RESEARCH PROJECTS

These are my research projects.

They represent the pinnacle of my scholastic achievement, and I have used what I have learned from these projects to launch more thorough research and software development projects.

The Effect of Virtual Reality and Visual Media Types on Human Emotional Response

I began this project in August 2022 under the expert supervisor of my faculty mentor, Dr. Beomjin Kim. We sought to explore how virtual reality could be used as a tool to assist people. To this end, I led a team of fellow undergraduate researchers in developing and executing a virtual reality research project to explore how people responded to different media types presented through virtual reality. By exploring people's reactions to different media types, we could develop future virtual reality applications that are more emotionally impactful.

My fellow researchers and I spent many months researching academic articles and drafting supporting documents while developing our experiment. By early February 2023, we had concluded our experiment, analyzed our data, created our abstract, and designed a research poster, which was submitted to the 2023 Purdue Fort Wayne Research and Creative Endeavor Symposium. Our research suggested that computer-generated virtual reality more strongly affects human emotions than camera-captured virtual reality.

After presenting our poster at Purdue Fort Wayne’s research symposium, my team and I began developing our next research project, which can be found on my projects page. Expanding from this project, we are now exploring how memory can be affected by the use of virtual reality.

A Proposed System to Facilitate Undergraduate Research

While I was conducting the virtual reality research project, my team and I noticed that we all were participating in research only because we had done well in our faculty mentor’s course and were subsequently offered a position pursuing research. We undergraduate researchers felt this selection system could unintentionally exclude otherwise capable researchers because they struggled with a single class. As a result of this conclusion, we began our second research project in December 2022 to explore the perception of undergraduate research on campus.

We conducted a literature review to demonstrate the benefits of undergraduate research, which justified pursuing this project. Afterward, we surveyed undergraduate students and faculty for their opinions on campus undergraduate research. We discovered that 48% of students were interested in research as opposed to 26% uninterested. We also found that faculty unanimously agreed they would utilize a web portal to connect to researchers if available.

From our conclusions, a need and desire for a standardized method of research connections was evident. My team and I submitted a request for an undergraduate research portal to the Computer Science department as a capstone project. Our request was approved and is currently being developed by my fellow undergraduate researchers and me. More information can be found on my projects page.