- February 17, 2022
"The opportunity to immerse myself in Japan’s culture for an entire summer and learn more about software engineering is one I will never forget. This was easily one of the experiences I have learned from the most at MIT, from the fantastic preparation before heading to Japan, to the support that we were given in Japan."
Forum8 is a company that celebrated its 30th anniversary this year since its creation in 1987. Focusing mainly on 3D VR modeling technologies, Forum8 is a company that balances computer engineering with civil engineering, to provide a variety of services, from driving simulations to urban and traffic planning.
Forum8’s main branch is located in Tokyo, though it has offices all throughout Japan, such as in Miyazaki, Osaka, and Sendai.
I worked on a project to develop an Augmented Reality application as a demo for Forum8’s marketing team. The project was supposed to work by pointing a camera at something such as a wall, and displaying a user-loaded model on the screen, as though it existed there in real life.
My project was more of a walk through the steps of Software Development than it was an independent project. I spent a lot of time planning out the application, from use features to user input and design, before I got into actually creating the project. However, despite spending a lot of time thinking about what to make the project, the company actually had a project in mind that I ended up creating instead. Most of my time was spent learning the new languages that they wanted me to program in and doing research about AR and how it could be used, and only about a quarter of the internship was actually creating the project, so most of what I knew from MIT didn’t come into play, especially because I relearned it when going over the software design phases with my supervisor.