Just Another Day On The Job

Today was a pretty normal day. Joe brought the doughnuts this morning... which is always a good way to start off the day! We headed to our labs to begin coding the videos once again. However, today was a little more exciting since Jane is about the finish her video, which we all worked on for awhile at some point within the last two weeks. I got to the 1 second clips which means that I do not have that long until I am done as well! Very exciting. We pretty much spent the whole day working on that since Andy asked us to at least finish up one tape... we got pretty close so it counts.

We also went to the IS&T meeting, at which Dr. Easton gave us a very informative and interesting presentation on the work that he has been involved with, including the Archimedes Palimpsest. It was really cool to hear what he had worked and how profound the discoveries were. Erika and I also participated in a pilot test of John's experiment, which has something to do with walking and footprints on the ground... I guess we will found out more later. And that was about it for the day, fun but productive is always good!

Keep it classy,
Matt

Visiting the U of R

Today we went to the U of R to see what their interns were up to. Their program is more based on biomedical areas rather than imaging. They deal with the body at the systems, cellular, and molecular levels, meaning that they cover every level of the body. It was a lot of fun to see what they were doing and see some really interesting things, such as seeing a live mouse being dissected for research to be conducted on its brain. Many of their projects include research on a smaller level right now that will hopefully be expanded into full human usage.

Before we went we had a funny discussion about how everybody's prom was worse than anybody else's. However, I think Jane takes the cake with only 20 people showing up!! Wow! After we got from the trip we headed back to the labs to get back to work. We coded for the rest of the time :P It wasn't that bad though because we took a break to calibrate our tapes... finally! But other than that it was straight coding for the rest of the day. Hopefully we will be able to take some more pilot tapes tomorrow for our experiments... which will be much more fun :)

Keep it classy,
Matt

Harry Potting Sighting... And Cool Legos

So today was just another normal day on the job.

We coded for the first couple hours and met some interns from the U of R intern program. We gave them a tour of our lab and an intro into what it is all about. Then we went back to coding until lunch time, basically a very uneventful morning. Lunch was good because we basically got two free lunches! One with the U of R interns and then one at the Wednesday lunch talks... I ended up very full but happy.

After the lunch talk we headed back to calibrate the tapes from yesterday... but Leanne was using the calibrating station so we had to move on to something else. Instead we finished the Waldo presentation and wrote up the script for running the experiment, as well as the same stuff for the Lego experiment. Then we took some video for the testing of the Lego experiment and we can calibrate all the tapes tomorrow hopefully. We also upgraded my environment beautifier, a Lego plane! ... the picture is up top.

Okay so I forgot to mention how at lunch we saw Harry Potter. We tried to take a picture with him but he like bolted out of the room as soon as the presentation was over! He hopped on his Firebolt and got away before we even had the chance to ask :( Hopefully he will be back next week though!

Keep it classy,
Matt

A Good Day

So today was just a really good and productive day! :)

We started off the morning by planning what we would show the U of R interns, who will be visiting us tomorrow. We want to show them eye movements, the mobile eye tracker, and some videos of eye tracking in action. In addition, we might show them some experiments that are going on right now, maybe even the one we are designing! After that we coded for a really long time, until lunch! Wow I don't think I've ever coded for that long without a break, it was intense.

After lunch, we decided to take a break from coding and work on the Kung Fu Panda tape. We set everything up and took some good tapes of each of us. Hopefully we will be able to calibrate them tomorrow and make them into one condensed clip. Then we worked on our Waldo project, including the Lego experiment. We designed a better PowerPoint presentation for each so that the experiments would run more smoothly. These will help us in the proper data analysis too by giving us better data. We took some Waldo videos today, which we will calibrate tomorrow, and hope to get tapes on the Lego set-up tomorrow as well.

Looks like we have a busy next day ahead of us, including the fact that we have other interns touring our labs! I think we should be able to tackle everything though...

Keep it classy,
Matt

A Day Without AJ

Its very sad today but AJ is off to Philmont for two weeks. But we couldn't slack off in his absense!

Today was one of the most productive days yet! We took videos on the high speed camera of eye movements, yes all possible eye movements. Then Erica created a movie that combined them all in to one clip. It can now be used by Jeff in his classroom instruction and VPL Boot Camp '09 to demonstrate examples of eye movements.

While she was hard at work on that I made some progress on the Kung Fu Panda project. I got all the kinks out about the screen size and it looks like we are ready to start developing the set-up. The video will be used to show the different combinations of subject and surroundings, as discussed previously. I also coded for a long time and then Jane took over and worked on coding some. So basically all the projects were worked on today. Except that we are putting the Waldo on hold for right now, that will have to wait till later while we work on these other projects.

Well thats all for today hopefully tomorrow will be as good a work day.

Keep it classy,
Matt