I figured that since I'm too busy to do much of anything around here, some of you would be interested in hearing what I am doing with my life
Classes are as time consuming as ever, and are generally the least useful thing I do, at least in my opinion. This semester, however, I am also doing research and working on a game in a group project. Research has been pretty fun so far, as I've been setting up a control system for a prosthetic hand with a large number of degrees of freedom, similar to this one:
The cool part is that over the summer, I get to integrate EEG input into the control system, which means that we will be able to control the robotic hand by thought. While all this has been done before, the main thing that my lab is looking at is how to apply tactile feedback in order to increase performance of the user of the hand. For example, if somebody loses their hand, they can have a prosthetic one attached and controlled, but it's difficult to know when they are touching or grasping something and how hard the contact is. This is the problem we are looking to address.
I've posted a few screenshots of the game I'm working on over
here. While I have learned how to implement a few new game mechanics (networking, serialized gamestates, etc.), the most important thing I've learned has been how to manage a team of people. My team includes myself, an artist, and 3 computer science students, so there is a lot of potential to make a great game. The biggest challenge at first was getting people to do exactly what was needed. I quickly found out that my instructions were too vague or incomplete, which led to incomplete features and bugs being worked into the game. I eventually figured out how to guide everyone on what they needed to do while still giving them room for exploration and creativity. We are working really well together now, and should have a great game done at the end of the semester.
This game also lead to me being recruited for another summer job which has me pretty excited. I will be working as a solo developer in a game that models the Intelligence Analyst job at a place such as the FBI or CIA. The basic concept is that there are feeds of information that each team gets about different actions and events around the game world, and it is the team's job to determine what information constitutes a real threat (such as a bombing, a bioweapon, etc.), and which are red herrings (fake information). It is complicated by the fact that each team can broadcast false information, and each team has agents that can move around and affect the game world. It's a really cool premise, and I get to make some really good personal connections with it. It will be used in by some feeder programs (programs designed to train people to get into intelligence) as a training tool, with the potential to be used or modified by the FBI in the near future. The best part is that between this job and my research, I'll be pulling in roughly $12,000 over my 3 months of summer, which isn't bad for an undergraduate student who has student loans to pay off.
So that's pretty much where I am right now. I'll be looking at grad schools for a Robotics program pretty soon, but there's not much more I can say about that. Things are looking pretty good right now, and they will keep getting better from here on out, so I'm pretty happy with life