This week involved going back to my earlier notes/readings to consolidate them with the progress that I have made with CYO Airport Story and A LOT of writing, in order to meet the M4 DREAM requirements. While writing my technical paper on this project was both difficult and time-consuming, now that it is finished, I am feeling a greater sense of accomplishment at the end of this DREAM experience. It is interesting how it is difficult to see your progress, especially when you aren’t able to actively work on production as much as you would like, until you sit down and write everything up. I am now able to clearly see that I actually did get quite a bit done. I am feeling very good about the design of my project and I feel like I have a good handle on the tasks that still need to be accomplished in order to fully finish CYO Airport Story. (I will actually be continuing this project for the Spring 2024 semester through a master’s project class at Tufts.) I am also so glad that I took the Autism Across the Lifespan course, which involved a major theme within my project during the same semester. Having a dedicated lecture and readings based on the intended audience for this project was invaluable. I know that the paper and the design would not have been as strong without having taken this course. I am also incredibly grateful for my dedicated advisor Fahad, who has agreed to continue as my advisor on this project this new semester through the master’s project class offered at Tufts. He offered a good balance of insight, motivation, support, and discipline for me to explore this project productively.

This week was quite productive. I was able to dive into several areas of my project that had been put on hold, due mostly to the IRB Application process. I finally faced 3D model AI generators and am happy to say that I am feeling much more at peace about these emerging tools than I was beforehand. I found that, to date, more direct human input is still very much needed when producing 3D models. I also discovered that, while it is true that there have been more advancements in this area since this past summer, that we aren’t too far beyond just wrapping 2D textures around 3D objects. Current available tools seem to have a database of basic 3D models, which don’t really change very much based on given prompts, and it really comes down to the 2D textures that are wrapped around these models. Clearly, AI generated 3D modeling itself is still at its infancy.

I had a 3rd round of IRB Clarification Requests this week, which I was able to quickly address and my IRB was subsequently accepted! The IRB Application was accepted during the last week of classes, however, so I will be waiting until the start of the Spring semester to begin this study. This means that I will not be able to actually engage in this study for the DREAM portion of this project. Due to a final paper assignment in my Autism across the Lifespan course, which I was able to cater to apply to this project directly, I also decided to write a first draft of the technical paper for the M4 DREAM requirements as this final paper assignment. This is what I spent this past week doing and I am quite pleased with the draft of this paper. What I have left to do is to change it from a project proposal style to a technical paper format, which will include more project details. Having Professor Eileen Crehan review and grade this paper also has the added benefit of having a professional collaborator on autism research look over my work so far.

I received a 2nd round of IRB Clarification Requests, which mainly focus on fully clarifying exactly how I will recruit and what the level of involvment of my Autism Across the Lifespan professor, Eileen Crehan (who has also served as kind of an unofficial secondary advisor on this project), is. In order to address both of these issues, since the clarifications had to do more specifically with Eileen using her Crehan Lab records as a form of recruitment, she has agreed to sign on as an official collaborator of this project. Eileen has also brought up potentially collaborating further outside of this project, so I am very glad that I took her course in conjunction with the DREAM project.

With the IRB clarifications addressed and the application resubmitted, I turned my attention towards actively tackling the character design of my NPCs. I am actually toying with the idea of creating characters that resemble dollhouse dolls. In my research I have learned that attempting to achieve reality is not necessary, and is often less effective, even within immersive simulations. I still want to create a believable/consistent scenario, however, and have noted that actual dollhouses look real and the dolls used within them do not. I felt further confident in this appraoch when looking at the popular game (among children and adults) called Animal Crossings, which has very simplified doll-like character design. Finally, a simplified character design approach has a much more practical time-saving benefit as far as production. I went ahead and laid out various facial expressions, hairstyles, colors, etc. that could be combined with 2 base character designs. Meaning, I have 2 doll bodies that can wear various facial expressions, hairstyles, colors, etc. to create a divers population of NPCs.

I received a first round of clarification requests for my IRB application, which was quite extensive. I suppose this was to be expected, since this was my first IRB application attempt. The requests did bring to light many areas in my proposed initial study that I had not fully thought out, so going through this process is clearly useful. This did mean that I had to once again put off active production of the project and focus on fine tuning my study design, which I am now realizing I have not yet discussed in this blog.

I was able to return to production this week and, unfortunately, immediately ran into a bug that slowed things down. I had left off with a completed ticketing/bag drop area scene, which included window views and barriers set up so that the user cannot move outside of the scene. When I attempted to run the simulation again, I was getting a blank view. I discovered that this came from accidentally importing a second camera into Unity from Blender when creating the dome that encapsulates the scene. Once this was debugged, I decided to lay out my remaining tasks and to schedule my remaining weeks for the DREAM phase of this project (I will be continuing this project next semester through a Masters Project class at Tufts).

