Week 10: Post Halves plans & New Features

We had made good progress until halves and achieved our goal of putting the entire pipeline together and testing them out. We also got a lot of good feedback and advise from our playtesters during the Halves demo.

Schedule for next weeks

We went through our list of features we wanted to implement and made another revision of the list. This is how it looks like now.

Possible Story Ideas

We were also wondering if we could introduce some more game elements into our experience by adding a story line and reward system. Here is a list of ideas and storyboards that we prepared. We evantually decided that it would complicate our existing experience and distract the users while focusing on the game.

More Animations!

We added more animations to Ako this week. These are actions he would be making throughout the game for different reactions. Ako also has a little touch of VFX to make him happier!

Working with Speech Fallbacks

Before halves, we hadn’t dealt with speech interruption. Ako was effectively deaf while he was speaking because we wanted to avoid edge cases to happen and let the experience flow in a simple manner.
However, for natural conversations to be possible, we had to consider and enable features to deal with speech interruptions and different kinds of edge cases.
We had to answer questions like :

1. How would Ako behave when interrupted while he was speaking?
2. What would happen if one is subconsciously speaking/murmuring to himself or to somebody else, and not to Ako? How do we differentiate between those kinds of inputs versus valid ones?
3. How do we filter out sounds (which are not English words) like coughs or sneezes from the user so that Ako doesn’t have to process them?
4. How do we treat things like people asking for hints/rules/other questions mid-game?
   So this week was about discussing these areas and optimizing Ako for a more of a natural conversation

Complete Card Set and Cued Tracking

Until last week, we were building our demo with a specific set of cards. The reason being, we would know which cards are part of the cards on the table and what would be the possible set in them.

For a Set to be found, the system must know the features of all the 12 cards that are on the table. But, we can’t find the cards unless we “see” their ArUco codes.

So, our question: How do we know what all cards are on the table at a given time?

The answer is: Track and register the card before they are placed on the table.

So, we added AR cues to instruct the players what to do. This allowed us to use all the cards in the deck.

This also allowed us to classify the cards into 3 categories : On Deck, On table and Discarded to avoid confusing the system.