My interest in computer science started early in my life. The first light of computer applications enlightened me when I was studying in primary school. Computers were novelty things in my hometown as my hometown is a small (relatively) city in remote area in China. People there are having rather antique lifestyles. My English teacher at the time found computers useful to play videos and slides in class for her class to improve the original plain tapes. She started with PowerPoint and then moved to Macromedia Flash. Which, was a pretty amazing piece of software at the time that not only allows user to create sophisticated animation easily but also enables the possibility to do programming. Using so-called ActionScript, which was inspired by JavaScript, which was also not being considered as a serious programming language at the moment. However, the ability to control the playing of flash animation and even manipulate the elements while playing was a mind-exploding experience to me. As I mentioned, my hometown was a remote place without a geek community, many people, including most of my teachers and even the dean, as a result, see this new trend as malicious, unreliable, evil and additive. This is the reason why throughout my life between primary school until the end of high school, I did’t have a chance to develop my knowledge base from support of my school and teachers.
Luckily, with the enormous support from my family and friends, I continued my study from books and the internet. Finally, in 2013, I got admitted by Ritsumeikan University (Homepage, Wiki) in Japan. Believe me, it felt so good when suddenly the thing you are interested in that other people were indifferent, got recognized. At that point, I already mastered ActionScript 3.0 (And Macromedia was acquired by Adobe). I used Flash to emulate the user interface of the game Grand Theft Auto IV and made an app with collected in-game information and data with an interactive game map. This project got a lot of attention in several game-related discussion groups on the internet. Also, started from JavaScript, which shares the similar grammar, I also learned about PHP, SQL, and other topics related to dynamic site building tools at that period of time.
At Ritsumeikan University, I connected all the knowledge base into a general and broad view of computer science realm. I deepened my understanding by learning about deeper layer details such as logical electronics design, operating system, algorithm basis, computer networking, wireless transmission and more. In addition, for the senior year, I joined RM2C lab (Homepage), a laboratory focused on mixed reality. Professor Shibata was my academic advisor. In this lab, I started learning and implementing mixed reality and diminished reality technology. I used Unity 3D, OpenCV to implement my undergraduate research project.