Project EMAR

December 8, 2016

Last Blog Post of the Quarter

emar

15424418_1243273105719654_2056353833_n

This is the last blog post of the quarter! We have had a great time this quarter and have made a ton of progress. Here is the final update until January:

WHAT WE FIXED

In preparation for testing, the Physical Computing (PC) was hard at work making last minute fixes. Here are the major accomplishments:

  • Updated the code for EMAR’s eyes
  • Fixed major touchscreen glitches (only some minor ones remain)
  • Fixed audio and got matching voice with script working!!!!
  • Soldered EMAR’s eye wire
  • Gave EMAR a stable base

The biggest accomplishment was getting the audio to work. Believe it or not, this is the first time EMAR’s audio has worked completely successfully! The PC team is very proud to have finally made this happen.

TESTING RESCHEDULED

Sadly, the testing session scheduled for Tuesday 12/6 was canceled due to logistical challenges.. Getting into the field requires a great deal of planning and coordination as we are learning.  We look forward to testing EMAR extensively next quarter, and in the meantime are satisfied that EMAR is now fully functional.

REFLECTION ON OUR PROCESS

To finish off our last meeting of the year, each member of the research group reflected about what we accomplished over the quarter. Each group talked about major takeaways and accomplishments. The Feeling Heard (FH) team talked about their successes at creating a great script for voice and eyes. The Social Interaction (SI) team discussed their success with our in-house user testing session that lead to some great data for improvement. The PC team summed up the quarter with their statement that, “Everything was broken, then we fixed it.” We also talked about some process data by sharing “Wows and Wonders” with the group.  Takeaway data for next quarter includes students wishing to be more involved in other teams through better communication and maybe cross-team collaboration.  Overall the team of faculty and students is very happy with the results.

NEXT QUARTER’S RESEARCH

Many (n=9) of the current students plan to continue with the research next quarter.  Our technical goals for next quarter are 1) adding a camera to EMAR to record close-ups of user’s facial expressions, 2) moving EMAR’s platform from Arduino to Raspberry Pi, and 3) creating an easily customizable system whereby the FH team can recode EMAR’s script on the fly when necessary. Our research goals for next quarter are: 1) to visit 3 high-schools to gather teen data, 2) continue to build our literature review of HRI, and 3) analyze school and EMAR data.

Come back in January, we have a lot of exciting research still to come!