At this point in time, I'm in charge of the group, although it wasn't always that way. To begin with, Laura was our leader, but because she wasn't confident in her ability to be in charge of the group she asked me to take over. I have mixed feelings about this for a number of reasons. Firstly, it was probably a good idea because I feel like I would be a better group leader than her, especially if she went into it with the idea that she wouldn't be. In contrast to this, I have a feeling that it would have been better for the group as a whole if she had stayed on as our group leader. At the moment our team is struggling with interaction, mainly due to the language barrier we face with having members who don't have English as their first language. Having Laura as our leader may have negated some of this as she would be able to take charge in their native language where I struggle to communicate with our group members sometimes.
I feel that this barrier we face as a group has somewhat hindered our ability to work thoroughly on our project. In conjunction with this language barrier, I feel that some of the members of the group have a large disinterest in the project, so much that they work a little on their part of it then put it out of mind. This makes managing a large project quite difficult, as it means work is either not delivered or it's delivered at a subpar standard. The only course of action we've been able to take in relation to this is to press on with our work as best we can and not overly rely on imput from all members of the group. The way we structured our project initially means that there are two main focuses for our group, and at present we are able to press on with at least one of these working properly. While this means we may not end up presenting everything we set out to present as a final project, it does mean that we will be able to have a large section of it finalised, be it proof of concept or finished completely.
As group leader, seeing early that these issues were arising, I had to add my milestone the notion of keeping the group running as smoothly as possible. I feel that to a certain degree I've been successful with this so far. A lot of my time in this project has gone towards trying to ensure that everyone knows what they're doing and when they need their work to be completed. Though no matter how much I stress these issues I still find that it is out of my control if the work actually ends up being done or not, which can be frustrating, especially when that work then falls onto others to complete.
Mechanical Design:
From the outset of our project, we split the group into two parts, the design of the mechanical and programming side of things, and the Crysis side. Myself and Matt took the physical aspects of our project and have been working on these since the beginning. Together we discussed idea for how our system would work. Matt designed the initial Kinect Rig, drawing up the plans which we eventually had laser cut into a prototype. Through this stage, I helped a little in talking through the design choices, although most of the work on this front was Matts.
My work on the mechanical side of things has been through the conceptualisation of our system for moving the Kinect across the room. Our initial brainstorming came up with the idea of using a Spider-Cam like system to move the rig across the roof of the room.
Programming:
My main aim for this project was to immerse myself into the programming side of it, as so far I have very little to no experience with that sort of thing and would like to know more about it. The project focuses on programming on two fronts, the Kinect's integration with Crysis, as well as Arduino to run the motor systems for the Kinect.
For the Kinect, we're managed to get the integration with CryEngine 3 working properly with Stephen Davey's help. At the moment what we can do with it is fairly basic, and will probably need us to get into the code of the Kinect and Crysis SDK to achieve what we want it to do. The next step for me will to be looking into these codes and seeing if we can get positional data for each limb on the person being tracked. This will allow us to be more interactive with the bathroom appliances with gestures and body positioning. It will also enable us to do things like changing the height of a toilet seat or shower head depending on the size of the person in the room, two of the major interactive parts we were hoping to achieve.
The other part of the programming that I've been looking at has been the Arduino. Coming from having basically no programming knowledge, fiddling with the Arduino kit has been difficult. I've gone through a learning booklet that Russell provided when he gave out the kits, which has taught me a few things, but at the moment I can't just sit down and make it do something, I need instructions to achieve this. My accomplishment so far is that I actually now understand what all the code is saying, and can figure out some problems when I come to them. I'm very happy with this progress so far, as I was completely stumped by it all initially. So far I've been able to do everything we will need for our rig to work. I've been able to get a stepper motor to move depending on a varying input amount, which would be what drives our spider cam style rig, as well as rotating the Kinect around on it's rig.
So far in this group project, I feel as if I've made progress towards what I set myself out to do at the beginning. I've been able to further my knowledge of programming, as well as how to practically apply that knowledge to our project. I've also been able to help design the mechanical systems that will eventually run it all.
As the team leader, I feel like our team is slowly moving forward, although a lack of interaction has dramatically limited our progress. I feel that if we keep moving at this rate, we will be able to accomplish something substantial, although not at all what we initially set out to do.
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