Day VII: Boot Camp Concludes

Before we could finish the 100 or so slides left of the Boot Camp presentation, Bob took us on a brief journey across the plaza to the IT Collaboratory. Don't ask me what a collaboratory is, I don't know either. Leaving that aside, we were there for a tour of the Remote Sensing Lab, in which they observe the Earth from satellites and planes. They've developed such things as a camera to detect signs of spreading wildefires, and one that can see hydrocarbon gases. This latter camera was demonstrated for us with a propane torch. It was cool, because the propane was visible as a stream of black mist on the camera even though it was invisible to our eyes.

After returning to the lab, we fell back into Boot Camp. The first thing they did was quiz us on our assignments from the day before. I actually was able to find the required data between last night and this morning, which places the mucin thickness at .8 micron, just over Jeff's prediction. Following that, we continued with Boot Camp, discussing further the details of the different types of eyetracking, including the bright- and dark-pupil techniques.

Lunch was provided unexpectedly. Nick had to buy the lab a sheet pizza because he lost a bet or something, and he decided to pay up today. So that was nice. Good, free pizza. Thanks, Nick!

After lunch, we held an open-forum discussion where we took turns bouncing questions off of Jeff and Andy. It was cool; I learned a lot about optical illusions and cool ways you can trick your eyes into seeing certain things. It was also more fun because we were all involved in the discussion.

Following that, Tristan gave us another lesson on coding. It was helpful, especially because last time he neglected to tell us that you had to designate the location of each fixation manually. Which we hadn't done over the two minutes of tape that the four of us had already coded. Thank god that it's not actually going to be used. Anyways, then Andy helped us set up the mobile eyetracker and put it on. Then, the three of us interns did a quick experiment so we'll have practice with all the steps of an eyetracking experiment: Setup, execution, calibration, digitization, and coding. Today, we did the task with each of us wearing the eyetracker, and tomorrow comes calibration and coding. At least we know what we're doing this time...