Affinity Research Group

Today we spent the morning with the ARG learning how to work in teams. Some of the information was more helpful than other information. However, the discussions we had with our research groups about our goals, tasks, and deliverables were extremely helpful. Our group has a much better understanding of what we are doing now.

Research Question: What is the effect of the domain on the decision making experience? There are 4 domains we are looking at: reality, virtual reality, 2D, and augmented reality. We will need approximately 60 people to go through each domain experience for when we conduct the experiment, and we made a draft of a timeline to help us determine when we will be doing different parts of the research. For instance, we have to make the instrument to measure the decision making experience (i.e. survey of some sort) soon so that we can sent it to the IRB (Institutional Review Board), which has to approve all experiments in which people are involved.

We also saw some examples of AR on youtube, and it was really really cool. You wear a headset and hold a square with a symbol on it, and the camera detects the square piece (its like a marker) and creates an image on it in augmented reality. So one student at ISU made an application in which you could command the images to do different things, and he built a wheel. It's hard to explain without seeing it.

Here is a link of an augmented reality demonstration: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2gqshFr4AI

This is a link to an application of augmented reality in the car industry: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9KPJlA5yds&feature=related

Also, the faculty mentor of the program is really nice. His name is Nir Keren, and he is from Israel. He is possibly the only other Jew on campus, and told me that Manoim in hebrew means engine. He lived and worked in Israel, in Beersheva. I told him about my family there, so we had a nice little discussion about that.