Date Range: 01/30 - 02/05/2019
Total Hours Spent: 8
Overview
This past sprint marked the official kickoff of development on the project. Our team has been focused on building the foundational elements of the project to pave the way for key features that will be coming down the pipe in the coming weeks. Personally, I have spent my time over the last week updating and organizing the GitHub project board, researching how to integrate Oculus Rift tracking/controls and game physics, and finally getting the aforementioned Oculus Rift features up and running.
Challenges & Successes
My greatest challenge over this past sprint was honestly just managing my time between everything that had to get done inside and out of this project. Our program has had/still have a sleuth of assignments due in a short period of time which has put a huge strain on the amount of time I've had to commit to the development of this project. I spent most of my time this sprint, as Project Manager, going back through our Project Board on GitHub to clean up, redefine, and redistribute tickets to more realistically represent our capabilities each week while we keep up with approaching deadlines and exams. The assignment due in parallel with our weekly deliverables this week is an unnecessary addition to our workload at this time, especially with an alpha presentation expected for next week. I only feel that our time and effort would be better spent focusing on this project as opposed to another assignment that is worth more of our grade than it should be. Not to say it's unachievable, but that's hardly the point.
A quick video capture taken from the current debug environment showing off the newly implemented Oculus Rift look-controls.
On the bright side, while researching Oculus functionality and physics options I came across components for both that might make integrating the features we need a lot easier than expected (thank you A-Frame community). We were able to get some great looking physical interactions working (see Braeden's M3 blog post) and the Oculus look-controls are also working well, though the controller support already doesn't seem to be as intuitive as the online documentation has lead me to believe. I've already spent a large chunk of time playing around with the "hand-controls" and "oculus-touch-controls" components to try and get something working but as of right now, more time needs to be spent finagling with components to see if I can get something working soon.
Next Steps
This next week will be hard-focused on working towards our alpha presentation. We had to push back a couple important item from this past sprint, such as object interaction, into the upcoming sprint which means we'll have to work a little more magic than usual to get a solid demo put together for this time next week. I have some important work to finish up in regard to the Oculus Touch controller integration, fingers crossed I can figure something out asap.
UPDATE:
I got the hand-controls component to work in the FireFox browser but have yet to get it running in Chrome...more work to be done on that front. At least we have something; progress!
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