Sebastien’s Status Report for 2/20/2021

This week the team spent a good deal of time going back/forth about narrowing down on a particular idea for our project after receiving some feedback from professor Kim. We considered what could be usable in conjunction with technical feasibility and ended up deciding to build an “air draw” whiteboard in the form of a “server” that consumes camera frames and produces a “drawing feed” that’s something along the lines of a sequence of (x, y, isDrawing) tuples sent over an inter-process-communication channel. A generic module like this allows many applications to use it. We want to build an actual UI with it, but we also want to focus on the whiteboard server itself rather than building a UI – luckily it’s possible to open a UNIX-domain socket in a browser via the WebAssembly System Interface (WASI), so right now I’m pretty sure we’re going accomplish this by forking excalidraw and adding a WebAssemply stub that reads the “drawing feed” and calls relevant javascript functions to draw on the canvas. I also set up a team notion as a place to stay organized that’s easier to use than google docs and has task-management built-in, including Kanban boards that are viewable as a Gantt chart.