it looks like that’s definitely going to be what we do for him from the neck up moving forward. ‘Course, we can’t very well use Barney or Alyx, so we’ll need a custom model. That’s a ways down the to do list, though.
Well, I guess that’s about it. Expect more frequent and sporadic updates in the future. Lots of interesting stuff going on…