No More Public Holidays

With the end of last week, it marks the start of week 10 and the end of public holidays for the semester. Which probably means it is time to get super serious about implementing the rest of our project functionality and build to ensure we have a solid product ready for exhibition with a week to spare.

Recapping last week, we unfortunately missed out on our usual contact session on Tuesday because of the change in schedule. Despite that I still took advantage of the fewer people in the workshop to get myself acquainted with our new friend the Leap Motion controller. After installing the basic SKD and unity packages it became immediately obvious that this was the perfect technology to be using for our desired experience. In hindsight we should have pursued the acquisition of a controller much earlier in the semester to save us wasting development time with the Kinect. However, it was assumed that there were no Leap Motions available at the projects inception.

Despite having to go back to square one with a new technology, out of the box the Leap Motion was already at the same level of progress we had made with the Kinect over the past weeks. I was able to set up the controller our desired unity scene and have hands coming in and interacting easily. Additionally the documentation for Leap Motion and unity made it super simple to understand how the controller data was structured and how to access it. As a result I was able to get access to both frame, arm and hand data by the end of Tuesday. Still overall it was a good experience going through working with Kinect and looking at OpenCV. It really made me appreciate the concept that there are multiple ways to do something, but that trying to use a system in more obscure ways that it was not necessarily  designed for is a lot more complicated than exploring other options.

For the rest of the week Ken and I shared development of the Unity project, to the point where we had by Friday a working prototype where interactions would take place when two hands were close enough to each other. Additionally we managed to figure out the hand / object collision system to get messages sending from objects when they came into contact with any part of a hand or arm. This should give us a really solid platform to develop from this week in getting up a function prototype that we can actually test in the workshop. Huge shout outs to both Isaac and John (I-god and J-god) from Team sign play who helped us with coding suggestions as well as explanations of the Leap data structure. It really highlighted to me again that coding needs a plan, and there is a reason for breaking your code down into reusable chunks and controllers.

In terms of our physical build, our projector stand should hopefully be operational now after some additional reinforcement this week to ensure the main arm could support the weight of a projector mount and an actual projector mounted onto it. Overall I think this leaves us in a pretty good spot going into this week being able to connect our prototype to a top mounted projector and work through any challenges that might present this week. While additionally we can add extra polish to our scenes within unity to better communicate a story without having to stress to much about the video.