Intro
This week was spent mostly finalizing our thoughts on what our project should be and working on the PRD + Video. For the initial few days of the week, brainstorming involved continuing to try out the Hololens to get a feel for the device’s strengths and limitations as well as borrowing inspiration from other successful applications. After the trip to the Hololens Academy, we decided that collaboration should be the main focus of our application as the robot shooting experience proved to be very engaging and entertaining to us. On Thursday, we spent the majority of our time drafting the PRD and the prototype video as well as refining the finished versions of the two deliverables.
Design Ideas
During our brainstorming sessions, we came upon multiple decisions as to what features the application should be able to support. Of the many decisions made, these two features were the most debated and impacted the vision of our application the most.
Whiteboard 2D panel vs 3D holograms
For the drawing application, we pondered whether to allow the user to create 2D drawings or 3D holograms. However, we discovered that the Hololens’ tracking of the distance between the user’s hand and the device itself was coarse and will likely cause a lot of issues in creating accurate enough 3D holograms. As a result, we decided that we would focus on drawing on 2D panels and come back to the 3D hologram creation if we had any breakthroughs to tackle this obstacle.
In person collaboration vs over the internet collaboration
Another idea that was also highlighted by our in person project pitch was whether to allow in person collaboration with the whiteboard seen by multiple Hololens devices in the same room or to allow over the internet collaboration whereas each Hololens device do not need to be in the same room and only share the whiteboard’s content (each device has separate absolute position and orientation of the whiteboard). In the end we decided to make the in person collaboration our main focus and add in the over the internet collaboration as an extra feature if time allows. This was mainly due to the fact that in person collaboration would require less overhead for the application as well as less development resources which would also allow us to work on adding more features to create a richer experience for the user.
Progress
In terms of deliverables, we were able to finish the PRD and the video as well as update our website’s design to give it a more stylish look compared to our original design which focused on simplicity.
For the project, we began looking at various assets that we could use in order to create our application as well as how to divide up the project to minimize roadblocks and allow as much autonomy for each group member as possible.