Essay – Full Story

Originally I wanted to do my essay on brain computer interfaces. I went researching and found all the sources shown below.

I didn’t really know what question I wanted to answer with this though so I slept on it for a few weeks.

A few weeks later we received a list of topics we could choose from to write our essays on and I decided to do mine on “What’re the trends in XR in the next 10 years? XR/ VR/ AR in the near future? Why? (Evidence and discussion of an example)” thinking I could fit BCIs in there somewhere. Whilst doing my research on this topic, I came across CREAL.com.

CREAL is a company co-founded by former CERN engineers (which explains a lot really) that developed head mounted displays using light fields. I thought this was really cool and decided I must include light fields in my essay about the future. Unfortuantely, the maths for creating light fields is an absolute pain in the BUTT, and trying to find explanations in sources that don’t use maths was harder than I thought. Like look at this ****:

After having found my sources of information for this topic, it ended up turning into a light field essay and not a future of XR essay. So why not just combine the two: “Is Light Field Technology A Possible Future For XR?”

My original essay plan is as shown below.

This wouldn’t account for all my sources but it was a starting point just to get me writing. As I would find out later on, I pretty much scrapped this plan entirely and figured it out as I went along. I would use a source, get the info from it, write a paragraph or sentence or whatever I wanted from it and slot it in where I thought worked in the essay. Not very efficient but it works.

These are the final sources I used for my essay:

I’ve got the CREAL website, Facebook Research about their holographic optics, a research paper about a light field stereoscope, Pokémon Go statistics, an experience of CREAL’s proof of concept light field devices at CES in 2019, a stereoscope proposal, the research paper for the holographic optics, an interview with Touradj Ebrahimi, a Wikipedia entry on light fields, and a Wikipedia entry on the company Lytro.

I had written about 1100/1600 words of my essay when I saved the document onto my external harddrive and went home from uni. After I got home, made dinner and went to open up my essay to finish writing it since it was due the next day, the file was missing from my harddrive. ******* PANIC!!!

I spent the next 30 mins or so trying to locate the file any way I could, to no avail. I got to the properties of my harddrive and it says there was a file system error. OH FOR ***** SAKE. So I fixed that issue, which recovered the file, only it was the essay plan file, not the essay file. Luckily for me, when i changed the title of my essay I also saved the file with a new name and deleted the old file. WHICH MEANS I had a copy in my recycling bin, only it was from the previous day. Which means I lost almost all my essay anyway.

Cue spending the next several hours powering through writing an essay. Upon completion I save it, and COPY the text before closing just in case. THANK **** I copied the damn thing because it didn’t save despite saying it did. So I pasted the entire essay, checked it over, and made sure to thoroughly check where it’s saving. Save, close, reopen, it’s there, good.

Now to submit this annoying file. There’s no submission button. ****. Annie help. She’ll fix it tomorrow.

So here I am after rewriting my entire essay now writing this blog entry to describe my woeful story. Poor me. Hopefully the submission button is fixed in the morning because I ain’t coming back to tell you if it is or not.