Project number: #10
Title: Out of Body Experiences: Multiple Sensory Replacement Experiments

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Should this project be considered for the Best Project award? no

Should this project be considered for the top 3 project awards? no

On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the overall organization/clarity of the project report? 8

5. On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the overall project idea? 7

6. On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the overall research contribution of the project idea, methodology and/or results? 7

* Overall, is the project report clear, concise, and well-organized?
Yes it was well organised.

* How does the project idea and methodology fit within the framework of Developmental Robotics?

It almost fits well within the framework of developmental robotics as it might be helpful in understanding the representation of the physical body in the mind.But also OBE is a psychological phenomena which is not observed universally in all test subjects.Also it is something which might not be produced over various number of trials.The results of thus project is also not very promising towards developmental robotics applications as the results seems to be not very stable as explained by the authors.  

* Describe what you like BEST about the project?

The attempt to create OBE using vision and audio instead of vision and touch is something novel and I like the attempt of trying to do it.Also trying to produce results which seems to be consistent with the previous experiments of OBE when there were not much support in terms of equipment/lab and sound proof room for conducting the experiment is good.

* Describe what you like LEAST about the project?

The original proposal seemed to be lot more exploring about the OBE while the actual implementation did not do much of what was proposed in the project. There were originally 4 experiments mentioned in the proposal.The original implementation consisted of only two menthods.This is a reduction by 50% of the original potential of the project.Also one among these two experiments is a repetition of OBE which has alreasy been proven successful.If the partial results or attempts showing partial success were explained by the authors then it would have contributed a little more.

All these might be due to equipment scarcity as explained in the report, still the over all expectation of the project went down because of this. 

There was a mention that there were not enough participants which I don not agree with. THis is a sort of experiment which most in the class were interested in taking part.So if they had posted in the class then there might have been a considerable amount of people taking part.
If they would have asked for volunters from class that would have helped atleast a few of the class students in understanding or sharing the effect of OBE. In the demo too the OBE was not totally demonstrated due to the lack of time. Since this is a project which could be judged only by personal experience or with large number of paticipants,when the number of test subject is only twenty, the results are not very satisfactory.

If the team would have tested more on class students I think this project would have been even more successful atleast in terms of getting better idea and results or even getting a better idea of why a few tests failed. It might be even helpfull to know if the test results are affected if participants had good knowledge of what is OBE or other phsychological reasons behind it.

Still I like the second experiment and the attempt to do something novel.

* Do the methods, results and contributions of the final project
correspond to what was presented in the initial project proposal?
Not totally. The proposal covered a wide range of experiments while they were not implemented. This is attraibuted to equipment failure or inavailability.

* Are there any major details left out with regards to the methods,algorithms, or experimental design described in the report?
More details could have been given in terms of what sort of participants were chosen or the grounds for chossing participants for this experience.It is very important when it comes to an exoeriment like this. It seems that there were no grounds for choosing participants for the project from what is given. If this were a conference paper then i think a little history about the OBE knowledge or prior experience for the test subjects might be helpful to arrive at some different results even.Also gender might be taken into account.

* Do the experimental results reported in the paper demonstrate success?
Not totally.But they seem to have generated something close to exisitng methods for OBE. Still im not sure if 20 is a decent number to arrive at conclusions for such delicate experiments like OBE.The setup and place chosen for conducting experiments also seem to have contributed to a small reducution in the success rate.

Also there are a lot of questions to be filled out in the survey. All these questions would be helpfull to know the outcome of the experiment.Still there seems to be a lot of questions being asked which might annoy the participants thereby reducing the reliability of the results obtained.If you could shorten this down to the most appropriate questions(which I am not sure if its feasible) would be a haop 
* Do you have any suggestions for improvement and future work?
Future works are well laid out at the end of the paper by the authors themselves.But i think the future work should not only include other experiments but also repeating the same set of experiments with better chosen set of test subjects if they were chosen at random now. This might create a bug difference in the results that are produced.

* How close is the final project report to being publishable as a conference or journal paper (consider the research papers that were
part of the course reading)? What would it take to get there?

The details are well laid out and I think it is good enough for being presented in a conference except for some formatting and presentation style changes if this were a journal. If this has to be published it would obviously require IRB approval which is the most important constraint as it deals with human subjects.
As mentioned the grounds for choosing research participants would also become an important criteria as this would be helpfull in producing better results with better reliability.