Hello readers! My name is Elaine Duff. I am the geologist on the team. It’s my turn to tell you about the amazing things the Cosmoshox NASA SUITS team has been doing during the month of February. This month, we initiated our first few scrum sprints of the semester. We received the TSS Plugin we had been waiting for in order to begin implementing our designs in Unreal Engine. However, there are a lot of things that come with any learning curve, much less one for NASA SUITS, such as outfitting the TSS Plugin for the version of Unreal that functioned the best for our design requirements. 

What we have done so far has been somewhat slow going as we waited to receive the TSS plugin from NASA. Yet, we have had some success in the deployment of our biometrics widget. The majority of these past two sprints focused on flushing out the designs for the Heads Up Display (HUD) and the Local Missions Control Center (LMCC) so that we could start low fidelity testing. Most of our work on the Hololens has been in the backend, since the front end was impacted by TSS variables. The front-end designs are majorly completed with the Figma wireframes. 

 

The anticipated test environment at NASA’S Johnson Space Center will be outdoors during the day. Although we have not tested outdoors, we have tested inside. When testing in indoor light, the opaque and black background on the widgets allowed for the issue of contrasting backgrounds, no matter the color or brightness.

 

There are lots of bugs and issues that can come up when you are learning UnReal and learning how to create a NASA project in Unreal, but we are here and testing what we have so far. Since we are the only team working in Unreal Engine, receiving the Unreal Plugin as late as we did delayed high-fidelity testing. We have been preparing for low-fidelity testing, which has challenged us in getting good feedback for the HUD and the LMCC in Unreal Engine.

As with any good team, the use of feedback for this challenge is how we are able to make the best user-centric and user-friendly interface possible. Our faculty advisors have been a great help to our team this month. They have been aiding in maintaining transparency within our team. As the late receiving of the TSS Plugin delayed our development work, tension within our team grew. With the help of our amazing advisors, Maggie and Kristyn, we were able to bring to light our team’s frustrations and better manage them. 

A second form of feedback we use as a team comes from our NASA mentor who has a heavy Human Factors and Human-in-the-Loop testing background. The feedback we receive from her is great help when it comes to our research because we have no expertise when in HITL testing. We have met with her twice this month at the end of each two week Sprint. These meetings have allowed us to work on informal and formal testing plans and wireframe ideas from here so that we can have a continuous and iterative process. Our mentor, Amanda, has also helped bring our attention to the need for ensuring our designs match the NASA standard for things such as color and field of vision. Meeting both in person and virtually with our mentors has allowed us to be a better functioning team.

 

As a team, we have been looking forward to our next outreach event! This past month, Margaret and I were able to talk about what we do and how to join our team during Engineering week at WSU as a part of “Girl Day,” where females in engineering speak of their current careers and research and how they got there to inspire and mentor young female high-schoolers so that they might inspired to pursue engineering fields. As a graduate student studying geology on the team, I was surprised by the amount of girls who were excited to talk to me about how geology fits into the space industry and technology research on the team! Margaret and I are pictured below at the “Girl Day” outreach event. You can view our Girl Day post on our instagram here: COSMOSHOX Instagram - Girl Day Post Our next outreach events will be happening on March 22nd and April 5th. More on those in later articles! 

As the CosmoShox team, we are excited to announce that one of our graphic designers, Savannah, was the star of a Derby High School article as an alumnus of the high school. The article highlights her experience in the SUITS team, and we were all incredibly proud of her! Check out the article here: Derby High School - Savanna.

Something you may not know about the campus we attend to keep you interested in our state is that the original Pizza Hut was built on the WSU campus here in Wichita, Kansas. Although, it is currently a Pizza Hut museum!

 

Can’t wait to “Shock” you with our next updates for our team. Ad Astra, to the stars!