Week 4 - final proposal

Finally its over.....

We;ve got the proposal and poster over and done with, now its time to concentrate and work on our projects....
I can't wait to do some coding(have been deprived of coding for almost 8 months now!!), espacially when Director is involved, as it is one of my favourite programmes to do coding/scripting in.
I took some time to look through my proposal before finally handing it in and also decided to put in some of my week's work to the proposal. The link layout detail, information list, and the details about the nodes we will be having for this QTVR project.
Can't really say that a lot of work has been done, other than looking through the proposal over and over again, just to make sure everything is smooth flowing. Looking through the sites I've done my research on, and referencing them in my proposal.
The one thing that I can highlight this week is that I've been on the phone a rather lot lately, not just casual chit chat, but I've been calling up the company I used to work in back in Singapore(as an Interactive media developer), talking to supervisors, my ex-manager and my under studies, several rather interesting things about QTVR/Director has been discovered.

Firstly Flash can do the same and have QTVR, but it will need a plug-in inorder for it to control QTVR as well as Director, the main risk here is this, not all computers will have that plug-in which means for an online site, you will have to get users to download it before QTVR can be ran and controlled, secondly MACs and PCs both require different versions of that particular plug-in, this will definatelly bring up compatibility issues.
Next Director CAN be interfaced with a webcam, webcams are considered in the same family of devices as digital cameras and scanners, digital cameras and scanners are considered TWIAN devices...therefore, a Director TWIAN Xtra can be used and packaged together with the projector file upon delivery or if we're crazy enough, we can use the low level Director code to interface with Windows(required some Windows programming knowledge) as an alternative route.
Hmm...looks like there is more and one way to skin a cat.....

Week 3 - Second Meeting

We meet up with Matt to talk more about the project and we actually had an understanding of how the poster and proposal all have to be done, Matt showed us the device that could be used to actually take panoramic photo at an accurate assigned angle and yes its in the front office ready for us to use.
We'll most proberly need to use it next week after the presentation of the project.
We got down to doing the stuff, typing out our ideas, drawing flow charts, assigning priourity to tasks, and finding a fairer way to actually divide the task up equally.
Basically I just discovered that I'm suppose to get down to thinking of the links and nodes, which rooms for a webcam, which rooms to skip and of course which rooms to have just information on it.

Drawing up the link diagram, I felt that the chart tool in powerpoint can't do it much justice as its hierarchical and what I need is a schematic chart. So I decided to come up with a detailed linking list, which states which rooms link to where and also to add a node ID, just in case some nodes have the same name.

What reminds for us to do now is to come together one more time to come up with a project proposal and also the poster, and also to combine the idea of what we have done so far.

We will be meeting on Thurday to dicuss this a bit more and to actually to a second walk through the building and to mark out the spots where the camera will be place, as according to Matt our initial count of 40 nodes was way too many and we were told to try to limit it to below 20, which I've managed to come up with 16 nodes. I just hope 16 would be enough and not too much work.

I am thinking of coming up with a prototype sometime this weekend, however I do not have most of my past written codes with me and thus, it may be a bit hard to think up something within this week.

Lets just see how far we can go during the next meeting.

Week 3 - First meeting

We go together as a project team to discuss our project, our research findings and it was rather good to see different things different ideas.
Finally we decided to stick to something like the opera house website, but instead we will be using Director, we've also decided to further research on the use of webcam with the QTVR.
We've decide to create the QTVR based on the usage mainly for students, current students and extrenal/oversea students. We thought of having it for the purpose of 1st year students, however we were thinking won't it be more cost effective to have a building tour instead, plus with the implementation of student mentors, the job of getting the first year students to know the building isn't enough to justify the need for such a complex software.
However if we can use it for both future and current students, to tour around to attend lectures(for oversea students) and also for student who are sick or just unable to be at school during that time, it might just be more useful.

We've gotten down to sorting out our job deligation, based on our strengths, and also preferance. We've also been moving about the department doing a spotting session, deciding the number of nodes, the number of photos we should take per node.
Basically there was a lot of walking around and what I would like to call field work to gather information of our "job site". We've also gotten down to typing up certain documents, proposal templates, project management planning.
Planning on what the out come software should look like, the number of links, what are the other resources we need to gather from here.

