Exhibition Day

Exhibition Day itself was great, while some of our team members were stressing out and looking to make final changes to the code I was feeling good. Potentially due to the lack of sleep and large amounts of caffeine I had consumed, but once our blackout curtains were up I was itching to show our project to people and see what all the other groups had done. We were one of the lucky groups that got marked early in the day so the pressure was off for most of the exhibition and we could just enjoy it.

Our installation itself worked about as well as we could have hoped. The hand tracking was not perfect and the Leap motion would often drop out, but despite that the marking team had a flawless interaction during the marking and people seemed to genuinely enjoy our concept. I was surprised by the amount of time people were spending engaging with our installation given that the interaction was a little clunky and our intractable game objects could be hard to hit. Maybe it was because of the large amounts of sweets we had at our table with gummy bears, Cadbury favourites, and Reese's pieces (The king of chocolates) we were clearly a destination with other teams (sign play) sending people our way to preserve their own meager candy stashes.

On a more seriously note I was really happy with the level of interest and engagement people came away with after playing with our exhibit. Throughout the semester I always felt that we had a strong concept and an interesting proposition, so it was nice to hear people commenting on that. It really allowed people an imagine what the future could hold type moment, where the actual installation and its functionality was less important than the interaction itself and what interactive body projection could become as a story telling method. While I think our concept may have been one of the best my choice for best installation would have to go to Taleweavers that Dome set up along with the switches and levers they created really worked a charm.

Then it was time to share a drink with friends and pack everything down like it never happened. It was great to see everyone working together and people staying around to socialise. The after drinks down at the Charming Squire was a nice way to get to know everyone that we had been reporting back to every Friday for the last 10 or so weeks. With that said this will be the end of my blog for this semester Lena can sit atop the iron blog throne with a mighty 25 posts. Big shout out to the say hello team for turning blogging into a competition and keeping everyone on track.

Mad Dash to the Finish Line

It already feels like forever ago that the team was madly pushing over Saturday and Sunday to get the project polished up and the functionality finalised in order to exhibit to the public on Tuesday. Saturday we finished implementing the last of our functionality and got the system somewhat stable so that we could test it on Sunday. Sundays testing revealed that we desperately needed to change the way our leap motion was being mounted.

While mounting the leap top down made logical sense, when testing with two people it was unable to detect more than one hand at a time. Major panic aside, we were lucky enough that Team sign play were also putting in the hard yards on their project so we were able to test their side mounted leap set up. While the tracking for an individual hand was slightly worse than with the top down method, this side mounted cradle system seemed perfectly happy to track two hands at one.

So I madly got to work copying their design and creating a cradle of our own that we could use at the exhibition to hold our leap controller. The rest of the day contain large amounts of sawdust, sanding and sweeping as we got the new cradle built and tested before heading home for the night to paint it up.

Fast forward to Monday the day before the exhibition we were in the lucky situation that our installation was relatively simple in terms of build and was easily packed into a single box making transport much easier than some of the other groups. Still between the moving van being delayed an helping other teams disassemble it was not until lunch time we had actually unloaded at the  edge ready to set up. Surprisingly all the bays at the edge were still set up to the public and needed to be cleared to make way for peoples installations, which we were advised was not happening until 2pm that afternoon. Cleared bays at 2pm and lock out at 4pm did not sit well with me so with a little help from Michael from team 'say hello' and some negotiations with edge staff we cleared the bays out ourselves.

Come the end of the day our installation was 70% set up and ready to go for Monday we just needed to purchase some black out curtains to darken the space and ensure our leap motion would track hands nicely. We organised for team members to make a run to the city on Tuesday for anything we were missing (damn you bluetac) while others would stay behind and set up the camera and posters in time for the 12am open to the public.

Week 12: Sound the Battle Music

Blow the horn of Gondor, send for the elves, cry for the ents, SOMEONE get the eagles. Time for all hands on deck with the throttle turned up to 12, it's the final countdown.

With exactly seven days until exhibition time it is time to polish like crazy until our little baby shines real nice. Today we are getting more footage around GOMA and the edge for our video so we do not have to use any stock footage and avoid any frame sizing issues. Additionally we are getting our projector stand and leap motion cradle painted black to fit in with the rest of our exhibition space and ensure our project looks a little more professional, rather than cobbled together.

Additionally we need to clean up our unity scene and add some extra components and interactivity to make the experience a little less one dimensional and better get across our concept. Thankfully yesterday Ken raided the asset store and found some beautiful free low poly assets which we can use to make our scene look a lot more inviting with minimal effort. Using some of these assets we are also planning to improve the currently limited scope of our interaction by having trees that will drop apples onto the ground which can then be fed to our roaming horses.  Additionally we found some low poly flowers which we can use to sprout on users hands when they leave their hand stationary for a certain amount of time.

Hopefully we are not leaving ourselves with too much to do at the end, but it would really be great if we could get all this extra interactivity working for the exhibit. I feel like there are going to be a lot of late nights and hopefully slightly crazed (safe) dance parties in the workshop this week. Also fingers crossed I am not a complete mess after getting all four of my wisdom teeth out tomorrow :O

Week 11 - Video Time.

