I started this week by completing the “Social/Behavioral or Humanist Research Investigators and Key Personnel” course from the Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI Program). This course is required for researchers involved in human research. Although I don’t think I will have time to work with human subjects before the end of the summer, it was a good learning opportunity to go through the training.

On Wednesday I attended an interesting research talk on using virtual reality to measure bias and mitigate stereotype threat. The speaker mentioned that her first research experience had been at the University of Minnesota with my mentor, and after looking her up I realized that she had been a DREU participant back in 2003!

For my project, I worked on getting the doors of the hospital to open and close when clicking on them with the controller in VR. This ended up being a little trickier than I thought it would be. I am using the Oculus Integration package, which provides support to develop Oculus apps in Unity. It has a lot of resources to supplement Unity’s built-in support but knowing how to use these resources is not always obvious. After watching tutorials and reading through many forum discussions, I found a solution that I was able to implement.