11/17 – 11/21
What We Did:
This week was an extremely eventful week. We had both Soft Opening at Electronic Arts on Friday as well as a Press Day filled with interviews the day before.
Before diving into that, we spent the initial portion of the week focusing on polishing the build. We knew that we would be inside a building for both meeting with press as well as presenting our build during softs, and so we wanted to make a build that excelled indoors. We adjusted the core loop of the application so that it would be both memorable for the user as well as function well enough indoors where the GPS signal is weak.
We also spent a good bit of time polishing the animations for the robot as well as tweaking his dialogue so that it was themed and fun for the user to interact with.
The press day event was a fun day where we managed to showcase our application to various outlets and allowed them to take a glance as to what the future may contain!
Softs was another great showcase where a number of Electronic Arts’ employees were able to check out the possibility space for augmented reality on the BT-200 glasses. We did run into some spotty wi-fi connectivity issues which cost us a bit of time to make a few workarounds there, but all in all it was a great experience for all parties involved.
Challenges:
As mentioned, we did run into some hiccups during softs presentation due to the poor wifi connectivity really affecting the performance of our build. Thankfully we had the video we recorded with Epson playing on the nearby big TV screen while we worked on developing workarounds for the internet. This experience just refreshed a lesson for us to always test your showcasing environment well in advance to catch these issues before they become big problems.
Plan For Next Week:
Next week will be a really short week due to Thanksgiving but we have a few components we would like to tackle in the upcoming weeks.
First we will process some feedback that we got from Softs and see how we want to address them. Then we have an upcoming research paper abstract deadline that we want to submit for. We will also be working on a branding video to explain our project so that its legacy can live on. Lastly, we are exploring solutions for our navigation waypoint system bug that is preventing the outdoor experience from being as polished as we would like.