Mohamed Mansour's Personal Website

My Summer Job

Posted on June 9, 2006, 8:31 pm EST

Wow... I gotta say my first job is very interesting! I work as a Software Developer in a Haptics Lab doing Virtual Reality.

Many of you wondering right now about the keyword, "haptics". According to Wikipedia, "Haptic technology refers to technology which interfaces the user via the sense of touch. It is an emerging technology that promises to have wide reaching implications." But in the present day Haptics is similar to Agumented Reality. It is what you do in the real world that seem very realistic in the virtual world. I hope I got that correct :)

For instance, imagine that you are seeing a 3D Object, a cube, on the monitor. And you hold a stick ( a haptic device, similar to a pen ). When you move the pen, the virtual reality pen on the monitor moves. It acts as if it is your own pen in real life. NOW picture this, you are touching the pen on the box. When you touch it, you can FEEL that you have touched it. But in the realworld, you have touched NOTHING! Cool eh?

This technology is very nice and cool, I believe it is the future in technology. Many univeristies around the globe are researching on this new ideology of bringing the virtual world into the reality world. And I that amuses me the most.

My job is pretty tense. There are many haptic devices, and each device has its own API. My job is to build one application that connects all the devices in one area. For instance, Say I want to use DEVICE1 instead of DEVICE2 for this application. So I goto settings and change the DEVICES. The devices are not from the same manufacturer so that makes the task a bit difficult.

So I decided to do everything within C# .NET 2.0. The reason being is simply because it is the BEST language a nerd could have. That language using Micrsoft Visual Studio .NET 2005 makes programming funner and quick. They have separated the UserInterface COMPLETELY from the business logic (code).

Since I am using .NET, the hard part was to use the STL libraries API from C++ to port within .NET. The framework for the Haptic devices are given for us, but the API is all Standard C++. So one obstacle was to port them to .NET, I figured out a way, and It is going fine! My other goal was to make very well Software Engineering practices. I am using extensive patterns and design throught the whole project. My main goal is making the code reusable with absolutely no dependencies other than that given class.

Anyways, thats my job. It is pretty nice, and I might make a small game to play on these awesome devices! Pheww I am done for the day. 12hrs programming :p

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