8/25 – 8/29
What We Did:
Project Kickoff!!!
We have successfully completed our first week of our project with a running start! During this first week our team has scoped out our initial milestones with our advisors for this project and dived right into seeing what this device is capable of doing.
Our team discussed possible team names and we decided to call ourselves “Palimpsest”. In ancient Roman times, scholars used Palimpsets which is parchment with pre-existing content that has undergone a transformation so that it can host new content. We thought that this word aptly suited our team’s project with augmented reality. With the Moverio BT-200 Glasses we are able to “reuse” the world around us in a totally novel way thanks to its augmented reality functionality. Our team is very excited to see what we will be able to do in this domain.
Roles and responsibilities were discussed and assigned amongst the team. We were planning to use RACI to aid us in distribution of roles but due to our short term goal of exploration of capabilities of the device, we ended up not using that tool just yet.
We managed to create a google calendar schedule to plan out when we could meet both for Scrum and for daily core hours. We underwent a little bit of a challenge to set it up, but in the end we are able to have Scrum everyday at the same time which is a huge plus.
We are all presently exploring where we can take this device to create a meaningful application for it to perhaps show a glimpse of what the future can be like. We have spent some as a group looking at what already exists in this domain. Our producer\designer is continuing research in this space. Our three programmers are each exploring a different SDK\functionality of the device. Our artist is providing them with some placeholder models as well as doing some research for our logo design. As a whole our team has been successful at getting a running start for where we can take this and the future for our project is filled with exciting possibilities.
Challenges:
With our running start, we have already been tackling a few challenges. The first challenge our team tackled was finding a good time that we can meet daily for scrum since on Tuesday and Thursday there is never a time that all five of us can meet.
Our first solution was to try doing an Online Version of Scrum on those two days of the week with a physical scrum the other three days. However this includes a much larger upkeep with both a physical and digital scrumboard and defeated some of the core purposes of scrum. So we pursued other options.
Our next solution that we will be trying out, is doing scrum at the same time everyday, with Tuesday and Thursday having the one team member who cannot make that time, do an individual scrum with the producer later who can then inform involved parties when appropriate of that team member’s progress.
The next challenge is trying to figure out what is the design possibility space of the device, to see what it can, cannot, and somewhat are able to do. To tackle this, we are spending a bit longer of the project life cycle on exploring possible options and combinations of the capabilities of the device.
One of the capabilities we wanted to pursue, voice recognition as a natural gesture for AR interactions, is currently blocked while we wait for additional quality hardware to be delivered.
Our Plan For Next Week:
Next week, we are looking to continue exploring the device and the possibility space. We plan to prototype out more tools and toys and showcase them to our advisors before we narrow down our scope with the most exciting option in the coming weeks. We are also hopeful that our hardware arrives and we will be able to try some form of voice recognition integrated with the device.