This week was a hectic one, but product, and very informative!  The reason for this of course, was quarter “walkarounds,” more of a showcase here in SV, though.  We had a ton of EA employees come by and give us great feedback on both our character concepts, design goals and questions, and a demo of the core experience we threw together.

For your viewing pleasure, here is a video Carl was so kind to provide of our walk through, go ahead, watch it!  This static, unchanging text on your web browser will still be here when you’re done!

https://vimeo.com/184886100

Welcome back!  Most of our week was putting together that experience, which we will let the video stand alone to testify for that work.  Additionally, we compiled our notes on feedback, which you may read at your leisure here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Zu1VnT0iWa_GIPMZlyD6q45Ji4GQhFGoy6DEY2DaoRQ/edit

What we did besides that was speaking to a very nice gentleman named Shawn, he is our contact at University Relations.  We talked to him about the tours he gives, what he finds make a good tour vs a bad one, as well as some logistical points for us using the space.  He was very excited about the project, and actually expressed interest in using it once we’re done, which is very awesome to hear for us.  Also, he gave us the actual script he uses to conduct tours, which will be super helpful for us.

Next week our focus will be on getting the character into the scene in some form and interacting with the player, as that is our highest priority item after our feedback from quarters.

Until next time,
~mixAR

mixAR here for another weekly update!

This week we really laid the foundation for our project.  Our tech has progressed to where we have some of the core functionality – selecting objects in the real world to interact with – is in our project, we have designed out a huge amount of the experience, and our character concept is almost finalized!

For tech, we’ve really been focusing on getting interactions in, because that will let us iterate on design much faster.  Specifically, we are setting up dummy objects in our work space, and teaching the HoloLens to look at them, and pop up little UI elements around those real objects in space.  Getting that to look good and flow right will be a challenge, but one we are ready to take on.

Art has been slightly distracted by branding materials, but those are now finished, so we are hard at work finalizing a character concept.   Our plan is to have the basic modeling for the character done by end of next week.  We are between a masked apparition idea, and a friendly robot, we love both but want to make sure we go with the one we love the most.

We have a great idea where to go moving forward as well, and have quite a large backlog of features we’d love to work on, and have figured out the problems we need to solve quite admirably.  In the immediate future though, quarter walkarounds are next week, and we feel ready to talk about all of our exciting ideas and research, and we’re confident we will get some great feedback to use moving forward.

That’s it for this week.  See you next time!
~mixAR

Hello again friends, mixAR here!

This week has seen some pretty major pivots, so we made less progress than we should have, in a sense.  However, those pivots have landed us in a wonderful place.  Our Branding materials have all been finished, at least as a first pass, our tech has progressed enough to begin working, though was stalled largely this week by design concerns, which we should get into now.

Our original idea, while good, didn’t quite satisfy us, so we spent the week making absolutely sure we are going to come out of this project with a strong work that really hit the goals set out at the start of the semester.  That is a challenge for every project, but we now have a very solid plan, to build a guided tour experience of a gallery here at EA.  This really does meet the aforementioned goals much better than any previous idea, and we are very happy with it.  

So, now that the road is clear, we are going to push forward as best we can.  

Looking forward to next week,
~mixAR

It’s week 2 and Team mixAR is doing well!

This week has seen each member of the team begin to work in earnest on the project. However, there is a lot of setup to do on any project, so that has taken priority this week.

On the programming front, we have begun setting up our Unity project, and getting code running on the Hololens with good success.  This means that next week we can start writing code for the project and testing on device, which is really exciting for us!

Art is progressing well, with a slight focus on branding  and marketing materials still being present.  Our main character is being concepted, and our logo is being constantly updated and improved on as well.

Design-wise, we have been researching everything from professional checkers matches, to AI methods for calculating emotion, to psychology papers on emotion in general.  We have been compiling as much of this research as we can in our team’s google drive folder.  

Our first sprint planning will be Monday morning first thing, so next week we will really be ramping into production on our project, and we’re all excited.  So stay tuned for next week’s update, hopefully it’s as good.
-Team mixAR

Hey everyone, this is our first Newsletter for Team mixAR!

This week has been very eventful, with everyone getting settled in sunny California, and all the fun that surrounds that.  For project work however, after getting to know each other, the team quickly dived into the problem presented by the problem (How do people interact with AI Agents in an AR environment — using Hololens), and came up with a two stage plan for executing on the project.

Step 1, Checkers:  This stage will likely go until Halfs, at longest. In it, we will construct an agent in real space to serve as a Checkers opponent to the Guest.  The Agent, Hereafter referred to as Mix, will react to your moves, being pleased, conceited, worried, etc.  Additionally, we will see how the experience changes if instead of playing against you, Mix stands over your shoulder and reacts to your play vs a more traditional computer opponent, or perhaps a real person.

Step 2, Something Unique:  After Halfs, we want to make our own game.  We have various ideas floating around, but nothing solid, as we want to learn as much as possible from the Checkers prototype before deciding on how best to utilize Mix.  In general though, we want to utilize all the technology developed in Checkers, along with the knowledge we’ve gained, to make a more physically based experience where the Guest must rely heavily on Mix to progress, and we want it to be very physically based to utilize the power of the Hololens.

Next week will be the start of our first sprint, where we will begin designing our first Checkers experience, Mix, and our core tech.  
In summary, we’ve started strong and there are no signs of that changing soon!  Keep checking back each week for further updates.