With my IRB Application now submitted, which took much time to wrap up this week, and having had put together my Interim Report, CYO Airport Story is now feeling quite focused, design-wise. I still have not been able to put a lot of time into the direct production of the project, especially with there having been larger assignments in my Autism Across the Lifespan course that have served as a direct connection to this overall research. I am beginning to understand the importance that design, reading, writing, and conversation have on research, as a whole, along with production. Though it is still difficult to not feel like nothing is getting done if it isn’t direct production.

I reached the halfway mark for this project this week. I went ahead and submitted my M3 Interim Report, accordingly. While I have not yet been able to return to the direct production of the project, I looked into research regarding character designs, in regards to games/simulations, and user response. I also had a conversation with my Autism Across the Lifespan professor, who has continued to provide support as an unofficial secondary advisor, and with a student in the course regarding this same topic. They were both able to provided some useful feedback. Basically, my initial inclination to steer away from realism seems to be the proper appoach to character design.

Completing the IRB training and starting my IRB application used up all of my hours this week. Again, as mentioned in an earlier post, the timing is working out quite well because this process is also forcing me to go back to earlier readings and notes to review the foundational aspects of this project. At the same time, it is a bit frustrating to have to focus on the reading/writing aspects of this projects after having reached the milestone of essentially completing the ticketing scene.

I am happy to report that I have wrapped up this phase of scene development for the ticketing area, including the immersive dome. Aside from likely needing to add some overlooked details, such as benches, the ticketing area scene is looking pretty complete. This is good timing, since my advisor suggested that I fill out an IRB application at Tufts in order to be able to include the community engagement interviews (mentioned in last weeks post) in my research paper. This is why I have also begun working through the required training that is needed when submitting an IRB application.

This week I have continued to work on scene development and I got far enough to where I was also able to start working with lighting. I am finding that the lighting options are quite limiting, especially when compared to other 3D/motion graphics software. I have also realized that in order for the scene to feel more convincingly immersive, that I need to surround my scene within a dome. I will likely be using Blender to create this dome.

I decided to sign up for a special topics course this semester, which should actively support this project, entitled Autism Across the Lifespan. The professor who teaches this course works in the department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts and is also an active collaborator of my DREAM advisor. Through this collaboration, she has experience working with CS students and had already offered useful insight over the summer, before I decided to sign up for her course.

I have now put together the first of four places/scenes for CYO Airport Story. I decided to begin with the ticketing area because the challenges that will be needed to be worked through here will carry well to the remaining 3 scenes. The ticketing area is likely the most complex because of the amount of characters that will be needed to fill the scene and because of the differences in either being able to get tickets from a kiosk or from an individual.

Having arrived at a point where the project became more focused, I felt it necessary to put some time into synthesizing the research that I had done up to this point. These past couple of weeks, I spent some time organizing the articles that I had read and made note of the type of research that I still need to explore. I used the remainder of my time working through Unity tutorials that felt relevant to this project. I do feel that I am finished simply working through tutorials at this point, however, and will be moving towards more actively producing CYO Airport Story in the next couple of weeks.

I am now feeling a sense of urgency in putting the majority of my energy towards focusing on working within Unity. For this reason, I have spent the majority of my time these past two weeks going over tutorials, and more specifically one tutorial that covers creating a “choose your own adventure” game. This is good timing, in that the project is now more focused and we now have a more basic design worked out.

I now feel as though I have a better understanding of my intended audience, especially after reading one of the books given to me by Professor Eileen Crehan. This has caused me to reflect on some of the more dated articles and projects that I had come across and revealed some issues concerning the lack of consideration and understanding, on a more basic level, of the autistic community. Fortunately, it does seem as though the approach of more recent studies have adjusted and improved and it is clear that I need to put more effort into focusing on only the more recent studies from here on out.

Since my last post, I happened upon an abundance of relevant articles. While quite exciting at first, I became overwhelmed with all of the considerations and all of the possibilities surrounding this project. I was especially glad to find a couple of recent articles that discussed real games and VR for autistic contexts, however, and in a manner that summed up relevant studies by highlighting what works and what needs improvement in this field in general. Reading these articles helped me to understand that it was necessary to begin working on creating a good and purposeful design, while also realizing that I first needed to better understand my intended audience.

Recently, I have focused my attention more so on what the motivation would be for an individual to want to interact with such a tool. Fahad mentioned that there would be a natural motivation, in that someone can understand that they need to go to an airport and that this would be a tool that could help to make this easier for them. I also decided that it was important to make this experience a game, in order to create a more enjoyable motivation.

I began this research project with the broad concept of creating a VR experience that could help autistic individuals prepare for going to the airport. I began my research by reading papers by a recent Tufts PhD Computer Science graduate, Tooba Ahsen, whose work focused on the use of AR for autistic contexts. My advisor served as Tooba’s advisor during their time at Tufts, and it was his suggestion that I begin my research in this manner. I also looked through Tooba’s sources and began collecting relevant articles for my own project, which I began to organize within a google doc with links.