12/1 – 12/8

What We Did:

Our project has finally come to a close. This was a very exciting adventure that we undertook over these past 15 weeks,
and you will be able to read our final thoughts in a postmortem which will be posted shortly.

In this last week sprint we got the last touches done on our project. We started by finishing all video shooting needed for our promotional videos so it can showcase the best possible footage of our application experience.

We then attempted to tackle a workaround for the compass not working as expected, but then realized that this is a problem with almost all cellphone’s built in compass. A good solution to overcome this challenge would be way out of scope and so we were forced to accept our previous workaround, which is one can swipe to summon the companion wherever they want.

We also finished our research paper which we have submitted for publication
which summarizes all of our insights over the past semester.

Finally, we spent the rest of our time preparing for our Final Presentation
before our peers, ETC graduates and Electronic Arts employees.

Our final presentation went really well. We did a great job explaining all the lessons that we have learned while developing this experience on this emerging technology. We were asked some great questions and the people that tried our application had fun interacting with Sparky and were amazed by some of the components. One guest commented that a lot of what we have done is working behind the scenes so most people don’t realize it which he thought was really interesting.

All in all, we had a great time developing this markerless augmented reality experience on the BT-200 glasses and we learned a lot about developing on this space. The biggest takeaway for us developing on the project was never giving up when we faced tough challenges. Randy Pausch who had founded the Entertainment Technology Program had said before:

“The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.”

 

Thanks a lot for following our progress!
~Team Palimpsest