Individual Major Milestone

Introduction:


The key feature of this project, it's in the course name, is collaboration. Unfortunately, this is an area in which our group has not been particularly successful.This project is part of a larger project under the guidance of Stephen Davey. Unfortunately he has had a large amount of other work to attend to and has not had many opportunities to provide direction, though he has been quite willing to give feedback.
I think that, in retrospect, the development of a timeline for us to work in would have helped us both assign tasks to be completed and complete them within a reasonable time frame.
However, we have made substantial progress and I hope we will achieve an interesting and innovative solution by the end of this project.
Hopefully we can still deliver an effective idea, even if it's somewhat theoretical, but it would be much more useful to have a functioning prototype.
I have made progress towards my individual milestones, however, a lack of group interaction and technical limitations have hampered my ability and enthusiasm to make more substantial developments. Hopefully our group and myself will be able to come together to create an effective project solution, but this will require a cohesive effort on the part of every member.

My personal progress has mostly been in the areas of industrial design and intellectual property. I had hoped to use this project to increase my programming prowess, particularly with the Kinect, however technical limitations have meant that I am unable to take as active a role as I would have liked in this part of the project.

Collaboration:

Our group has struggled with collaboration throughout this project due to the language barrier between its members and also the lack of a single, fundamental goal which has been present in past studios. I feel this is somewhat a result of the group formation process, since a group with a wider range of skills may have been able to better divide elements of the project and potentially communicate more effectively.

The detachment present in some members of the group has also meant that Steven, as the group leader, receives very little feedback or even basic contributions to the project, so effectively some members only action is to complete assigned work, slowly and ineffectively, and then to ignore the project. This problem is much more difficult to resolve since it stems from the attitudes of the members themselves and the only solution so far has been to not rely on any getting any input from them and simply running the project with a smaller group.

Industrial Design:

One area in which I personally have developed is Industrial Design. Having never done anything remotely similar to designing this Kinect mechanism, I was unsure where to start. Unfortunately, none of my team-members had any experience in this area either, so I effectively had to use trial-and-error to discover an effective solution. The solution I created turned out to be somewhat over-engineered, meaning it was excessively expensive and only marginally efficient. This was due to my focus on having it able to be laser cut and structurally sound. Perhaps if I had focused more on pre-built alternatives I could have procured an effective powered bearing that would have filled the same role as this design but cheaper and more effective Thankfully, we have a fall-back in the form of the 2-axis bracket, however, the amount of time spent on this is largely disproportionate to the payback. While this is useful to know, it is unfortunately too late to be of much use in this particular course.

Intellectual Property:

Due to the presentation we where required to deliver, I have become much more proficient in the area of Intellectual Property, particularly in the process of acquiring protection for the various kinds of IP that can be created. This promises to be useful in both this and future projects as most of the things we create in our course can be protected and there are ways this protection can be used to generate income as well as protect against IP theft. I also had another assignment in a different course on the subject of Intellectual Property and this presentation was of great value. There are very few areas, in fact, where a knowledge of IP would not be useful. I would say that so far it has been the most useful part of this course.

Programming:

While I had planned to focus on the programming side of this project, the lack of an available Kinect as well as the inability to even create any flowgraphs on Windows 8 means that this side of the project has rested mostly with Steven.
With that being said, we've worked collaboratively on the programming side and with Stephens help have achieved a working integration of the Kinect sensor and Cryengine 3. We hope to add the ability to track individual limbs to facilitate more intricate interactions with the various elements of the environment, though this may require delving into the Kinect SDK and exposing more of the positional joint data.

I've also worked on understanding the Arduino coding language so that, if we manage to implement it, we can control the movement of the Kinect in reaction to the location of the user.
Using the Arduino control board to move control a number of stepper motors would be the main component in moving or rotating the Kinect sensor. The stepper motors work by enabling electromagnets located around a central spiked-gear which rotate the gear a minuscule amount, down to a single degree. This gives the motor a high degree of accuracy, though at the cost of lower speed. Rotation speed, however, is not particularly important for this project, since the sensor only has to keep up with a human at walking speed, potentially even slower.
The implementation of this is quite simply, it simply requires four wires to be connected and an electric pulse sent down them in sequence to activate one of the four electromagnets.

The use of these motors is the most effective solution for tracking people, given its accuracy, and also if we manage to implement the Kinect Apparatus, to control the wire winches that move the apparatus around the room.

Conclusion:

I have made progress towards my individual milestones, however, a lack of group interaction and technical limitations have hampered my ability and enthusiasm to make more substantial developments. Hopefully our group and myself will be able to come together to create an effective project solution, but this will require a cohesive effort on the part of every member.