My Practicum at the UMD XR Lab began in the spring of 2024, during my second semester of college. I attended the Second Look Fair, walking around through the rows of student organizations until I bumped into the XR Club. While I was switching into Mechanical Engineering for my major, I hadn’t really considered what to do in terms of extracurriculars to represent that change, but given I had some past XR-related independent projects, I got to talking with them.
I found that the site supervisor, club president Damien Figueroa, was very amenable to the idea of taking on new hardware projects with the club, as the current regular attendees were almost entirely computer science majors working on game dev and other software development challenges. The most crucial part of me finding a site that meshed well with my plans was finding somewhere that had a niche I could fill, careful selection based on what I could do and what other groups needed. It’s very difficult to find a site when you’re competing with many others for the position, which coupled with the many underutilized spaces and groups around campus, means a good bet for an interesting and engaging Practicum is to seek out the more obscure groups in your sphere of interest.
Having done this with the XR Club, I proposed a haptic glove, based on my experience with a similar project. For the majority of that semester, I was preoccupied with my major switch and the grade requirements, but I still worked in the XR lab to upgrade the 3D printer and equip it for hardware projects. I formally presented this idea to the club at the beginning of the Fall 2024 semester and gathered several interested people to collaborate with, going through the process of selecting a design, applying for funding, and waiting for the circuit boards to come in.
We chose a fork of the open-sourced LucidGlove project, known as the Fae Mod, due to the unique benefits of using printed circuit boards over wiring directly to components, and the novel challenges it presented. Much of the third semester was spent finding a way to solder the tiny pins on the processor, which came separate from the rest of the board. We collaborated with Terrapin Works and used their soldering equipment to affix the chips, which despite starting with 5 chips, only yielded one working board. Undeterred, we modified the plan to only construct one glove instead of two, which would provide valuable redundancy with our limited components.
Over winter break, many of the components were printed at home by myself and several others from the club who had 3D printers, though we left enough undone to make sure the team members who had little hardware experience could get the chance to learn. I brought back more of my equipment from home, which sped up the process by allowing us to solder in the lab itself. We soon ran into a new issue, a change in club leadership – the previous president, Damien Figueroa, would continue to be the one to supervise my project and provide support, but the new president missed the first deadline for budget requests, and some key components went unordered.
There was a lull in activity as we waited for the next budget window, but by the time it had gone through, little time was left to finish the project in time for the Practicum. I called an all-hands-on-deck meeting the second everything was ready to go, and the lab went into hardware mode, tables of wires and headsets being commandeered for a soldering station, computer stations used by my collaborators hard at work flashing the microcontroller, 3D printer running non-stop. It was an intense, but exciting experience, as the whole project came together at breakneck speed. Despite the pace, we still managed to get some good educational experiences in – I taught several of my teammates how to solder and operate the printer, learned some interesting things about embedded systems programming, and instilled the confidence in both myself and my teammates that we could take on complex, multidisciplinary projects in the future.
It wasn’t just the technical skills I picked up that will help me going forward. I learned some interesting things about project management over the course of constructing the haptic glove. Nothing slows things down to a grinding halt like a lack of urgency, as evidenced by how quickly the project froze once we hit a setback. The conventional advice of planning out regular, incremental milestones neglects the base difficulty of organizing a group of people with hectic schedules together at the same place and time.
Going forward, I’d like to learn more about the “sprints” method of project planning popularized by the software engineering field, and apply it to induce the urgency needed to make actual progress. Not enough appreciation is given to the social aspect of engineering, how organization lays the foundation for the effective application of science, and how interacting with other motivated individuals can introduce new ideas that no amount of theoretical knowledge could replicate.
For myself and my academic journey, this project has given me the opportunity to reflect on what I might want to specialize in as I get to the more advanced engineering courses, and has led me to consider taking more classes in embedded systems design and maybe MEMS later on. I have plans to attempt more research within the XR club and attempt to innovate low-cost haptics systems, which will provide more engaging projects and motivate some of the difficult electronics courses in engineering. After graduation, I hope to apply the skills in project management and learning to assist my life and career, both in a professional setting and with my own independent projects.