Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010

I began with finding online instrument libraries to make "artificial" sounds for the map interface to add on to our sound libraries, but most of the instrument libraries you have to buy, so instead I went to work on my poster. Right before lunch, Nafisa and Michal took Edith and Me into a reading room to test out the actual soundscape prototype. At first it didn't work so well. It was hard to trace a river, and when you got off the river, it was hard to find it again. Nafisa zoomed in onto a section of the map, and it was much easier to follow rivers, because the buffers around them were bigger. After lunch, I worked on my poster.

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

Today started with programming. I went through the programming challenges at http://www.pythonchallenge.com and tried them out. I worked on them most of the day, taking breaks every once in while to work on getting artficial sounds for the soundscape mGIS program. Late in the day, Michal had a meeting with us concerning random questions we might have, and presentation concerns. After that, he explained what simple expressions were in programming. I still don't quite know what they are, but he will write something up that will help me understand.

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

I started today with reading the research paper. I finished it, and moved onto the programming challenge. I finished that, and headed to lunch. After lunch, I found a python programming challenge website, and did those until Edith and I met Michal for a meeting about our presentation at the ASE Symposium on August 20th at 3:30. We talked about what we were going to talk about in the presentation until 4:45, when I posted this.

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

Today I continued reading the research paper, which is taking longer than i expected, and got a great idea from it. My idea was to have a user controlled sweep, which I posted earlier. I thought about that and worked on it until lunch. after lunch, i tryed a new programming challenge. It was to take in a list of numbers (9 6 5 8, for example), and have a pen go forward the first amount, turn right 90 degrees, then go forward the second amount, turn right 90 degrees, etc. At first I didn't understand it, but then I talked to Michal and got a little bit of headway.

User Defined Sweep

I had an idea today. Earlier, we had problems with an overview of the map, which I will call a gist. We didn't know how to give an overview of the map, but we knew we needed to have one. I thought that maybe we could have the user define the sweep. For example: the user presses a button and sweeps his finger across an area he wants to know more about. The computer will then play a sound for every group of pixels he passes through. For this design, we will need to experiment to get the right settings. we will need to experiment with how big the groups of pixels will be, what shape those groups would be (square, hexagon, triangles, etc.), how fast to do the sweep (same speed as user sweep, or set speed), and what information would be in the sweep. If you have any other ideas, please feel free to post them.

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

First i continued reading the research paper that I had started yesterday. Then, I wrote some thank-you cards that ASE asked us to write. After lunch, i decided I wanted another programming challenge, so I asked Michal for one. He told me to program something that asks for a phone number and gives it back to you in a standard format. For example, if you put in a phone number as 587-9854+985 then it will give it back as (587) 985-4985.

Monday, July 26th, 2010

I started today off by reading a paper called "Sonification of Geo-Referenced Data for Auditory Information Seeking: Design Principle and Pilot Study". At ten, Michal asked to have a meeting, where we talked about the ASE Symposium, and also about ideas to help our blind user understand the map more. After that, I continued reading the paper. After lunch, I decided to work on the Kochs snowflake fractal a little more, but by the time we went to the duck store at 4:30, I had gotten nowhere.