10/27 – 10/31
What We Did:
This was a very exciting week with lots of progress following the showcase at Halve’s Presentation. Before we dive into what we have accomplished over this past week, we wanted to point out an awesome event that
we partook in that has not yet been covered in a newsletter.
Last week right before Halve’s presentation Carl and John took a trip down to Los Angeles to do an interview for Epson which will be displayed on their developer page for the BT-200. It was great to finally meet in person with Eric, the product manager for the augmented reality glasses, as well as Michael, the associate product manager. The shoot went really well, and people there had a great time interacting with our rough build and seeing where it is heading.
So this week, our team’s sprint started with a big meeting where we discussed the feedback that we received. We also got great feedback from Anthony Daniels who was visiting the ETC-SV branch for a few days.
We then planned out our soft’s demo goal along with goals for the next three sprints.
From a research standpoint, we have been researching what conferences we want to submit the research paper we will be writing to and we compiled a list of them with deadlines. We also have three potential research domains that we are considering exploring and which can provide value to future augmented reality developers.
We are now using the Asana tool in addition to daily Scrum to help us manage tasks and deadlines a bit better. This really helps counter the main weakness of Scrum, which is that the deadlines for tasks are often not very salient.
We are making great progress on the technical front. We have almost finished making and integrating the navigational component. We have now gotten the wit.ai scripts to work with any place instead of just resturants. We also managed to squash two major bugs that have persisted for a while. The first being that the applicated used to crash when the microphone did not pick up any responses and the application would also crash if the google search component yielded no results. They have both been accounted for now which makes our application very stable.
From an art standpoint we made a bunch of decisions and progress as well. We decided how we wanted to visually represent Sparky’s speech. We also planned out how we want to give the user feedback that Sparky is in fact listening to the request and showcase when Sparky is no longer listening. We also planned and
made most of the animations for his navigation and conversation system.
Challenges:
We are almost done with the main technical challenges. We should be completely finished with them by Monday evening.
We had a little bit of a hiccup when we tried to make Sparky’s mouth animated while Sparky is talking. We initially tried a movie texture but Unity will not deploy movie textures to IOS\Android devices so we moved to a sprite solution which will allow us greater flexibility in making the speech animation look just right.
Another slight challenge that slowed down our progress for this week, was that one of our three programmers was away on a business trip for most of the week. But we adjusted our week’s production timeline accordingly
and ended the week where we wanted to.
Plan For Next Week:
We are about to enter week #11, and we still have a lot we want to accomplish before softs! We should be finished integrating in the navigation component by Monday evening. While that is going on we will be trying to adjust the speech rate and select a new voice to make Sparky sound a bit more natural. We will be having animations of various emotions being created and integrated to give him a bit more personality. We plan on doing multitude of playtesting sessions throughout the week to get great user feedback to move beyond that of a technical demo.
We are very excited to see this application really coming together.