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.

Late Appraisal Report Feedback

Finally got a good chance to take a look at the Feedback from the other groups in their appraisal reports. Overall there was a lot of interesting comments that really made me think about our project and how we can improve it. However, the major constraint now will be the feasibility of implementing this feedback in the time we have left to build the experience. Getting to the end of week 10 now I know that personally I am starting to feel the pressure to get something complete coded up and suitably working to express our core concept.

[b]Feedback[/b]

A lot of feedback about clarifying our target audience and how this could help flow into both the visual style of our experience but also the story line that we are attempting to present. Again we are trying to stick with a nature theme with cute animals based on previous feedback, and we have currently got a horse model in our Unity prototype which we are hoping to tell a story with. At this point it feels like our experience may be limited to a single story so hopefully we can put enough into it that it evokes emotions and engagement from the audience at the exhibit.

This really leads into the feedback on narrowing our scope. Starting to feel the limits of time we have been getting progressively less ambitious about our interaction and trying to go more for a single deep experience. Adding sound effects both ambient and visual element specific is something that came up again in the feedback and something we are desperately trying to implement into our final design to ensure and immersive experience.

We also got some really good feedback on how to guide users into the experience and allow them to explore rather than explicitly providing them with instructions. Creating an story that starts with an object users want to interact with in the center of the table and them having the story unfold from there seems to be the best option in terms of having users interact with each other and touch hands.

Again there was a lot of feedback about adding multiple user support and additional interactions to the experience. While we would definitely like to implement these features unless there are some major breakthroughs in the next week they are unlikely to happen. They are very much something that would be nice to have but not essential to the project at this stage.

Finally there was questions about why this project would exist outside of the exhibition setting and what human motivations it taps into. The project was really envisaged as an experiential piece of art or installation art that looks to push the boundaries of traditional body projection methods. We are really looking to provide a more emotional connection to a story with this project. Given this feedback we might need to make this more clear in our video and support materials at the exhibition.

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.