10/3 – 10/17
What We Did:
This was a very crazy long week. I wish to preface this by stating there are 168 hours in a week, and we tried to optimize our use of all of them. Let me share some of the accomplishments that our team was able to do over these past 168 hours.
We started the week off with a user experience plan for our halves demo which helped
us prioritize the components that are essential for that showcase.
We were missing Mohit and Shirley for a few days this week due to industry conferences which slightly slowed our progress, but were able to sync up and arrange our tasks in such a way that made up for that lost ground. John also brushed up his Unity skills and acted as our backup fourth programmer so Rex could try different models, textures, particles and so forth on the BT-200 Glasses. He also coded out some gestures -> animation combos to get a feel
for how intuitive and fun they would be for the users.
Rex was not feeling thrilled with our old model and so he put it in a lot of hours at the start of the week to completely iterate on the character design drastically. This new character tests well with our audience and people are very easily able to tell emotion in his poses and empathize with the companion. We spent a bit of time iterating and testing on color pallet design, and finally decided on a color that most people seem to like. Color is a very tricky thing to uniformly decide upon and at the end of the day, we might discover something such as looking at a certain color on the glasses for long periods of time might be taxing on your eyes. So for right now we are settling on a base color of blue with yellow\red accents. Rex then worked on an animation list in order to show Shirley the kinds of poses he expects the robot to do,
to help her understand the character rig needed.
Shirley was able to integrate gestures with robot interactions before she headed off to her trip. The user now became able to summon the companion into the scene by making a open palm gesture. If time permits we might add some more gestures such as swatting the companion to move him around.
Now that Shirley is back, she is helping Rex rig and animate our companion.
Wei worked on four fronts this past week. Wei started off by testing the accuracy of the gps, the latency and calibration time. Then Wei created a simple particle system so our companion can look like he is floating, it is very rough but with John and Rex’s help, it is at a good enough state for halves. Next Wei created an animation controller class to make our code much more organized and hierarchical. There is still a bit more polished that can be done on that script, but it is in a good enough state. Finally, Wei has been working on a few sound effects for our companion for our halves demo build.
Once Mohit returned from his conference, he championed being the main scene integrator in unity and has been working to combine everyone’s functionality together. Mohit was able to finish coding wit.ai for work on android and finished the plugin for unity while also attending the conferences. However, we realized to our dismay that it would only work on Jellybean\ Kit Kat OSes, and we are currently using Ice Cream Sandwich. This became a huge problem and all solutions seemed to lead to potentially 3 month long tasks to fix if we wanted to keep these systems. Thankfully, John was able to find a workaround which took Mohit a few days to be able to implement which allows for this service to work on the ICS OS. This was an extremely stressful workaround though with massive risk, the device nearly bricked itself multiple times before it finally worked. Mohit is now working on a decision tree model system which can itegrate the various components together.
We discussed a potential research paper with our advisor Jiyoung. She provided us great resources and advice for writing this paper and this is something we will definitely pursue with the knowledge we have gained.
All in all, this was a crazy long but fun and rewarding week for the team members of Palimpsest
and we are very excited for our Halves Demo!!!
Challenges:
We faced immense challenges with technology, character model, non-compatible OS, work-life balance, project-elective balance, and then sum, but we worked really hard as a team to overcome them all and supported each other.
Plan For Next Week:
We first plan to finish our core functionality, then get some great feedback and iterate on it from user testing, and then present that quick polished version at Halves and
get lots of awesome feedback from ETC alumni and employees at Electronic Arts.