I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! We’re back from break, starting winter quarter, and ready to hit the ground running with our project’s production.

Yesterday we discussed some issues we found with our interface. It seemed that having the project projected on the floor but having parts controlled via gestures and others controlled via touch would create a sort of disconnect, which we don’t want as it’s an important goal of ours for the installation to be highly immersive. We talked about two different solutions:

• Keeping the projected floor interface, but incorporating more touch. The blocks in the center circle might be activated by pressure pads, and the middle rings might be activated by double-tapping the foot or holding the foot in one place for a few seconds, rather than by our previously planned gestures. The outer space would be activated just by moving through it, as usual.
• Projecting the interface on to a screen, with the projector behind the screen to reduce distortion and the Kinect behind the user, rather than in front of or above. The entire installation would then be gesture controlled, but made so the user could still touch the screen, and special attention would be paid to the rest of the installation’s environment to keep the immersive aspect.

We also talked about some other technologies we could incorporate to take some of the brunt of the work off the Kinect, including working with Arduino boards and infrared sensors. We figure that the fewer things we need to force it to sense, the easier the installation will be to use.

We’ve got a bunch of upcoming goals for the next week:

• Thursday evening, a few of us will be installing the projector and Kinect in one of the Golisano labs so we can be sure we know how everything hooks up, and to practice safely hanging the equipment top-down in case we decide to keep the project projected on the floor.
• Tuesday, we’ll be doing some heavy usability testing – Matt and Mekan will be creating some very simple demos that we can control with gestures, and we’ll be trying the gestures projected on the floor and the wall as well as several other options. From there, we’ll move on to having other people play with the demos and getting their feedback as well. This will help us ultimately determine which direction we’re going to take, depending on what feels most natural, comfortable, and intuitive.
• Myself, Emma, Bogdan, and Theo will be doing some heavy design work for next week, so that we can pick out our final design direction and start working cohesively. Bogdan will also be taking a look at options for our sound visualizer.
• Brad will be taking a closer look at our options for music. We can create sounds, but we may also be able to generate sound dynamically through code, so this will take some experimenting with to see what works and sounds the best.

We just recently finished up our final presentation for the end of the quarter, and have a bunch of awesome design and development progress.

Matt and Mekan have gotten the Kinect receiving data and tracking gestures, which is an intrinsic part of how our installation is going to work.

Bogdan, Emma, Brad, and Theo have also been working on some more design concepts.

I worked on creating our research and process document. You can go ahead and download the PDF to take a look by clicking here. The documents noted at the end of the PDF as being on the CD are those that are included in this here blog post.

The designers will be working over Thanksgiving break to create additional design comps, and when we come back from the break we’ll be picking and choosing what we like best to nail down our final design direction by week two of winter quarter so we can start learning how to create the dynamic assets in Stage3D. The developers will be working on a Flash demo of the interface and getting our Kinect and projector mounted and working (we need to hang this equipment top-down from the ceiling, so a lot of time and care is going to be involved!). Around week six we hope to be putting design and development together so that by weeks nine and ten, we’ll just have bug fixes left.

In the meantime, we’ll also be looking in to materials to use for the blocks that will make the center of our projected interface work. We’ve got a couple different options for materials – the two we’re currently playing with being strong glass and foam core – so we’ll be studying costs and how well the materials stand up to abuse, since this project will need to be able to take a fairly heavy beating across about six hours of use at Imagine RIT.

We’ll see you after Thanksgiving!