I was going to have a demo for upper management of my company, but the VP of R&D got waylaid by travel issues and had to postpone. So that gave me a few additional hours to do XML parsing things and generally fix up the application. This is what a study looks like:

<?xml version="2.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<Setup>
 <ResearcherName>Some Researcher</ResearcherName>
 <SubjectName>Some Graduate Student</SubjectName>
 <SubjectAge>23</SubjectAge>
 <SubjectGender>Male</SubjectGender>
 <Seed>0</Seed>
 <SpeedTests>3</SpeedTests>
 <AccuracyTests>3</AccuracyTests>
 <Sessions>2</Sessions>
 <SoundFile>C:/Wavs/heli.wav</SoundFile>
 <SoundFile>C:/monoExport.wav</SoundFile>
</Setup>

So now I have a release build that can create ad-hoc sessions or read in a test session from an xml file. The results from the test is output to a csv file where the position of the source(s), the position of the cursor, the angle between them, and the time to act are all recorded. In addition, the number of speakers used is determined and the normalized volume to each channel is recorded. So yay.

I suppose that the next step with the code would be to set the speakers explicitly, rather than letting the API determine the volume, but I think that would be another study. And I should add comments before I forget why I wrote things the way I did (wstring wst(str.begin(), str.end());, I’m looking at you…)

For the pilot study, I’m going to team up with Brian to go and find all the relavent previous work and set up the study. I’m pretty sure that we’re covered by one of Ravi’s IRBs, so I think that collecting data can begin as soon as a machine is set up in the lab that we can use.

And while that’s cooking, I can now use my shiny new audio library to hook up to the telepresence simulator. Woohoo!

Not much to report today, the gas people were running new lines to my house. It seems they do that once a century, if it needs it or not. With all the hardware at work, it makes developing at home pretty much a no go.

• Did verify that the release builds work with the end-user DirectX install
• Added text to emitter position on the graphics screen
• changed the timer to to std::chrono::high_resolution_clock (check the bottom of this post for an example)
• It looks like MSVC 2010 doesn’t have <chrono>. Made do with clock_t and clock() instead.
• Added xml output for test setup. Why does ctime() return a string with a line feed!?

So the testing part of the code is done and working. Yes, there are bugs, and some cases where exceptions are thrown that should be handled, but if you color inside of the lines, everything works. Of course, now I need to be able to record the output, so it’s time for some classes to handle the work of saving results for analysis.

• Creating a TestResult class with the following information
  • session number
  • test number
  • test type (speed or accuracy)
  • time to lift
  • source position
  • cursor position
  • angle difference
  • speaker volume matrix
  • Also, there will be a toString(), toCsvString(), and  toXmlString() method for output;
• The TestManager will instance and store TestResults in a container (vector?), which will have the additional fields
  • Researcher name
  • Subject name
  • Sound file
  • Total sessions
  • Speed tests per session
  • Accuracy tests per session