Week 11

Week 11 started off a bit slow, we decided to stay at home and work on our respective parts of the project, instead of coming in to work on it in class.  This is due to the fact that we didn't need any help from the tutors or lecturers and we felt that it was easier for us to be productive at home, rather than in the noisy classroom.

We decided at this point that we should have a arcade cabinet for the physical set up as this allowed us more artistic freedom and the ability to theme the set up to the scenarios we would have in the app.  We were also discussing the viability of buttons at this point.

We all started working hard on the Wednesday and posting our work up to the Facebook page so we could get feedback and advice on how to improve it. Max posted up a rough mockup of a potential title screen for the application, embracing the arcade-y direction that we now wanted to explore.

A potential title screen

At the time this was going on Hamish was redesigning the physical set up, Kyle was working on the programming - especially getting the weight and height sensors working and I was working on writing as many scenarios as I could for the app while keeping them high quality and getting relevant data.

Max also wanted to explore his animation ideas and posted up an animation mock up.  This was quite well done however I was sceptical on whether it was viable to have animations throughout the application without us running out of time or having to sacrifice some quality in order to get them in there.  After some discussion we decided that animation was an additional feature that would be added if we had enough time.

I then brought up the idea of buttons as we had limited time to put buttons in if we actually wanted to use them.  Kyle was of the opinion that we didn't have enough time to implement buttons at this stage and I was inclined to agree with him, despite my own personal desire to see them implemented.  So we put that on the additional features pile too.

Hamish then shared with us his designs, throwing out a few prototypes, including a few more traditional looking cabinets and a few out there designs.  These designs obviously had a long way to go but they were certainly a step in the right direction and got us closer to achieving the aesthetic that we now wanted.

Rough Sketches of the physical set up.

Shortly after that Hamish came up with some much higher 3D models of the potential installation.  These came much closer to what we wanted and were based on the dimensions of human beings that Hamish had done thorough research on in the proceeding weeks.

A mock-up in Maya of the installation

Max wrapped up the week with mock-up of what the interface could look like if we went heavier on the art.  He used place-holder art to avoid wasting time.  I liked this art but I was worried about it being too full on and detracting from the questions.  I think it could be quite effective if we toned back the design.

Overall I'm happy with the progress we've made this week.  We've all worked hard and have got most of the early prototyping out of the way, meaning that next week we'll be able to get even closer to our design goals, improving on what we have this week.