Finally, the Fall 2022 semester has started. I was looking forward to teach an IST 461 – Database Management and Administration course, but unfortunately the class had only two enrollments so we had to cancel it. Now, I am teaching two sections of CMPSC 221 – Object Oriented Programming with Web Applications, one section of IST 210 – Organization of Data (i.e., an introductory to database course), and PSU 1 – First Year Seminar (a 1-credit course that teaches students how to become a college student at Penn State Abington). The new things that I have this semester:

• I will be using Oculus Quest 2 in IST 210 class so students can walk into a Hot Dog Stand simulation model and observe the system in virtual reality (VR) environment. The 3D simulation model has been developed in Simio Simulation Software and it can connect to Oculus headsets including Oculus Quest 2 (either wired or wireless connection). The goal is to see if seeing these models inside a VR environment help their learning and increase their motivation about their major.
• I also switched from NetBeans 8.2 to NetBeans 12.5 for CMPSC 221 class. NetBeans 8.2 was really outdated so now we are using much modern integrated development environment. I would like to thank our Office of Information Technology people at PSU Abington.
• I have received my new laptop which replaced my 5 year old Dell Desktop Computer in my office. I have used some of my National Science Foundation grant money to buy a laptop I liked. It is a Dell XPS 9720 17-inch laptop. It has 14 core i9-12000HK CPU, 16GB RAM (2x8GB, DDR5, 4800Mhz, Dual Channel), NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 6GB RAM 60W GPU, 512GB PCIe NVMe Solid State Drive, 17-inch FHD+(1920×1200) InfinityEdge Non-touch Anti-Reflective 500-nit Display and 5 year Dell Warranty. I am still setting up some stuff like Hybridizer to use GPU computing with C# programming language (basically I am trying to make GABAK to run on GPU for faster computing). One of the nice thing about the laptop is that it has 4 USB Type-C plugs but unfortunately it does not have any HDMI or USB 3.0 ports. So I either have to connect it into a Dell dock to connect to a different monitor and USB mouse, or I have to carry the small dongle that converts USB Type-C port into 1 HDMI and 1 USB 3.0 port. But I guess we have to get used to this modern technology since we heading towards wireless or USB Type-C connections. It is probably a good idea to get a good Bluetooth mouse instead of the USB cable mouse that I am carrying in my backpack right now 🙂

I will be working with at least 3 students this semester on the Augmented Reality Warehouse project. Hopefully we will fix the existing code (the WebXR developers updated the WebXR standards in April 2020 so our old code (you can see the running version in this link) is no longer working. We are a little bit frustrated since many of my previous students spent hundreds of hours on this project for coding and seeing the working code being broken with this new WebXR standards is really disappointing. I hope that WebXR standardization team will not make drastic changes and depreciate the methods and libraries we are using right now with the new code so we don’t have to start coding from the beginning again as we are doing right now.

That’s all folks!