Research internship · NYU Tandon
Immersive Computing Lab
A summer building a VR environment to help researchers measure spatial neglect, a condition where the brain stops attending to one side of space after a stroke.
What it is
In the summer of 2023 I worked as a junior research intern at NYU Tandon's Immersive Computing Lab, on a project studying spatial neglect. Spatial neglect is a condition, often following a stroke, where a person stops paying attention to one side of their world even though their eyes work fine. It is usually assessed with pen-and-paper tests. The lab wanted to know whether virtual reality could measure it more precisely.
What I did
I built a VR environment in Unity and C# where a participant reads words placed around them in 3D space, wearing an HTC VIVE Pro with Tobii eye tracking. Watching where someone's gaze does and does not go gives a much richer signal than a paper test. You can see which regions they skip and how their attention spreads across the space. Before writing any of it, I read through more than fifty academic papers to understand how spatial neglect is studied and where the existing tools fall short. At the end of the summer I presented the environment and our findings to NYU faculty and researchers from the Kessler Foundation.
What I took away
This was my first time building something for people other than myself, with real users and a clinical purpose behind it. The hard part of research software is not the code. It is making sure what you build actually measures the thing the researchers care about. I also learned to read academic papers quickly and pull out the few details that change a design decision. This is the project that got me interested in building tools that sit close to a real human need, which is a thread I have kept following since.