Kriti Kalary, SUNY University at Albany / SUNY Upstate Medical School

Week 1:

I arrived in New York City on Sunday and we kicked off the REU program with an icebreaker social event. I met the rest of my REU cohort while bowling (I wasn’t very good!). All too soon, we jumped right into work. I met with my mentor, Dr. Wole, and started brainstorming ideas for my proposal due on Friday. I worked to narrow down my field of interest and land on a unique yet interesting idea for my project—I had to toss out a lot of ideas before ending up with something I was happy with. This week also started off our first few classes of Dr. Wole’s VR, AR and MR course which has been incredibly interesting so far. I spent the rest of the week furiously searching for relevant articles to include in my literature review, trying to round out my rationale and support my research proposal. For fun this week, I met a friend in Central Park and tried some great bagels!

Week 2:

Week two was equal parts work and fun! I had a couple of road bumps this week where I had to alter my proposal a bit to make it more unique. Luckily, my older research for my literature review from last week was still helpful and I was able to collect all the information that I needed for my paper without too much trouble. This week, I finished my introduction and related works section of my paper, created a figure for the theoretical model of my paper and started outlining my methodology.

I also downloaded reallusion and tried to get character creator to work on my macbook through parallels, but it took too long to load. The headshot plugin worked well, so I will likely end up working on the software aspect of my project next week on the computers at CUNY Hunter. For fun this week, Or, Asmita and I went to the Chelsea Market, some of my friends came up to visit me and we explored Central Park. I also listened to a performance by the NY Philharmonic and saw fireworks!

Week 3:

This week saw some pretty solid progress on the technical front! I created my two avatars— one which was familiar to participants modeled after my own face and the other was modeled off of a headshot of a random person I found online. The avatars look fairly realistic and I tried importing my avatars to Iclone and tested out the live face app to test out various methods of eye contact/gaze behavior and it worked out well.

The first avatar is the unfamiliar avatar, while the second is the familiar avatar (I still have a few edits to do for the former).

I also finalized my methodology this week, so I’ll be in a good spot next week to start working on my survey. For fun this week, I went to see a 24kGoldn concert and explored Brooklyn with a friend! I also went thrifting and visited some cute bookstores.

Week 4: 

I revised my methodology and technical implementation this week! I ended up completely refreshing my avatars since I wasn’t super happy with my original versions of the unfamiliar and familiar avatars from last week. I also worked on my slidedeck for the midterm presentation on Friday and created demos to share with my classmates to update them on my progress. Here are pictures of my new refreshed avatars (unfamiliar and familiar, respectively).

Next week, I hope to collect some more responses and make headway into data analysis. I aim to make some figures and start analysing my data with a focus on looking for significance. For fun this week, I met up with friends for dinner at Red Lobster and went to a speciality book store and explored Times Square. I also finished reading Battle Royale by Koushun Takami and finished watching Invincible S2!

This week was entirely devoted to data analysis. I had to collect all of my data and start organising it. I ended up with 38 responses which I started to look at in excel and SPSS to try and check for significance. I also started working on creating some preliminary tables and started working on my discussion section of my paper as well.Below is my table of data with preliminary mean and median values.

Time has been going by so quickly! For fun this week, I explored some more bookstores, checked out some new cafes, finished season 4 of The Boys (cannot believe I have to wait until 2025 for the next season!) and finished reading The Midnight Library for my book club with friends. I also went to see a concert with my brother in New Jersey for the korean singer/actress IU which was incredible!

Week 8: 

It’s the last week! It’s a sprint to the end. I’ve been working on the results and conclusion section of my paper after finishing analysing my data and looking at statistics. I have also had to start thinking about logistics for my conference submission and created a video with all of my various avatars for my conference submission. I’m pretty excited about my video submission though— I have a really fun background music track playing while the video flips through all of my avatars. This week, I also had to cut down my related works and introduction section to make sure that my entire paper fit on four pages. I also had some formatting issues that I had to sort through to make my paper look a little bit less wonky. I also edited my original theoretical model to make it a bit more interesting while also taking up less space.

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