Tag Archives: Science

Aug5

Hanging out in Davis (California, not Square) – Part 3

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Sunday, 14-June-2015

The whole “sleep cycle reset” held pretty well for me – Sunday saw me awake pretty early again. It was nice, and I got a chance to catch up on a few blog posts (Ed Note: Yeah yeah, I know. These things are getting posted… what, a month late? Hush. Editing takes a while. The sheer number of pictures that Ben took would blow you mind. BLOW. YOUR. MIND.)

But Mike did finally get mobile, which meant that chill time was over, and Serious Business Time was begun. Specifically, getting smoothies at the nearby grocery store.

The smoothies were brain food, since Mike had to get into the lab to finish up some work before he could run away for the next week of roadtrip adventure. I just relaxed. Maybe went through OKCupid a bit, checking out the landscape for Hood River. Maybe.

What I will admit to is that after everything was done, Mike gave me a tour of the lab – the main working area and the cleanroom. We couldn’t go into the cleanroom itself, but I did get to see some of the basic MEMS tech that he works on day to day. It was pretty awesome. I actually understood the basics of what he was describing, thanks to the internship that I had in a MEMS/Nanotech lab – but that doesn’t mean that I could have actually done any of the work… it’s sort of like how people can understand the basics of “planets orbit around the sun”, but can’t actually calculate out orbital trajectories.

Anyways, we hung out and did a tour and then went home. Stopped by the grocery again on the way back to grab some stuff for dinner, but that’s really it.

Then: more party! Allow me to, again, give a quick synopsis:

  • Pool party!
  • Cooking!
  • Grilling!
  • Huge pitchers of drinks!
  • Poor life decisions on my part, in regards to the number of drinks consumed!
  • Swimming!
  • Pulling my Cast Iron skillet out of the car, and grilling a set of obscenely delicious steaks!
  • Doing the above while making poor life decisions in regard to the number of drinks consumed!
  • Not hurting myself or anyone else during the two above bullet points, thankfully!
  • More partying!
  • Making good life decisions in regard to drinking lots of water, knocking back a few asprin, and going to sleep early!
  • Writing this list before falling asleep!
Nov30

Augmented reality with Giles

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Nov 22nd

 

One of Mike’s friends (haven’t know him long enough yet to call him a friend of mine… when does that transition happen, anyways?) that I met on Monday night was names Giles, and him and I had chatted for a bit about the research that he was doing at the Uni; one of the symptoms of being an Engineer is wanting to hear all about cool research, even if you can’t really understand what they heck it means. And from that conversation he invited me to meet up at the Human Interface Technology (HIT) lab at UC.

I met up with him around two or so in the afternoon, dropping in on him unannounced thanks to my lack of a working Kiwi cellphone… and my unwillingness to pay $2.00 a minute on my international phone. Heh. We chatted for a while about what the HITlab actually does, some of the cooler projects that they’ve worked on, and the specifics on what his project actually is. One of the coolest things that he showed me was a room that looked (seriously, this is real) like the Holodeck from Star Trek: The Next Generation. It had the grid and everything, and from what Giles told me it could be used as a 3D wrap-around theater, where the motion-sensors would detect the subjects movement and allow them to interact with the projections. Yeah, scary-cool stuff right there.

So after the show-and-tell portion of the visit was over Giles showed me into the “experimental survey room” where the test was to take place. He set everything up, explained all the rules, and I signed on all the dotted lines… and then we finally got everything started. The goal of his system was to assist a new and untrained user in assembling a basic motherboard from the upper-level components (board, processor, video card, RAM and S-Video). I wasn’t really an untrained user, but he needed all the data that he could get so I guess it works.

And seriously… this system was cool. He had programmed it all himself (using pre-built modules I believe, but not 100% sure) and how it worked was that the program told you to pick up a part, verified that you had the right part, and then told you to place it into the motherboard before checking that you placed it correctly. Simple… but for each step it would also show you. First which part was correct by overlaying a 3D arrow over the part, and second by overlaying a 3D demonstration of how the part was fitted into the system. The glasses would overlay these instructions as if they were actually there… and I definitely spent a little too much time playing around with changing the orientation and having the arrow change too, and placing the part incorrectly ans having the system show me the correct way to put it in again.

It was a bit scary, to be honest, seeing digitally-created images overlayed into my waking world. I don’t know what this means for humanity, either for good or ill, but I’ll really curious to see how it turns out once they technology is finished and expanded upon. Random people being able to create a computer from its base components… and people being driven insane by images of things that aren’t there, or even people being erased from other peoples vision by simply editing them out. Very cool, and very dangerous.