Virtual Auction is an auctioneer training application developed through for my company, Vengate LLC. The impetus for this software came from the fact that beginner auctioneers today are severely limited in their options to effectively train to the actual speed and pacing of real auction environments. Virtual Auction bridges the gap between auctioneering school and conducting live auctions by providing controlled environments where auctioneers can practice their auctioneering skills of vocalization, pacing, ringman communication and bid recognition in various immersive auction scenarios.
My master’s thesis project was a psychophysiological computing system that adapted video game difficulty based on player's physiological signals without prior knowledge of the relationship between player's mental states and physiological reactions. The specific physiological signals collected were skin conductance, heart rate, and heart rate variability. The intend of this research was to explore a possible solution to the inherent problems of individual physiological specificity and retrospective analysis used in current physiological computing systems.
My primary activity while at Iowa State University was developing the virtual reality application, VirtuTrace, under the direction of Dr. Nir Keren. This software was developed to empirically evaluate the decision strategies of first responding and scene commanding fire fighters during high risk scenarios. The motivation for our experimentation derived from classical theories of decision making being unsuccessful in explaining real-world decisions, especially those made under time pressure or involving difficult tradeoffs.
There is an estimated 27 million with dementia worldwide with 7.7 million expected in 2030 in the United States alone. Dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease is an increasing predominate health risk as our population ages. The number of individuals in the United States who are aging to the later stages of live is growing at a rapid pace, with an estimated 72.1 million adults over 65 by 2030, or about 19% of the population.
The final design for the HCDE 518 class on user centered design was Knovelscape, a framework that provides relevant information to engineers where they need it, while at the same time, connecting the engineers to their teams and communities by allowing them to easily contribute their own content back to the community. Knovelscape is a research material recommendation tool embedded into engineer’s work environment through application plugins. As engineers work, Knovelscape recommends research articles, user contributed documentation, code libraries, code examples, team discussions and public forums targeted specifically to the work the engineer is currently doing.
1987 is a demonstration of heightened immersion from rapid movement through close proximity in a CAVE virtual reality environment. In this demonstration, users navigated a virtual 3D space using only head positional information. The demonstration was built specifically for the Iowa State University C6 virtual reality lab and integrated VRjuggler, OpenSceneGraph and Bullet software libraries. The premise of the software is simple, the user is et within a virtual hamster ball that they maneuver through a series of tunnels.