HV Weekly Journal 7
An overview of the last month of my internship
Each week, I’ll post something akin to a personal journal entry that gives an overview of what I did for that week. These posts will provide less-polished insights, keep me focused on producing material, and will allow for earlier feedback. Let’s jump in.
This journal is for weeks nine, ten, eleven, and twelve.
It’s been a journey throughout this internship, learning how to more rapidly produce interactive prototypes with JS and learning how to apply UX methodologies to virtual reality.
Weekly journals in the first two months went well, but fell by the wayside once I started working on my final prototype and writing up my case studies. These case studies are taking 3x as much time as I thought they would. Each one seems to go a bit quicker than the last.
I’m at conflict with myself. I’d like to publish them as quickly as possible, focusing on shipping over small details. On the other side, I want to make these quality pieces of work. In my weekly journals, I’m pretty loose with my specificity. There are surely times where my readers could get tripped up on an oddly phrased sentence or ill-defined term.
Frank Ocean recently dropped two albums after four years of basically nothing. The benefit of being your own boss allows you to stretch timelines. Frank did what he needed to in order to produce high quality work. I, on the other hand, am of a different caliber than Frank and do have a boss coming in soon: my final semester of graduate school. If I don’t finish these case studies in time, I may need to write a couple in September. That makes me nervous that I won’t really complete my internship as I defined it.
In the name of satisfactory completion, here’s to quick, quality writing: 🍺.
I’ve published two of my case studies and am presently finishing off my third on environment traversal.
For my Reality Editor, I want to design something that allows presentations between multiple people, favoring dynamism over static representations. To research this, I’ve been watching presentations in different media. These can be presentations of information via text in Wikipedia. Or, presentations between a group of people via conversation. I’ve watched traditional, classroom based representations, searching for ways they may be enhanced with virtual reality (and ways in which they wouldn’t be enhanced).
In my research, I’ve also looked at creation tools and what they have to offer. I’ve looked at simple template-based tools like Balsamiq and highly complex tools like Unity and Photoshop.
The ultimate goal is to bring these together in a meaningful way for a defined set of users — which I still haven’t settled on yet.
This is likely the last journal I’ll publish for the internship. What’s left is four more case studies (environment traversal, SpaceVR simulation, video controls for spherical video, and my final one on a reality editor) as well as my final essay on humane design.
Thanks for riding along,
–Andrew
