I’ll be honest, I shut my brain down for 3 weeks during the break – no work, no deadlines, no worries. Instead of cramming it with presentations and hour long class sessions, I ventured to the trails and hiked the mountains of my hometown, Los Angeles. Some would chalk it up to a lazy break, but sometimes you have to know yourself… and just give your mental health a rest. As I expected, the schoolwork picked right back up as soon as I touched foot into Houston, but by then I was excited to jump back into my projects in full force.
There was a bomb cyclone in the east coast, so my sister and I made sure to go outside in the west coast.
That is…until the ice storms hit us on the second week of classes and as such, Rice University shut down for a couple of days. Seems like déjà vu, right? Ironically, just as Hurricane Harvey descended on the second week of the first semester, we got hit with sub-freezing temperatures and ice storms in the second semester, halting all movement across Houston completely. Of course, it did not last as long as its predecessor, but nonetheless it was seemingly effective in sapping the new year’s momentum towards my projects.
But here we are, back in the 100% humidity that we are known best for, and as I sit here writing this blog, I am excited to launch into a new design project with Karlee and Tasha: designing a virtual reality (VR) capability for virtual ethnography. Big words and confusing – here’s a picture of what to expect.
“Learning” how VR works…for educational purposes of course.
Pretty neat. We’re getting to a tipping point in technology with the growth of virtual reality – it gives us abilities to witness and observe scenarios without actually physically being there, engaging with systems across the country from the comfort of your own room. One of the greatest challenges I noted during my clinical observations at the Texas Medical Center last semester was working in real time. Doctors are performing on a patient, people are moving constantly, and before I knew it, a 3-hour surgery comes to an end and I am still trying to comprehend what happened during the surgery preparation. Even in teaching hospitals, not every question can be answered by a physician, and you might miss stuff simply because of all the interactions occurring at any given moment. This is why we are developing this capability of virtual ethnography – if we can allow multiple people to witness a surgical procedure at their own speed, and with the ability to playback areas of interest, we can improve our understanding of the scenario and gather better scoped needs from it.
Of course, this all begins with actually implementing a functional VR system. Tasha, Karlee and I are working to make this a reality within GMI, and it starts with the purchase of the best systems. Already from the literature search for the best systems, I can see the unbounded potential of this technology within medtech, and it is a matter of time before it becomes a standard across device development.
Aside from that, Karlee and I are also continuing with Truvent, where we are now jumping into the crucial phase of our project – prototyping and testing. It’s been a long time coming, but this semester we are utilizing a sprint methodology for project planning, an unconventional method where we focus on one main objective and aim to complete it in one week. This is especially beneficial for us, as we can leverage the week to drive design, testing, or validation of a prototype and make the proper adjustments afterwards. There are going to be major advancements week-to-week, and I am excited to see the progress from this moment until my next blog that I share with you all!
It’s not real, but real enough.