Communication Presentation Review - Shades of Black

Overall this group's presentation was good, although there were a couple of areas where it fell down. It was obvious that the group was very well organised and knew what each of their roles within the presentation was. The slides that accompanied the speaking were also well put together. They did not have too much text, or especially the whole talk, but just enough that the audience knew what they were talking about. I did feel as if the pictures that accompanied the talk were too generic, and didn't have anything to do with the group's project, and although they had some link to the topic, they were too generic to really lend anything to the presentation. What everyone said seemed well thought out, although there were a few times were it seemed like the text was a little too verbose. This didn't help the presentation at all, but rather made it seem like they were spilling out large words just for the sake of doing so rather than to explain the topic of communication.

One main concern of mine was that the group tried to tackle the entire idea of communication rather than to pick a small section of it and do it thoroughly. While they did split up the topic into sub topics, these were all summarised quickly by an individual. I think it would have been more substantial to pick one or two of these sub topics and focus the entire presentation on those.

The video at the end of the presentation was interesting, although it did seem to just reiterate the presentation. I did like the interview style the group used, although it seemed too disjointed by each person being in a large variety of seated positions.

Week 7

Main update this week is that we sent our prototype Kinect rig to the laser cutters here at UNSW.

Design sent to the laser cutter

Sketchup model of the prototype

 The prototype will be mainly cut out of MDF, but with one acrylic part for the movement. We still need to buy some nuts and bolts to put it all together with, but that will be easy.

This week we also began testing the Kinect integration on my laptop. It all ran smoothly after spending a while setting it all up. It is a little limited with what we can make the game character do from the real world sensor, so we might have to rethink both our level of interaction as well as our method of demonstration.

Next week we are giving a presentation on Intellectual Property as a group, so we spent some time this week preparing as a group. Our tasks for the talk are split into the following categories:

Using IP:

• How to use other peoples IP.
• IP our group is using and how we should use it.

Creating IP:

• Automatic IP Rights.
• Formally Registered IP Rights.
• IP we've created and how we'd protect it.

 I'm doing the second topic, IP our group is using and how we should use it. This means I need to talk about all the different types of IP that our project involves, and investigate how their licensing agreements and intellectual property protection allows us to use them in the context of our project. The main IP I need to look at is: The Kinect and it's SDK, CryEngine 3, Arduino and Caroma products.

Week 6

I was unfortunately sick this week and didn't make class, but I talked to the group about where we're all at and what needs to be done. Matt talked with Stephen Davey about the Kinect integration with CryEngine. Unfortunately Matt's laptop runs Windows 8, which CryEngine 3 is incompatible with, so he'll either have to use my laptop or a uni one to do any work on the Crysis side of things. On a positive side, Stephen already has some code that works with the Kinect in Crysis, that allows for character movement by moving your legs, leaning, as well as recognising hand gestures.

The level design side of the group has also presented some of their work today. They have a first draft of the level, with three different sized houses and the detailed bathrooms. The models all look quite nice, although they could do with some more advanced texturing.

Week 5

This week wasnon teaching week for UNSW so we didn't have class. Matt and I talked about or ideas for moving the Kinect and are pretty certain we're going to go for the spider-cam system, but we'll get some feedback from Russell and Stephen next week and go from there.
Matt also worked on developing a design for a prototype Kinect rig. Info for that can be found on our wiki Here.

The other three members of our team have worked on the bathroom designs for the Crysis level, and should have them implimented into the environment by class next week.