Week 4

In this weeks studio class, we allocated who will be doing what group presentation later in the semester. I chose the topic of Intellectual Property for our group. This decision came about because it seemed like the most relevant topic to our project. We are using a number of different companies property to create our own system, so I thought it would be nice to investigate exactly how we are and aren't allowed to use this property. Our presentation most likely also cover how we are creating our own IP and how we as a group can protect it. This topic is also very relevant to us as students and as future designers, so I think it will be very useful to look into.

As a group, we talked with Stephen and Russell about our project. We looked at what we were planning on achieving as a group and how we should go about achieving it. Me and Matt both feel that our main problem is going to be the Kinect and how we will get it to function within a system running a number of different things at once. Stephen has some code that works with the CryEngine already, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it will do what we want it to do.

Me and Matt talked about how we think we can move the Kinect around the room to track a person as well. This is because of the limited view range of the Kinect, and the possibility that the user will step out of this space.We had a number of ideas, the most likely being a hinge system. This would be the Kinect sitting on a two axis hinge that would sit in a corner of the room, allowing it to rotate sideways and up and down to track someone. The other idea we came up with was for a bigger room, and is a Spider-cam like system that uses four wires attached to the Kinect and then to winches on each corner of the room. These would allow the Kinect to glide across the roof of the room as the winches push or pull the wires in unison.We will continue to look into these systems and try to figure out which one will be the most useful and easiest to construct.