Hello hello from SV!

Next week is halves, which is a big milestone for the project.  As such, most of our effort has been devoted to preparing for both a demo, video, and presentation.  For the most part this has gone well, and we have met our base goal for where we need to be for these deliverables.  That was made difficult by some difficulties we will discuss later.  Some specifics about those deliverables are as follows.  The presentation will meet all the requirements listed for halves by the ETC, and we are trying to focus on low density slides, relying on individual speakers to hit key points.  The video will be about a minute long, roughly a third of the length of the demo, and will feature a single exhibit in the museum.  The demo will be a three minute long experience, featuring three exhibits, and Mixy will serve the teacher role, with the superfan personality.

One major setback we encountered was the datedness of RainAI.  It turned out to not be compatible with Hololens, which set us back about three days, on both design and engineering, the week before halves.  As you can imagine this was painful, but we have learned from that mistake and have corrected course in time to meet our halves goals.  We are investigating other tools and methods at our disposal to make development of our AI smoother moving forward, similar to what Rain would have done.  Otherwise, we successfully managed to make a space mapping tool, and use that tool to successfully map the space, and get the character walking around, talking, and animating well.

Speaking of animations, we managed to get a large number of animations into the demo, all of our critical animations for the project, in fact.  There are still several variations of those to do, but we are extremely pleased with how well our animation pipeline is working, especially because our original concerns were that animation would be a bottleneck.  We are currently slotting time for next week to finish all the critical animations, and improve them based on feedback from halves.

Design, as with the rest of our efforts, was focused on halves.  Not so say that is all we did of course!  With our direction fairly solid, we are confident internally in the major design decisions we have made, which should cover the entire length of the project.  Of course, this is likely to change during halves, as many people outside the team will put eyes on the project.  So, our goal this week was to really question our decisions, and make sure we are able to explain as many of those decisions as possible, and understand them enough to integrate as much feedback as possible.

Next week will be all about halves feedback, see you then!

~mixAR