It’s always amazing how quickly time flies in hindsight now that our two months in Germany have come to a close. I had so much fun and saw many new places along with learning a lot about HCI!
My project for the summer was Visualizing Out of View Objects With the Hololens or, as we liked to call it, EyeSee: Beyond Reality. The idea is that on a ship, the bridge is so long that a pilot can only see one side of the ship at a time. However, the pilot still has to keep track of what is on the other side of ship that they can’t see. The solution, therefore, is EyeSee. It creates a visualization of the world around the user and maps objects to that visualization so that the pilot can keep track of these objects in their peripheral.
Of course, I didn’t know how to use Unity at all when I started, so my supervisor, Uwe, had me take a crash course when I arrived. I started with Unity’s Roll-A-Ball tutorial and once I had finished that, Uwe challenged me to port it to different consoles and modes. So the computer game that was controlled with arrow keys became an Android game controlled by tilting the screen, became a Cardboard game controlled by tilting your head, which became a game that was projected on an image and controlled by tilting the image around. That was the version of the game that was ported to the Hololens.
Once I had been brought up to speed, I worked on bringing Uwe’s Cardboard version of EyeSee to the Hololens. Along the way, in addition to Unity and Hololens development, I learned how to deal with errors that were often buried deep in code – how to solve them by myself, and when to ask for help.
In my final week, I worked on developing a game based on our study design using EyeSee. When complete, it will be put on the Hololens store so when people play it, we can gather data from many different people on the usefulness of EyeSee.
I learned so much and got to work with so many cool people! I am incredibly grateful that I got the opportunity to study in Germany. I’m going to miss everybody so much!
Thank you so much!
Dana