Summary; Accomplishments

This semester started with reading papers; there’s a large body of work about perception in AR/VR, and my research would benefit from a ready set of references. Some of the topics I’ve now supporting references for:

• decline of accommodation with age
• a variety of calibration techniques
• various depth cues in 2D and 3D
•  feedback effects (tentative, these need more investigation)
  techniques for measuring perceived distance
  theories of perception in virtual spaces (though these seem a bit thin)
• The current experiment has also been refined, and a new pilot in Unity should be complete in the coming weeks.

I’ve also done some work for my optimization class project that might be helpful to other projects in the lab; for xZ = y, generating matrices Z given known good x and y should be simple; it may also be possible to generate xs, given a promising set of ys.

Challenges

The lit review almost became a paper in it’s own right, but finding a recent survey made that a more complicated task. There’s still something there, some inconsistencies across papers, angles the survey doesn’t notice, but the path to a paper discussing them is less clear. Rather than a single paper, they may become separate investigations. There may also be room to adapt other lit aggregation techniques, like meta analysis, though it remains unclear how directly these techniques apply.

Organizing information found in the literature has been a challenges. There’s also a lot to keep straight: chains of support, who knows what from which papers; open questions, conflicts, and other things bearing further investigation … it’s already a complex web of interrelationships, and I suspect I’ve still only done a rather shallow exploration of the space of relevant papers. I need a better way to organize this.

Pilot development stalled a bit, as I decided what tools to use. An increase in the demands of my classwork about halfway through the semester derailed attempts at custom code; a shift to Unity means less labor intensive, but perhaps less adaptable, experimental tool development.

My Feelings on the Results

I’m a little frustrated things aren’t moving faster, and that I don’t have more paper write-up posts to better record what I’d found in my readings; I’m a bit frustrated that I don’t have a better command of the things I’ve read, a better system to lead me quickly back to the bits of interest, as interest arises.

But I’m happy to have had the exposure: I have a better sense of where the field is at, and where the current research fits. And somewhere in a giant (virtual) pile of papers, I have the references to support whatever I might write in the future; finding them might not be as efficient as I’d like, but it should still be effective.

Next Steps

In the next few weeks, the Unity pilot should happen.
Based on its results, the research develops in whatever way seems most promising.

Some paper and notes organization system will remain a side project, as might my custom experiment code.