Designer, XR Developer, Team Lead
Winter 2021 - Summer 2022
SUITS is an annual design challenge hosted by NASA to design AR tools for astronauts on EVAs [Link]. ARSIS 5.0 was Boise State's contribution for the 2021-2022 challenge.
Design document: [Link] .
ARSIS overview:
In other versions of ARSIS, I've worked as a XR developer, designer, and (currently) in an
advisory capacity.
My time at SUITS is something I remember fondly; it was the first large project that I worked in, and the first serious team that I led. As such I made plenty of mistakes and learned a lot:
I should delegate more
Many of my failures came from taking on too much and not relying enough on those
around me. This current iteration of the project, ARSIS 6.0, I’ve distributed my
old role among team members in preparation for my graduation. I’m also paying more
attention to how I might be underutilizing my team.
I need to be better about project scope.
Due to Covid and some untimely graduations, we were
operating with a very small team for 5.0. I need to be better at prioritizing features
and project scope in order to properly lead teams of any size. This year we've recruited
a larger team, but I'm still keeping my eye on it.
I need to recognize setbacks sooner and take the initiative.
We lost a lot of development time due to bureaucratic concerns. Eventually I realized that
they wouldn't get resolved through the university and worked around it, but I could have saved
significant resources by doing that earlier.
SUITS has three main goals during a project: submit a design proposal to NASA, perform outreach to the community, and prototype Augmented Reality tools for astronauts. During the 2021-2022 year, we largely succeeded on the first two counts.
I wrote the majority of a proposal that was accepted by NASA, and it recieved some praise for clarity. Additionally, it was useful for onboarding new members and telling them about the project.
We published papers, coordinated with the Discovery Center of Idaho, and otherwise were able to help people understand more about NASA, AR, and SUITS. Additionally, we were able to recruit a sufficient team to be well equipped for the 2022-2023 year, despite operating at severely reduced efficacy.
Unfortunately, due to several challenges that I'll get into below, we made a poor showing that year. Brutal scope cutting and intense crunching were required to have a project to show NASA at all.
Covid safety measures hit all student involvement groups hard, and our research group was no exception. We had a significantly reduced team size compared to previous years.
Our team had to prioritize recruitment over development, and there was a larger-than-usual push for outreach that year. I was personally responsible for bringing two new people onto the team, but they were unable to join until the next project (ARSIS 6.0).
When our old version control solution—Unity Collab—was decommissioned, we were not able to switch to its replacement due to its subscription-based payment model. We lost the bulk of our development time to this issue, and eventually I bit the bullet and bought a few months for the team.
This year, I began an sub-project to switch ARSIS from the old singleton design pattern to an observer-based pattern. This should add modularity and enable us to use Github to manage our solution. If successful, we should avoid future reliance on paid VCS solutions.
2022 was the first year after the last member of the original SUITS Challenge Team graduated. While I had spearheaded an effort to document everything we could in advance of her graduation, it was still difficult operating without that guidance.