HEI Lab

Between my 2nd and 3rd year at university I interned at HEI-Lab at Universidade Lusófona. HEI-Lab is research lab that describes itself as a Digital Human Environment Interaction Lab.

It was my first professional experience of any kind. When I was first applying, I thought there would be no way I’d be selected among so many applicants. The fact that it was a paid internship just made it more scary, as I had yet to break that barrier where I didn’t think I was good enough to write code for money (and I probably wasn’t).

At HEI-Lab I got the opportunity to propose an idea for a VR app that would have something to do with psychology. I didn’t know much about the subject but I had read an interesting book that summer, Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer, which described his journey from a regular journalist to US national memory champion. During his journey, he learns of something called the method of loci, a technique where one associates something to be remembered (eg. a task, an object, a number) with a physical place in their mind, and makes an itenerary.

For example, you’d memorize a shopping list made up of 15 items by imagining your home where you enter it, and visualizing the first item, say, at the door. Then the second item on the table where you leave your keys. Followed by the third item where you hang your jacket, and so on. It essentially relies on relating that object to part of an itenerary in a space you know and can remember comfortably.

In my mind that could be sufficiently related to psychology and the idea that spawned from it would fit very well into the VR requirement. I was tasked to build an app in Unity targeting the Meta Quest where the user would walk through a VR environment placing objects in a scene along a path, like in the method of loci.

I worked side by side with a psychologist from HEI-Lab and we went through relevant research papers tackling the same subject to get a feeling for the state of the art. After synthesizing relevant information, she got started on the reasearch outline and all of that stuff and I developed the app.

During this time I was in an environment with lots of other teams made up of 1-2 programmers and 1-2 psychologists, who were also developing VR apps pertinent to the field of psychology and therapy.

After I left HEI-Lab my project partner tested the application on a variety of people, gathered results and continued on with her paper, which I unfortunately didn’t follow through to find out how it concluded.

Regardless, I had a good time where I learned a lot and explored the field of VR. Solved a lot of interesting challenges in a variety of projects and had tons of contact with multidisciplinary teams each with their own project requirements. It was definitely a good and soft introduction to the professional world and the reality of working full-time (quite the shock coming from a regular student).