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.