Task 4: My Difficulties in English Writing

        Writing skill is vitally essential to express our ideas, opinions even the theory or the result of research. Some people think that writing skill is not very important to the engineering students because the engineering students always deal with scientific problem solving and experiments which are not required the writing skill. In fact, writing skill is a very important and essential tool to engineering students.
        As an engineering student, I found that a lot of assignments and reports of different modules require us to express our opinions and the result of experiment in academic writing. It can be a great challenge for me and those students who are not native English speaker. Hence, the biggest problem I am facing is my limited vocabulary in English that always discourages me from writing. For example, I have taken the EG1471 English course that required us to do a lot of essays, readings and text editing. Due to my poor vocabulary, I always spend several hours to organize and write an essay. Although I am managed to express my opinion very well in my mother tongue, I am unable to translate the meaning precisely into English. This makes my readers difficult to understand my expression.
        I have taken some actions which I think is efficient enough to improve my poor vocabulary. First, listening to English News can help me to improve my speaking skill and widen my vocabulary. Secondly, a newly-published dictionary is vitally required to understand the word meaning because there are always some changes of the usage of words. My vocabulary can also be improved through reading newspaper and articles. Moreover, asking question is crucial to clear the misunderstanding and doubt about the usage of words. It prevents us from making the grammar or usage mistakes again.
        As the saying ‘Where there is a will there is a ways’, so I believed I am able to manage the English writing skill well as I am determined to do it.

Task 3:Summary(Enhance Virtual Reality)

       Virtual reality is an illusory environment which attempts to give the brain a realistic set of sensations. True virtual reality creates an illusion of actually being there. It has been shown that people immersed in a virtual world and also respond realistically in interactions with life-sized virtual characters. It has been proved that virtual reality can be used in treating several kinds of disorders. Virtual reality also offers advantages for various sorts of research, education, and training. Virtual reality enables people to advance video conferencing with other people who located in the other parts of the world and carry out tasks together. A formidable engineering challenge is to allow dispersed people to seamlessly see, hear, and touch each other, even share real objects and equipment. The resolution of the video display and the field of view must be improved to maintain the illusion of a real scene. Reproducing sensations of sound, touch, and motion are very important to serious simulation. It is impossible to reproduce the fine-grained details precisely. There is another formidable challenge to place realistic “virtual people” in the scene to interact with the user. Identifying the level of detail for a user to accept the illusion is one of the challenges of virtual reality research. The accurate reproduction of sound and touch is more important than visually precise detail. Touch is an difficult challenge for engineers. For some uses, gloves containing sensors can record the movements of a user’s hand and provide tactile feedback, but somewhat crudely. It is still in the beginning stages to solve such problems. There is one possible approach would make use of electrorheological fluids, which alter their thickness when exposed to electric fields of different strengths. It may not be virtual reality per se, but a related concept also seems to be growing in cyberspace.

References
National Academy of Engineering (NAE). (2008). Enhance virtual reality. (n.d.). Retrieved October 2, 2008, from http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/cms/8996/9140.aspx