Group Presentations Review: Intellectual Property

Interactive Architecture:

The first presentation on Intellectual Property was by the “Interactive Architecture” group.

Their presentation was quite well structured and had plenty of informative content. Their oral presentation varied, it was quite good when they where explaining points with their own words, demonstrating their understanding of the topic, but some of the group members tended to simply read off cards or the screen, meaning the oration was quite monotone and not very engaging.
Some members seemed quite tense and would rattle off large amounts of text with very little time to actually understand what was being said in-between, while other members where perhaps overly relaxed, meaning their sentences where vague and not particularly well structured.

The written presentation had some useful summaries of the various concepts in intellectual property, though the style in which these where presented was not very consistent, which suggests that the amount of collaboration prior to the presentation was fairly small. This was also evidenced in the presentation styles, as some members seemed far more confident or knowledgeable than others.

They had plenty of examples, but these seemed to all be external examples, with no reference to their actual project. Project-specific examples tend to be more useful than external ones since they show how you can take a product and then run through how to protect it, where as an external example tends to be finding something related to IP, then going backwards to the product, so you don't really understand the process taken to protect it. These examples where backed up by images, which where relevant and fairly well explained, if occasionally miss-scaled.
They also had a physical example, which was quite interesting and certainly engaged the audience more than images or text could.

Most of their members seemed to have a good understanding of IP, though some effort to make the presentation consistent beforehand would have been beneficial.

Communication Presentation Review

The presentation by the “Shades of Black” group on the topic of communication was moderately well presented. There where occasions when the speaker was excessively verbose, making it sound more like they where regurgitating meaningless rhetoric rather than actually explaining their understanding of the topic. On the whole the slides where well composed, being relatively light on text and using interesting, if somewhat generic, images. The examples used where largely useful and helped to explain the topic, though the one accompanying the “integrity” topic seemed unrelated and didn't explain much, so I understand less about that topic than the others, which perhaps speaks more to the quality of the other examples rather than the lack of it in that particular one.

The topic of communication is a rather broad one, and I felt that the presentation would have been more easily understood had the scope been minimised and a small subsection of communication focused on rather than trying to encompass the whole conceptual topic.

The images where interesting, but I felt the connection to the topic being discussed was a bit flimsy and their actual relevance seemed fairly limited. While those little images of faceless models interacting are nice, they don't convey much of a message. Diagrammatic images tend to be more interesting, especially if you use them to explain your point, like the second image in “methods”.

In terms of the written content, it's well organised and the references are relevant and plentiful. There does seem to be a lack of content for the “Integrity” topic however.

The video is not particularly useful, it explains very little that couldn't be explained in text. Also, the style of content in the video varies frequently, meaning it was difficult to determine how to understand the meaning behind what was being said.

Week 7

This week the Kinect Rig prototype design was completed and sent to the laser cutters.

The 3d modelled prototype.

The laser-cutting schematics.

We also began testing the Kinect integration on Stevens computer. The tests we ran where successful, though as with all Kinect based activity, the environment can have a detrimental effect on the effectiveness of the device. This means we can begin fine-tuning the kind of interactions we planned at the start and hopefully can have them operational soon.


We began preparations for the Intellectual Property presentation we are giving next week. We split the presentation up into 5 main areas for the 5 group members, which fall into 2 categories as follows:

Using IP:

• How to use other peoples IP.
• What other IP do we use and how should we do it.

Creating IP:

• Automatic IP Rights.
• Formally Registered IP Rights.
• IP we've created and how we'd protect it.

I chose the 5th topic, IP we've create and how we'd protect it. There are 3 main things I think should be discussed in this topic:

1. The Kinect apparatus.
2. The CryEngine level and models.
3. The software written to react to the Kinect.

We plan to meet up on Friday this week to fully write up the presentation to ensure it works as a cohesive whole.

Planning Presentation Review

The presentation by the 3RDiConstruct team on the topic of Planning was an interesting report on the types and application of planning strategies and techniques.
The presentation was done using the “prezi” tool, which I felt was not used to its fullest effect, in fact, the only effect it had was to make me somewhat dizzy. The slides themselves suffered from one of the common problems with these kinds of presentations, where there is an abundance of text on the page, with a few images and diagrams here and there. The text itself was hard to read, partly due to screen size, and the images where often not entirely clear. The abundance of text meant that a large proportion of the presentation was spent simply reading text off the slides. This not only lessened any interest I had, but also gave the impression that the presenters where not particularly familiar with the content they where presenting. It also meant that instead of speaking clearly and intelligibly, there where often times when the reader would accidentally miss a word or attempt to paraphrase a long paragraph and the resulting sentence was somewhat nonsensical. I frankly prefer someone who says um and ah here and there while actually thinking about what they're going to say than someone who simply vocalizes text on a screen without thinking about the actual sentences.

The content was well split up, though the jumps between topics felt somewhat disconnected, and in general the content was of a reasonable quality. One way this could definitely have been improved is with more examples from the groups project. While examples where given, they felt like a side note. More central examples, having a base from which to explain the planning process, rather than explaining the process and trying to put little examples on each one, would have been much more useful in showing practical applications of the concepts that where described.
A few final suggestions, brevity is the heart of a good presentation. If you can explain something quickly and succinctly, not only will people listen to it, but they'll keep listening afterward.
Also, don't point out things you haven't done, it's not useful or particularly encouraging.

Week 6

We began working on integrating the Kinect sensor into Cryengine. Stephen Davey has already written some plugin nodes that can be used to control the character in game by moving in front of the Kinect. Whether this will be effective enough for the amount of interaction we're hoping for remains to be seen. We may need to use some more basic input, as the node he demonstrated was more tied to using the Kinect to make the character walk along by walking on the spot, where as we are more interested in tracking peoples actual movement by moving the Kinect, as well as their hand gestures.
We ran into some problems where Cryengine has not yet been updated to properly work with Windows 8. This means most of the development will have to be done on another laptop, probably Stevens, but unfortunately he wasn't here this week.
This could make development a bit slower, along with the fact that we don't have a Kinect ourselves and have to borrow them from BECU, meaning any progress has to be made while on campus.


The level creation group also presented their current progress to the group.

The level

The larger bathroom

While not yet complete, the models look quite good and follow the plans provided by Stephen quite well. The environment is nice, though perhaps a bit too detailed given that the entire focus will be on one room.

Week 5 - Non-Teaching

This week was a non-teaching week, but progress continued on the project. Steven and myself decided on a form for the Kinect Rig, we'll develop a design for a spider-cam like device and get feedback on it from Russell and Stephen.
I've come up with a preliminary design for a prototype:

The design still needs to be refined to make sure it can be constructed and that the motor will be able to connect, but I think this could potentially be quite effective.
It uses the heads of 4 bolts to hold up the lower section while the motor in the middle rotates it. The Kinect is connected by two laser-cut brackets and a piece stopping it from sliding sideways. The four wires are connected to the top-plate as well as the motor, meaning the Kinect can be rotated as well as moved around.