Week 4

This week we chose which group presentation topic we would be doing. We chose to do the Intellectual Property topic, as it's quite relevant to our project, given the amount of IP we are both using and creating. Thankfully we have a number of weeks to prepare for this presentation, which is useful in order to determine exactly what role IP plays in our project and why it's important.
There is also another group doing IP, since there are 6 groups and 5 topics. It will be interesting to see how our presentations differ and what effect our differing projects have on our perception of the topic.

We discussed with Stephen Davey and Russell Lowe where our project should be headed and how much we can feasibly get done. This is one of the more difficult parts of the project, since it's very difficult to tell what kind of problems we'll come across, especially with the Kinect integration, Stephen Davey has some code already implemented, but it could take a single day or multiple years. With this in mind we'll need to continually re-evaluate what our end goal is as we progress through this project so we don't devote too much time to a single area and end up having an incomplete project or a project with a single, disconnected feature.

We also began discussing the kind of design we wanted to use to translate the Kinect around the room. Designs we are currently evaluating are a simple two-axis hinge system that could sit in the corner of the room and simply rotate side-to-side and up and down to keep the user in range, also a Spider-cam-like system that uses 4 wires on winches to move the Kinect across the roof of the room as well as a rotating motor to turn to face the user. Another possibility is a rail-based system that can move the Kinect along a rail on the roof, and potentially throughout the house.
Each of these designs will be evaluated in terms of its potential flexibility as well as ease of construction.