Date Range: 03/13/2019 - 03/19/2019
Total Hours Spent: 9
Overview
This week's update is going to follow in stride with last week and be a bit shorter than most. I've been working on getting content prepared for our beta presentation on Friday (Mar. 15) and rejigging hit boxes on our dummy geometry to register unique collisions from each limb. I wanted to hold off on publishing my post this week because I scheduled a discussion with our Professor regarding beta presentation feedback so I could reflect on it here.
Challenges & Successes
I may sound like a broken record at this point but the biggest challenge is, and has been, allocating time to make significant progress on this project amidst our other more immanent deadlines. The work we're getting through is past the most challenging aspects - getting grabbing working took a month - and is now focused on getting the various pieces we've managed to get finished glued together into a complete package.
One of our teammates has been struggling with an injury which has put a lot of pressure on the team to make up for the missing hands and gaps in communications. It's been difficult to reallocate work without shutting out a team member entirely but I think we've managed the work we can to the best of our ability at this time; everything is easier in retrospect.
Our greatest successes over this past week, I believe, were, one, getting our VR environment to look REALLY clean and polished for the beta presentation and spending some time with out prof and TA to discuss feedback for our presentation as well as our course and program in general. We have a unique relationship with our prof and TA because they are both graduates of our program and have a greater understanding of our challenges out of the gate than most other professors do after a semester of watching the bags under our eyes extend past our chins. All jokes aside, I feel that our discussion helped level expectations on both sides of the table and inject some motivation back into our team for the final stretch of this project. We've made some great progress and are even a little ahead of the schedule we outlined in our beta presentation (see Figure 1 below).
Figure 1: Beta Presentation Title Slide
Over past couple of days I made some progress with attaching separate hit boxes (see Figure 2 below) to our kendo dummy so we'll be able to detect unique collision events when users strike each limb to fulfill the sequence received from the Master user on a mobile device. We currently have a proxy html page with buttons that emit the intended events which are being correctly picked up by the Master so all that remains is to relocate the events emitters from the proxy page buttons to the dummy hit boxes.
Figure 2: Screenshot of the new hi boxes (outline in red) attached to the dummy model. There are currently 8 unique hit boxes that will detect their own collisions and emit unique events.
Next Steps
We're now on the final stretch to release which means we have a handful of loose ends to tie up over the next two weeks. As shown in the timeline image from the beta above, we have a plan laid out for exactly what needs to be worked on and completed by the end remaining sprint. I'll be working on getting the physical interactions and menus finished up in VR while my teammates polish the mobile user experience before we all come together to package up both sides into the final experience.
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