Week 7- Putting it all together

 IN CLASS:

I spent 45 minutes today in class speaking about AI video generation, chameleon locomotion, the Jurassic Park metaphor, death of collective knowledge, alienation from labor, and the inherent worth and dignity of all human beings vs. the crushing anti-life, anti-human philosophies of capitalism.  I feel like the recipient of my talk only started hearing me after I made him feel guilty by telling him very frankly about why I am pursuing a degree in digital media.  The only thing worth noting about this hour is that ultimately he told me that my utility in the digital media is the ideas I bring to the table, the ability to make informed decisions and determine what processes will be most efficient and effective for any given project, and my guidance.  Remember this for later.

For what little amount of class time remained, our unwieldy group of 11 talked about how for 2/26, we need to have a working demonstration of all of the individual parts of the project operating together.  Vivian's leadership and organization is absolutely invaluable.  We determined that for next week, we need to have the following elements up and running:

  • MOTION (Lara, Varun, Yash) 
    • goal: test three-Kinect setup WITH audience touching + posing
    • goal: implement 1+ pose-based trigger
    • goal: make final decision on Kinect vs. mocap
    • if mocap, reserve room for live demo during class time
  • TOUCH (Kaenan, Lauren, Nick, Preeti)
    • goal: get UDP to Unreal working with Emil setup
    • goal: have touch sensors trigger events in Unreal with Emil setup
    • goal: have touch sensors trigger music in Unreal with Emil setup
    • goal: create costume mockup and get it working with Unreal 
  • VIRTUAL STAGING (Cindy, Michael, Vivian, Yash)
    • goal: investigate two-display output in Unreal
    • goal: decide avatar, VFX, objects, etc. and obtain
    • goal: design both stages in Unreal
    • goal: research global variables for Unreal Blueprints
    • goal: implement texture changes triggered by global variable 
  • CONCEPT (Vivian but also everyone)
    • goal: finalize performance design
    • goal: map out touch areas and discomfort values
    • goal: create physical Prompt Cards

I am on the touch team, since ultimately I will be the one designing and building the entire bodysuit with the capacitive touch sensors.  Our teammates made plans to meet up Sunday and get the UDP setup working along with all the event triggers and a mockup of the capacitive touch sensors.  

THIS WEEK:

SUNDAY:

Lauren, Nick, Preeti, and I met in the PhD lab for about 5 hours on Sunday in order to get everything working.  The vast majority of the time was spent with Nick trying to get the UDP to Unreal setup communicating with the Touch Designer interface input that Emil so graciously provided to us.  I am not a programmer, and have no experience in this, but I sat by Nick's side and provided support as best I could.  

While Nick fought with the computer, Lauren, Preeti and I experimented with the materials we have for the suit.  We tested several different setups and combinations to see what worked best:

Set-ups for touch suit that we tested:

  • Capacitive touch board TO wire TO conductive tape 

  • Capacitive touch board TO conductive thread TO conductive tape

  • Capacitive touch board TO conductive thread exclusively

Preeti tests the "Capacitive touch board-wire-conductive tape" setup on the back of my hand 

 Conclusions: 

  • You don't need to plug the feather V2 board into touch designer to see if it's working, you can just plug it in to a power brick and look at the tiny red light on the capacitive touch sensor.  It will light up when it detects touch.
  • Conductive thread didn't seem to respond to touch, bizarrely.  It also seemed to detect a bigger differential between the conductive tape being touched vs. not touched than the insulated wire did, which seems contrary to what it should be.  Hmm.   
  •  Conductive tape seems to be adequately separated from human skin by the bodysuit, and thus we shouldn't need our model Cindy to wear anything else under the suit to add additional insulation
  • Capacitive touch board TO conductive thread TO conductive tape seems to be the best way to go for now.

The three of us also worked on diagramming to which locations on the body each of the 12 inputs on the capacitive touch sensor would be mapped.  

Blessedly, Nick got everything communicating, and we were able to get our inputs to show up in touch designer!  Hooray! 


 Video evidence of our "Capacitive touch board - conductive thread - conductive tape" setup functioning and returning values in touch designer.

 

MONDAY:

Nick, Lara, Yash, Lauren, Varun and I met from 6pm to 9pm in the motion capture studio to try to get everything running.  I don't have the official suit done yet, so we mapped all of the input channels Nick came up with to different spots on the testing board Emil lent to us.  We spent the vast majority of this time fighting with the Unreal project and desperately trying to get touch designer, the wifi, midi, and Unreal all communicating with each other.  It was extremely frustrating, and I would highly recommend reading Nick's documentation in order to see how he finally jerryrigged it together.

        

Us suffering in the motion capture studio

 

I'm extremely impressed with how much we were able to pull together this week.  We will need to come in early tomorrow morning (27th) in order to get this all working before class so that we can show it off to Paul.  Sigh. 

  

 

 

 

 

 

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