It has now been two weeks that I’ve been here in Utah doing this internship and it has been a great experience filled with so much joy and learning I have truly enjoyed all of it!
On Monday we went into the lab again, this time our goal was to try and get to motion capture system working again so the user would be able to turn left and right in the virtual world. After a while of trying to follow a piece of outdated instructions to get it working, we where unable too and since it was starting to get late we decided to come back tomorrow and tackle it with a pair of fresh eyes.
On Tuesday we went back into the lab this time with the same goal of getting the motion capture system to work so the user could turn in the virtual world. Today we had much more success we got the motion capture system fully up and running, and if your stepped into the room and put on the motion trackers you were able to turn left and right your actions being mirrored in the game world projected onto the screens in front of you.
On Wednesday we again had our weekly meeting where we talked about the progress we had made since the last meeting, after the meeting had ended we went back into the lab to meet with one of the other PHD students working on this robot and working together we also got the treadmill up and running. The treadmill worked by sensing if the harness the user would strap into was moved forwards past a certain point the treadmill would start moving making it seem like you were walking. The treadmill’s movement would also be translated into the game world so you would also move forward in there.
On Thursday my last day in the lab we worked on getting the last few tweaks on the treadmill to get it working fully. After we finished with the treadmill we got working on getting the 3d on the projectors working again, after about an hour of tinkering we managed to getting it working with a pair of 3d glasses we had in the lab. Finally, the last thing we worked on in the lab was creating a system where an object would be sitting in the game world and as soon as you got close enough to it the object’s position would be taken over by the robot.
On Friday was a calm day we didn’t do all too much, though later in the afternoon I was gifted an Arduino by my host family and we all had fun working on that and seeing what we could do. Then on Saturday we kept working on the Arduino before we did a soldering project were I got to learn how to use a soldering iron.
This internship has been so much fun and I am forever grateful to all those who helped make this possible for me, especially my host family the Hirschi’s and Sarah Holbrooke.
A project on the Ardiuno
A picture of the robot I was working with
A picture of the game world loaded on the robot being projected on the screen
There are no comments published yet.