Last week Will, Maeve and I showed our research at the Centre for Life’s “Game On 2.0” exhibition. Two tests were being run, firstly, comparing the ASTEROID test to current tests: Frisby, Randot and TNO.  Secondly, measuring the average person’s depth perception on psychophysics equipment Ignacio had set up. To run all the equipment we had quickly learnt beforehand how to use the stereotests, record data and power up Ignacio’s experiment.

As the Centre currently has the “Game On 2.0” exhibition on, we were bang in the middle of 60 years’ worth of games, all emitting different sounds. Although exciting at first, these snippets of Mario Cart and Clash of the Titans began to grate on us by the end of the week! We were constantly on our feet testing the many children that circled to the table to get their eyes tested. All the children seemed to enjoy ASTEROID and the parents were willing for us to take down data for both experiments. We received lots of feedback, got a large sample of data and are excited to see what the stats will show! Altogether a lovely week interacting with the public 🙂

Nikki  

We went to the Centre for Life and had a stand in the Game On exhibition so that we could get children to participate in our research. We managed to get lots of children of a range of ages to take part, which was great and really helpful. We had two separate tests going on; a test of ASTEROID compared to other, currently used stereotests; and a psychophysics test to get an idea of the average population’s stereovision.

Sometimes it was really quiet and you could just hear the sound of computer game characters dying and shooting one another on the many screens in the exhibition, and at other times we were rushing around to cope with the numbers of people crowding around our stand. We found that as soon as you had one person doing the experiment, other people were curious and wanted a go too, so we tried the tests ourselves in the quieter moments. I’d never done any of them before, only being new to the project, so I quickly realised why the children were finding some of the tests difficult, by struggling at them myself. The children found the tests a range of difficulties- due to not understanding our instructions or by being nearly stereoblind. I was only there for two days but in that time we gathered lots of data and I found out more about the project.

Maeve