So many presentations today! We went over to building 78 and got to see some posters. They had a continental breakfast which was pretty good. Jon had his poster there but he had it up on a huge TV-which he was the only one. Jane and I wanted to hear him present to us but we were interrupted and we still haven't heard him yet. We also saw Mattie-Jeff's daughter- present a project she did. her presentation was so good- I give her props for doing it.

We were about to head back to our building for lunch when we spotted John, Nick, Tristan, and a free buffet line!! So of course we stayed there for lunch and it was pretty good. We stayed for some other presentations. Then I participated in Nick's experiment which took about two hours!! poor Jane was left alone coding. So the experiment was pretty fun because i got to play with an ipod touch. 

Lots of Progress made

I spent all morning working on our presentation powerpoint while Matt worked on the poster and Jane coded some of the video's. It's coming along really well.

Today we started testing our first participants!! It looked like it went well, the people enjoyed looking for Waldo. Maybe I'll bring in some food for them tomorrow. We now have to calibrate to see how well it worked. We will probably do that tomorrow if we have time. But so far we have made lots of progress today!!!!

I tried to go on Nick's experiment but when we went out it was way to sunny for his experiment. We have to try tomorrow. Also tomorrow there are a bunch of presentations so we will be going to those. Jon will be presenting so hopefully we will see his work that he has been struggling to finish today.

Final Presentations!!

So this morning Jane, Matt, and I finally started on our final presentation and poster!!! We don't have any data to add to our experiment section of it seeing as we haven't tested anyone yet. But we have started the background info about the lab and on eye-tracking etc. Matt's been working on the poster while Jane and I worked on the 'back-bone' to our presentation. While doing the presentation I came across a question that I had. So I went to ask Leanne and John but they weren't very helpful. I waited for Jeff and when I asked him we got into an hour long discussion which ended in Jeff burning the image of his hand into our retina's.

I don't remember why he thought of showing us this experiment but he turned of all the lights in the room and had us become dark adapted for 5 mins. Then after that he set off a very bright flash behind his hand which caused the image of his hand to be burn into our retina's. So as i looked around i saw Jeff's hand which had a cool purple color to it which then turned a neon green color. Don't worry the burn on my retina's went away after a couple minutes. 

Nick quickly ran us through a program(which i apparently can't blog about because its not out on the market yet) which was pretty neat. Plus later in the afternoon we shot some videos for jeff with the new mobile eye-tracker which only runs on 'that new program', so in order to calibrate the tapes we will get practice with the program- Dang and I was just getting familiar with Iscan.

Today for lunch we went to a picnic given by the people that put on the wednesday talks. The food was good but I was only allow one hamburger and they had NO CHEESE!!! Ahh, oh well but Tristan had a veggie burger because he is a vegetarian- which i could never do because without meat i like i would starve. Hmm so we bonded some with the other grad students and i'm pretty sure they are all going to die of poison except me (including Jane and Matt) because they all ate these tiny apple looking things on a tree.(I think they might have been crab apples) They will probably all show up to work tomorrow sick and I will just laugh at them.

Oh and we saw Harry Potter again at the picnic!!! :) It's just so uncanny, even more so up-close. 

After lunch we ran an errand for Jon and we worked on our presentations some more. I feel so much better that we have actually started them so now I don't feel as stressed out as before.

Trial and Error I Suppose

I coded ALL morning!! And this time I'm not exaggerating because i started at 9 and coded till lunch at 12.  I made such good progress tho and i am almost done!! I will definitely finish tomorrow. For lunch today we all brought our lunch which was a first. So we decided we should have a picnic and therefore we walked to a nice courtyard and ate lunch on a bench. On the walk back we found some cool benched that looked 'snake-like' and we tried them out.

Umm, I coded some more when we got back but i admit i got distracted a couple times. Jeff finally got a chance to see the eye movements video and now we basically have to re-shoot the whole thing. I guess thats what happens when you underestimate the Cassio's focusing ability. We didn't realize how good the camera can focus which is apparently a lot more than we shot the video's at. I guess it's all trial and error. When we went to re-shoot the videos we had massive failures. A quick side-track-- For nick's experiment he needs bad weather so that it is not too bright when he eye-tracks outside, so today he summoned some dark cloud to roll by when he went out to do his experiment. However for us to take high-speed video's we need a lot of light in order for it to be less blurry. Therefore, when we went to shoot, Nick's cloudy weather showed up and it was too dark to see our video's.

Then the camera's battery started to die and it takes at least 4 hours to be fully charged. Plus Jeff is taking the camera tonight so we won't have it tomorrow so that means we will have to re-do these videos another time.

Trip to ITT

Today was our trip to ITT. All in all it was pretty interesting. We got dressed up like marshmallows again today. Except this time we even had little booties to cover our feet. We got taken through the manufacturing plant where they showed us the different steps of making lenses. It was pretty cool but it was FREEZING there. We went to Dibella's for lunch and then brought it back to RIT. All the interns ate in a conference room and we all bonded some. Basma drew a lovely picture of a Kiwi bird from New Zealand on the white board and then preceded to draw the correct version of it once we told her it looked like a normal bird. Surprisingly the second Kiwi bird she drew looked a lot like the first one. Since her lovely diagram wasn't too helpful in picturing the bird Jane, Matt, and I looked it up online(pic. above) and it looks more like a duck than anything or Matt says it looks like a bear but I don't know. We coded for about an hour today.

Jane finally finished a video-the first one out of all of us. It was really exciting but now one of us has to check it before we can say it is completely done. i still have half of my video to go :( but i'm almost to the 1sec pictures-which goes by really fast during coding!!

Jane helped Nick out by pretending she was in a car. So that is pretty much all we did today.