This week started with an REU seminar on reading research papers. I learned many helpful tips on how to find papers in online databases and keep track of them, as well as how papers are structured and strategies to use when reading the papers, such as skimming the article and looking at the main points and visuals first rather than reading the whole thing linearly. During the week, we read a paper on technology-mediated mental health support in India and discussed it as a group at our first REU workshop at the end of the week.

Another highlight of this week was my first meeting with the rest of Dr. Interrante’s lab, which consists of a few other undergraduates, as well as a master’s student and a few PhD students. Everyone introduced themselves and talked a little about their interests and career plans. We are going to have weekly meetings where we each choose a paper about VR and present it to the group.

For my project, I have spent time this week looking into different ways of non-photorealistic rendering. I have mostly been looking at shaders, which are programs that run on the GPU and determine how to render pixels. I am planning on spending more time learning about the Unity rendering pipeline next week to better understand the role of shaders in this process.