Week 4 Update

April 21, 2016

Intro

This week, we spent most of our time exploring tools and tutorials related to our project. Based on the helpful comments from Ira and peers, we revised our Product Requirement Document to allow a better approach for building the first prototype of our application as well as better modularization within the group to maximize productivity. Additionally, we reviewed multiple Holo Academy tutorials for utilizing various features of the Hololens device in order to better prepare ourselves for the actual coding portion of the application.

Progress

Went over multiple Holo Academy tutorials including the Origami tutorial (101), Sharing holograms tutorial (240) as well as the Gesture tutorial (211). This was mostly to get a feel for how the scripts in Unity work in addition to how our application would be able to make use of the various features showcased in each tutorial.

The rough design of the application was planned out with four main modules: Whiteboard, Painting, Networking, and Menus. Whiteboard had submodules such as position and orientation, Painting had submodules such as shape presets, brush size and color, and the other two modules were separate on its own without much elaboration since we did not plan for them to be in the first prototype.

We divided up tasks for creating the first prototype. Panji and Radu will work together on creating the whiteboard and painting modules of the application while Thomas and Andy are working on the gaze and gesture control to connect the Hololens with the created modules.

We were able to find a painting application + tutorial that was able to fit our needs for creating our prototype. We began looking through the C# scripts to understand what is going on and will likely incorporate portions of the code into our application.

Plan for next week

By next week’s 1:1, we plan to have a basic prototype of the painting application to demonstrate. The current prototype will support drawing on a whiteboard using hand gestures (pinch and drag) with other advanced features being added in later. After the basic prototype is complete, we will then start working on the next milestone which is to allow collaboration between two Hololens devices (Networking module).