Almost There!

Things are slowly but surely coming to a close. Our project is in its final stages: two harnesses have been constructed, the code works (most of the time...) and we've begun writing our final paper. There are only two weeks left in the program once this week is done, and then it's time to go home! The research here has been an excellent experience, but I am so, so ready to go home. Sorry, dear College Station residents, but this place is beyond boring, and to be honest, I am most homesick. I want to get out of here.

Project wise, things are going well. Our app is polished, for the most part. We're just getting into testing the driving directions portion of our project, though I doubt that we'll actually be using that much. I don't think the world is quite ready (if it ever will be) for haptic driving directions. One of my coworkers and I have devised a new user testing scenario--we're testing to see if haptic navigation allows for a greater awareness of one's environment during the navigation process. I suspect that it will, but we'll see. I won't go into the details of how we're going to test this (research secrets!) but hopefully our tests are conclusive and informative.

Right now, I'm delighting in watching my coworkers bicker. We've been getting a wee bit testy, as we're close to completion but some things that should've been completed weeks ago are still left unfinished, and new problems are arising because of people's failure to update the code properly. Some people also might just need a few more hours of sleep. I'm deeply entertained, though they might not be.

But now it's time to perform our haptic driving experiment... a vibrational driving tour to YogurtLand for some delicious froyo to cool our hot tempers. Heh, I love research.

I am the Solder Master

Well, no, not really. Honestly, I couldn't even spell "solder" as of this morning. But I did just perform my first glorious act of soldering mastery, meaning I managed to solder a new Bluetooth piece together for our harness.

The Bluetooth has been a major pain for the past few days. We've fallen pretty far behind recently--we're supposed to be doing a truckload of user tests, so we can base our code improvements on user responses, but so many things keep malfunctioning in the harness, that we've had to delay things more and more. The Bluetooth is the current issue. It's gotten loose from being taken on and off constantly, and so when people are walking our testing courses, the Bluetooth will suddenly disconnect and we'll have to start the test over again. Bah.

But, at least we've finally started testing more. One of my fellow researchers and I have been grabbing random people from the dorm to try out the harness. I don't think anyone's made it through a test course yet, but at least we're seeing people's reactions to our harness/the technology, and can see what is and is not intuitive. It's kind of entertaining on occasion--one of the test subjects jumped about a foot when the vibrators started going off. I suppose people just weren't listening while we were explaining the purpose of the harness to them. Oh well, that's how testing is I suppose.

Have to get back to work, have to somehow get back on our summer track. How time flies when you're having fun screwed.