For the rest of the week we will be looking through our planning documents, gathering more data, and actually going into getting the beginning part of our project done.
With the work deligation, my main scope is to code the VR section, think of the links and the number of nodes needed, and also to do some minor editing to the photo taken and also to stich them up into a "3D" VR image.
We'll be meeting up with Matt this tomorrow(Tuesday) to talk more about this assignment.

Week 2 - research

As part of our project we did some research on the QTVR technology, however, I felt that the other group members would be doing on the technology itself, therefore I decided to actually research on the supporting software. Basically Flash and Director, after Matt Simpson showed us a website using QTVR, the sydney opera house website was using Flash as a container and has QTVR as its tour.
However it is strange I discovered a whole code library in Director, that contorls QuickTime including QTVR, which includes Panning, Nudging, Zooming in/out. It does seem strange though, Flash 8 does not have a code library for QTVR, there is NO in built code that allows Flash 8 to do scripting on QTVR.
It does puzzle me though, since the opera house's website was done using Flash. However since the program I prefer it just seem to be better that way. Plus we don't have to download any plugins for Flash inorder to make it work, as not everybody might have that plugin, and since the code is in built already in Director a simple shockwave player could do the trick.

Other research also found that there are several software available in the market that does the stiching and QTVR at the same time. Which basically cut down our job by a fair bit.

Further research also shows that the effect produced be QTVR, can also be emulated by, both Flash and Director, thus the answer for the opera house being able to do it using Flash as a container. Plus by doing it this way, we're not only able to add a new layer of hotspots over the "QTVR" we are also able to use multiple "QTVR" windows and even different pop-up windows. Thus we were think of the possibility of something like an online feed from a webcam in selected lecture rooms.

Personally I think this form of research was rather interesting as not only did we find out a way to make the job more efficient, but also alternative ways to emulate the QTVR section on the project.

Week 2

We've finally managed to have a combine group meeting with Matt Simpon.

During that meeting several options were considered, having the QTVR in a flash container, doing it with 3D, or even skipping the whole process of QTVR and doing something something as wild as hacking the google earth API.
All in all we discovered that the projects was rather opened, and we just have to come up with something, has a virtual tour of building 1 and/or 2. Since there are 2 groups doing it, we will be working on the same project, but just doing different scopes to it.
However Matt, is encouraging us to try new technology and differents methods to go about doing it.

After that meeting, we had another group meeting, or rather brainsotrming session. Well, we decided to "give-up" on the hacking google earth idea as we might not have enough experience with C++ or Java programming to actually go in and change the coding of an API, and seriously persoanlly I might be good at programming, but I hate changing somebody else's code, as most of the time to can hardly know what that person has coded.
We were more towards exploring how we can go about doing it the conventional way of taking photos, how we can create something that can be built upoon, what features can be added, why such this project is needed on a Uni level, which camers angles would be good to ues, which container flash/director/3D would be better, basically just the "who, when, what, why, how" of the project. Looks like the design process is fianlly underway.

Whats left for us to do in the up-coming week would be to actually research on the ideas thought of during that meeting, coming up with ideas, look for resource, finding the "raw materials" of this project(Sounds like a system development life cycle). Than one monday we'll get together again present our research and from there we'll have zeroed in on what we really want to get about doing.

Week 1

This is the firsy week of Studio 5, of course my plans for the week would be to slack off, but I guess I'll give it a pass....since I've got more important things to do....:)

Firstly selecting a projects to do, I've spent sometime with Kyle yesterday looking through the number of projects that can be done, some seem rather "unknown", while others seems too "easy" to true. Thus we decided upoon the QTVR project.

Why QTVR? Well, firstly we both have an idea on what it is, the type of technology that it uses, and also a rough idea on how to do it. Plus given the experience from industry that I've gotten, I suppose it won't be too much of a problem, for both doing it and doing research into it.
Furthermore QTVR does prodive a rather large scope to work in, we can us flash, director, a 3D software and there are also several ways to deploy it as well, online, stand alone, of even on mobile phone with some GPS to show like current location. This leaves us with something a little open ended, however it works both ways, apart from having no clear starting point to start with, we can look at it as we have a very board starting point.

Well, now that we've gotten it done, we still need 2 more group members, one which we've already found, Anthony who was interested in doing the same project as well. So now it 3 of us and waiting.

I guess the plan for the up coming week would be to actually meet up with Matt Simpon, who posted that project and see what else we can do.
However I do forsee myself have some ichy fingers and doing some self research on QTVR or even come up with a rough idea on how this whole project can be done.