So today we had a fun session watching all of the groups videos on the big screen and getting feedback from the group as a whole. I was pleasantly surprised to see that a lot of the videos were still very rough with some having simple placeholders along with audio and frame issues. Not in the sense that I do not want the other groups to have a better video than ours but I knew that our video still needed a lot more polish to be ready for the exhibition.

Most of the feedback from the tutors and the other groups were things that I had already picked up after watching through our video a few times but it was good to be able to clarify the areas we should focus on improving. I think the better part of the experience was being able to see all the different approached that the groups took in making their videos. Some used a lot of interview style pieces with product shots while others created a story with cute wizard of Oz style animations. Being able to give other groups feedback on their video (after Steven of course) was good, but I am not sure how much time each group will have to implement changes given that the exhibition is next week and the prototype is arguably a lot more important to polish.

Either way the general feedback on our video was that it was too heavily scripted and sounded a little too much like an infomercial. So we will need to cut down on the superlatives and let the product shots do more of the talking for us in explaining our concept. We also need to provide a better frame for the problem and explain WHY we are actually doing this to better sell the idea and usefulness of the project to people. Then another common theme throughout the presentations was the lack of product shots with users interacting, which we will be able to fix up after the exhibition where we can gather extra footage. We will need to ensure we have a good plan to get this footage during the chaos of the exhibition maybe setting up two cameras, one stationary to do a time lapse and one to capture more intimate moments and close ups with users.

Regardless there is still a lot to get done next week!!!

Week 11 - Special K.

Midweek update, things are looking up ^.^

Thanks to some help from Kit AKA the mystery tutor during Tuesday session helping me to set up our camera and leap motion alignment we now have a system of how to set up our Unity scene to get decent alignment and tracking of hands. The mapping is still not perfect but it is pretty close with the hands roughly the right size and staying mostly on top of users hands during our initial testing sessions. However, we will still need to do some work in figuring out how the leap motion detect where hands are coming from as it has a tendency to flip orientation arbitrarily causing the hand to come in on the opposite side to the user.

Ken and I will look to polish up the tracking and other aspects of the horse animation to make the interact cleaner, as it is currently quite clunky and does not really represent the overall concept we were hoping to go for. Again in hindsight it would have paid huge dividends for our project it we could have had access to a Leap Motion controller earlier in the project, which is probably more our fault than anything else. We should still be able to provide a solid proof of concept prototype for the exhibition though it may be lacking the polish I would have liked.

In Video news we now have all our shots and plenty of footage to work with in time for Fridays presentation and submission. Shilpi has taken the lead on the video front and will produce something amazing no doubt. We will definitely need a solid explainer video and supporting materials as I feel that our current prototype represents only a slither of what we hoped to achieve at the outset of this project. Hopefully that will be enough to spark the interest of people at the exhibition and do the concept justice.

The Week Ahead.

Crunch time is well and truly upon us Video due Friday and only two weeks until the final delivery of the project. Ken managed to merge the Unity code base on Monday so now the horse moves around naturally and gets attached to hands, where as previously we had those two working in separation. If we can keep developing separate functionality like this and then integrating without major issues we should be on track to have a solid project by the end of the semester. Additionally Ken managed to get the horses changing hands from one to the other and dropping off the hand if it leaves the scene rather than the horse also disappearing.

This should hopefully be sufficient for us to test today as we now have a free projector given that the exhibition at the State Library has been disassembled (THANKS PETE ^.^). We did have to make some slight modifications to our physical build as this new projector had a slightly different throw and mounting system but we have that up and running now ready to test. The only issue we might have is that we need a Leap to conduct proper testing but that means that we cannot be using it to work on the code at the same time. Hopefully we can trade it effectively between user testing and prototype testing to good effect.

The other major plan for today is to get all the footage shot for the Video to give us enough time is post production to meet Fridays deadline. Shilpi has pretty much completed a script and revised storyboard so fingers crossed we get that all done today ^.^

Last Week's Progress

Another week in the books and we are still making solid progress towards our final product. We managed to get more work done on our prototype and I was able to get the 3d Horse model that we are using in our unity scene to interact with our Leap Motion hands. So currently when a hand hits a horse object the horse become stuck to the palm of the hand and tracks along with it. This is one of the major things that we wanted to achieve with this project, having animations that would react to users and stay on projected onto their skin.

Unfortunately this is only a small piece of the puzzle as currently when the hand leaves the scene the horse also disappears with it. So we still have a long way to go, but I am starting to feel more comfortable working in both C# and unity which is a plus. Additionally Ken managed to get the horse models moving around in a more natural way when they are idle so that should help in attracting participants to our exhibit on the day.

What is more of a problem at the moment is that we are having trouble actually testing our set up despite being finished our physical build of the projector stand. The issue is that the projector we initially had at the start of the semester was actually had a million dead pixels making it virtually useless. Then the only other projector that was available was too heavy to mount onto our build, so we had to try and share with the other groups which was not very effective.

Some testing would definitely help us to sort out some of the scaling issues and actual projection issues which will be sure to happen when we get it fully set up. So this is definitely a cause for concern for myself especially due to the fact the next week we have the Video due and thus far we only have a rough storyboard and no footage.