During this week, we merge up the code from Fan, Michael, Joseph and Kanglei to become one whole experience. On Thursday, the game successfully run under wired Oculus DK 1 (with USB connected to computer, portable power layout, wired DK1 manager) and Motion capture system run under 60 fps. Except for the feedback for player to understand which buttons has been triggered is not obvious enough, the biggest problem we faced is the 1~2 second latency between player’s action and our program. We haven’t be able to find out the reason yet, but we suggest 2 possible situations that may cause this: the computer is too old to run this (display card is about 5 years old),  or either the power supply for Oculus Rift is not enough.

On Tuesday, our team have a 30 minutes talking to Jesse, and told him about our project and our goal. And we received some precious feedback, including what’s separate Motion Capture from others, and what are some successful projects in Motion Capture did. The idea of “using body as an input” became the concentration we have afterwards. So we did some modifications on our semester plan, and also a brainstorm meeting on Friday to figure out what are the cool stuffs we can try in this prerequisite.

Our team also had a short talk about what we are going to present on Quarters walkaround. With advices from Salvador and John, currently we are looking for a document, a video that will be shared or cited by other people as our goal. But, details and the real final delivery still hasn’t be decided yet. We will talk about this and make sure everything before next Monday, and finished our quarter presentation before next Tuesday. We are also thinking of making a short frap video about MoCap, and also what we’ve done in our maze prototype.

This week, we have a lot of progress, and we will start research on Sansung VR Gear as another solution for the laggy problem as well. In short, our first prototype is about to be done and ready for presentation. After quarters, we are going to step into next prototype, which is about body as an input.

During this week, we got the devices and tools we need and start testing them. We’ve found something went wrong when using wireless HDMI with DK2. But we will keep working on them to make sure that everything works.

In the meantime, we start to implement our first prototype, the maze. We’ve sketched the concept art and rather than just trying functionality, we’ve implemented functions that are going to be used in the game. The maze is going to be a mixture of puzzle and gravity changes, with 9 blocks on the ground as the player’s input to solve the puzzle. By entering the corresponding key sequence showing on the wall, player will be able to change gravity and walk along vertical paths. If everything goes right, we are going to finish our first prototype soon.

Also, we’ve made our shopping list for room decoration! And also our team photo!! Now we are all set to concentrate in our works.

This week, we’ve focused on a prototype for our maze game. After our meeting on Wednesday, gameplay programming team decided to try two different methods implementing sense of gravity change. Both methods were presented on Friday afternoon, and the team decided the one which is rotating the world rather than rotating the camera.

Besides of that, we’ve built up our Unity Assets Server, and also received wired Oculus Rift DK2. All programmers have successfully installed the Oculus Runtime Environment in their computers. Initially, our team was not able to install Oculus Rift on Motion Capture Room’s computer. But the problem has been solved lately. After DK2’s wireless toolkit arrived, our platform will be completely ready.

Also during this week, our team discovered the bottle-neck for Motion Capture SDK, which forced us to think of our game design once again. Hence we decided not to rewrite Motion Capture wrapper. On the other hand, we start to think about what can be added into our system to make it even better and further prove that it worths an upgrade.

Over next week, we will polish our maze game even better, and our logo, half-sheet and poster will be done.

• We’ve decided the project name to be “MoleCap”, and Joseph is the producer, Maria is the co-producer for our team. We have understood how Motion Capture works, and ready to further develop cool stuffs on it.
• We have a brainstorming session to establish basic elements we are going to explore for the next week. And we’ve decided a brief schedule for our whole semester, which is:
  • Now – Quats: Explore possibilities and Try out our wrapper with some basic executables.
  • Quats – Halves: Build up many prototypes (mini-games) to try out what can be successful.
  • Halves – Soft: Focus on one game and make it the best one ever.
  • Soft – Final: Polishing the project.
• And our project team will be divided into two mini teams in the following weeks, which are:
  • Maria and K: more in Tool development
  • Michael and Fan and Joseph: more in Game development
  • Jiaqi: assisting both teams as an artist