Day XXIII: Free Day? Wii Day? No, Not Quite.

Well, today was intended as basically a day of relaxation, because we turned in our final presentation to Joe within five minutes and had nothing else to do. Only Nick, Leanne and Jeff are left in the lab, so there weren't any experiments to help with, our project was completed, and we felt that it was time to have a bit of fun.

Not quite how it happened, as it turns out.

Jeff, understandably, wanted us to spend our day doing something a bit more productive than sitting around playing GH3, as much fun as that would have been. He decided that we should whip up a one-day mini-experiment based around Guitar Hero instead. So, after a few minutes, we decided to eyetrack me, (a semi-experienced player) and Leanne (who had never even watched someone play before. We chose to use the song 'Rock and Roll All Nite' by Kiss, being that it was a fun song that everybody knew and was not extremely difficult. I tried it once, and missed two notes for a final score of 99% (*****). Leanne did the song three times (to see if there was an improvement in score and a change in eye movements), and got scores of 33%, 67%, and 85% respectively. The trials were done in practice mode to get rid of the Star Power variable and also to prevent failing.

We coded the videos quickly and saw that Leanne was keeping her eyes right at the bottom of the screen and was only looking at the next notes immediately before she was supposed to play them. I, however, looked almost to the top of the screen and used peripheral vision to time the strums while keeping my attention on a broader swath of the song.

So, those were our findings on our one-day GH3 experiment, which are now also on YouTube. Again. Jeff seems to like putting our work on the internet, I'm not entirely sure why.

Ugh, and we've got the U of R presentation practice tomorrow...this is gonna be fun...