Update

Yikes, time flies when you’re NOT having fun, especially when occupied with exams and various course works! The whole 2-month exam period was not something I’d like to repeat again in a hurry, to put it politely. Unfortunately, I may just have to do that if I fail any of the exams, and especially the Algorithms exams looks like a hot contender for this. I actually spent at least 2 weeks revising for it, thereby even sacrificing time reserved for the other exams. However it didn’t seem to help very much, as I seriously had no idea how to answer some of those questions. The other exams went from good to mediocre. Results should be out soon, so we shall see then if I’ll have to pay another visit to Imperial next year.

After the mayhem of exams and finishing our group project on Hopfield Neural Networks (which mostly went fine, only hiccup was a missed flight to Barcelona due to last-minute hand-in of the final report), I now have 3 months to work on my final individual project. The task is to produce a browser-based Medical Imaging Viewer, based on the XTK-Toolkit. Progress is going okay, although it’s a strange change of pace from the manic multi-tasking of the previous term to now spending day after day sitting on the couch at home, staring at the same code. I should really attempt to leave the house once in a while.

So in what may have been an attempt to break up this daily monotony, I recently made an impulse buy which in retrospect seems like a waste. I picked up a Leap Motion controller after seeing some promising youtube videos. Unfortunately once it arrived and hurriedly plugging it in, the results were quite sobering. Maybe I just need to spend more time with it, but I have yet to experience similar accurate controls like demonstrated in the video. I didn’t find any apps which make the controller seem a better alternative to the mouse or touch-screen. The human hand seems to actually be less accurate than a mouse. A problem could be the lack of touch feedback that the other controllers provide. I tried out the Leap Motion Chrome extension, but had trouble getting clicks to register and it generally felt either too inaccurate or too sensitive to do anything useful with. Random hand movements would often cause undesired side effects, so I quickly uninstalled it. However, the software seems to be improving so when I get some time to sit down with properly, I might be able to get more out of it. Initially I thought I could combine it with my Occulus Rift in interesting ways. Programming something like a table-tennis game could be fun!

Anyway, that’s it for today, I better dive back into exciting world of medical imaging! Once I have a working version, I’ll post it here!