Eliza Sun's Journal

HOURS SUMMARY

Total: X hours

HOURS journal

1/27/21 - 2 Hours

Set up my journal; joined slack channel.
Learned about past projects, intrigued by Loudon Cohen's work.
Downloaded Blender.

1/28/21 - 1 Hour

Read about MinVR. Familiarized myself with GitHub along the way.
Did Blender tutorial.

1/29/21 - 5.5 Hours, 7:00 - 12:24 pm

Brainstormed for 9 fixes: Read through the wiki with the mentality of a rookie developer to spot potential content/UX improvements; compared with other CS courses' websites; compared with Wikipedia, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Encyclopedia of Britannica.
Blender tutorial.

1/30/21 - 2 Hours, 11:37 pm

Actually tried to implement the changes to wiki, and made adjustments to proposals.
Looked into astronomical data processing. Read/followed:
- https://www.adass.org/adass/proceedings/adass94/farrisa.html
- https://allendowney.github.io/AstronomicalData/README.html finished Notebook 1.

1/31/21 - 5 Hours, 4 pm -11 pm intermittently

Looked into astronomical data processing. Read/followed:
- this project https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.02649.pdf
- https://allendowney.github.io/AstronomicalData/README.html Notebook 2.
Looked into the state of collaboration in VR.

2/1/21 - 2 Hours

Setup Oculus Quest 2, Tried Google Earth

2/4/21 - 2 Hours

Setup Virtual Desktop, Paperspace, and SteamVR.
Gathered and browsed more papers on vLUME
Read LaValle, Virtual Reality for methodological guidance on VR research.

2/6/21 - 4 Hours

Downloaded vLUME packages and Bio-SR & 3D-SMLM databases.
Blender tutorial.
Brainstormed applications of VR in robotics research.

2/7/21 - 4 Hours

more brainstorming + web-crawling; set up DinoVR.

Project #1 & Deliverables: Add multiuser capacity to vLUME(open source)
- https://henriqueslab.github.io/resources/vLUME/
- Major 🚩: base codes are compiled
- deliverables:
  - 1. proof of concept: establish connection to Photon server by running external C# script
  - 2. Set up lobby and room.
  - 3. Generate avatars.(Second half of semester)
- in-class activity: try out the added collaborative feature!
Project #2: Evaluate various protein docking softwares (compatible with Quest 2)
- candidates: iMD-VR, VRDD, ProteinVR, PuzzleDock, DockPro...
- deliverables: wiki feature comparison write-up, quantitative review
- in-class activity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dDXCTzCItw protein docking quiz with VR but with selected softwares and users colocated in virtual scene.
Projectus Ambitious:
- Theorize collaborative user interface preferences and standards; review as many collaborative VR softwares and related literature as possible:
- build data pipeline for this project;

Project 1 – Add multiuser capacity to vLUME

Milestones:

2/11 Receive confirmation/authorization from https://henriqueslab.github.io/resources/vLUME software creator
2/15 Finish all 9 items in official tutorial https://doc.photonengine.com/en-us/pun/current/demos-and-tutorials/pun-basics-tutorial/intro.
2/17 commit file
2/22 commit file
3/01 commit file
3/03 commit file
3/08 final commit; once figured it all out will contribute to wiki a (partial) workflow overview.
3/10 Have 2 users examine the same data in a shared room. In-class activity day.

Backup plan: Evaluate UX features of existing protein docking softwares

2/15 (concurrently) Download all such softwares (that are compatible w/ quest 2). Download dataset.
2/17 Finish examining half of them. Explore ways to add collaborative features.
3/01 Finish using all of them.
3/03 In-class activity: protein-docking quiz/contest
3/08 Have a finalized list of criteria and description of each software's performance.
3/10 Wiki contribution. Presentation?

2/9/21 - 5 Hours

Photon tutorial and related Github repo; evaluated feasibility of the 1st idea.
C# tutorial.

9 Fixes to Last Year's Wiki 👉

10 min fixes:
- On the course homepage, lay out the progression of the theme of each year's iteration of this course. I clicked through past year's wiki's and really liked it when I noticed the progression, so I hope to make it more explicitly available to other viewers. （🌟implemented, tentatively)
- Make the search function more ostensible at the top to encourage the use of the search function especially if the wiki is going to go live one day. (Nope, it seems we have to settle for the little built-in magnifier icon.)
- Enhance the site's traffic: Update Google search result snippet of the keyword"VR software wiki" by adding useful meta descriptions. (Nope, Google Authorship is dead.)
- updated 1/30/21 5:32 pm: After a couple more hours of educating myself on what Google sites can or cannot do, I've realized that much of my dissatisfaction originates from the inherent characteristics of Google sites and therefore has no fixes, so I'm now trying to come up with ideas to improve the wiki with what we have:
  - Prune dysfunctional links/excessively embedded pages. (pointed out by many of my peers)
  - Maximize homepage content display density. (something I don't wish to execute without a discussion beforehand, which also leads to one of my 10-hr proposals.)
1 hr fixes:
- - Update "project ideas" each year to reflect the objective of the current iteration, and consider appending links to past projects as an example to illustrate the point.
  - Pair illustrations with texts. Provide embedded versions of web link/video previews.
  - New entries in the future reflected on all relevant upper-level pages with the automated generation of new sections. (I reserve my opinion on the feasibility of this feature.)
10 hr fixes:
- Add hover-over page preview to in-site links.
- Create a peer review mechanism to contributions to the wiki and enable giving suggestions to contents. A potential incentive could be encouraging students to log in their review activity to their hours journal.
- Add a workflow diagram for the development of VR applications to each entry, with the relevant step in the diagram highlighted. This serves as a progress bar to help the reader better gauge the material's relationship to the entire project.

PROPOSALS

Project 1 Proposal <ADD LINK>

Presentation for Project 1 Proposal <ADD LINK>

End Presentation for Project 1 <ADD LINK>

Project 2 Proposal <ADD LINK>

Presentation for Project 2 Proposal <ADD LINK>

Poster <ADD LINK>

In-class Activity <ADD LINK>

Public Demo <ADD LINK>

ALL OTHER WIKI CONTRIBUTIONS

CONTRIBUTION 1 [Planned: expand on the existing list of file formats as the basis of a version of workflow chart] <ADD LINK>

CONTRIBUTION 2 [short description] <ADD LINK>

.....

CONTRIBUTION N [short description] <ADD LINK>