Urban League Summer Camp: Day 4

Today we did a whole bunch of things. The day started with visiting various Astronomy/Insight Lab projects, starting with the SCUBE:

The SCUBE is an immersive learning environment that surrounds you on all 4 sides with projected scenes. The group navigated the solar system, witnessed the evolution of the elephant, and flew around inside a monkey's brain.

After this we headed over to see the Digital Solar Explorer. The DSE is a "cheap and simple" version of "science on a sphere"-type exhibits - basically, a giant illuminated globe. But part of what makes DSE different is that it is used to explore other planets besides Earth, and is controlled using a Wiimote.

HS Intern Matt explains his summer work with the DSE.

The DSE, exploring our moon.

The DSE operates using Google Earth, which allows for pushpin overlays. These pins include fun facts and other information about what you're looking at.

After giving everyone a chance to play around with the DSE, we headed back to begin planning what we would do tomorrow with the thermal camera. We'll be using a portable thermal camera, which will give us the chance to explore many different things. Here's a list of what we came up with:

We already have a pretty extensive list, but I bet we'll think of a lot more as we explore campus with the camera tomorrow. To help inspire the students and give them ideas, I demonstrated the FLIR camera and took pictures of everyone that they could print out and keep.

Thermal portraits...

...Always a hit.

Once 2:30 came around it was time for us to go on the (previously postponed) visit to the vision lab!

HS interns Prati and Liz were there to explain their summer research and demonstrate the portable eye tracker. They outfitted one of the students with the eye tracker, led him through calibration using Dr. Pelz as the target, and then sent him on a mission to find my office.

Prati outfits one of the students with the portable eye tracker. If you look on the computer monitor, the video on the left is the subject's eye, while the video on the right is the scene he is observing.

There is even an iPhone app that allows you to watch video of the subject's eye.

The latest trends in portable eye tracking fashion.

Here's the student searching for my office - and cheating by asking for directions.

After finding my office and returning to the lab, Liz processed the video while Prati explained what's going on.

After about 5 minutes of calibration and processing, the video was ready for us to watch. We all got to relive the quest to find my office through the subject's eyes! You can too, by checking out the video below.

(The first 35 seconds of Dr. Pelz wiggling his thumb are for calibration. Then the fun begins.)

And that was more than enough for one day! The students really seemed to have a lot of fun with this one. And the lab had fun with us, too - we've been invited back to check out more of the eye tracking devices next week.