By far the biggest risk that came up this past week was the issue of accuracy of the position and orientation of the paddle. The IMU was very inaccurate at the beginning of the week as the orientation would off by a lot, sometimes as bad as 45 degrees. However, William was able to fine tune the device so that the orientation data was realistic from eyeballing the orientation of the IMU. We are still going to work through some smaller problems with the IMU that William mentioned in his report as well as do more extensive testing to get quantitative data as to how accurate the IMU is. Right now, if any issues with the IMU come up, our contingency plan is to either supplement the open source code we downloaded with our own code or to find a new source that has the features we need. There are also accuracy issues with the camera as well. Right now, Logan is working on an OpenCV algorithm that creates a bounding box around the paddle and we just take the center of that bounding box as the position the paddle needs to be in. There’s definitely concern about how accurate this model is, but we believe that this algorithm is accurate enough that it is not noticeable by the player. As with the IMU, once this algorithm is completed, we need to get quantitative data of how well the camera can track static and moving objects.
One change in our final design is that the game will be run on the server. Something that came up during our design of the multiplayer capabilities of the game was that our old implementation had two players running the same game on two different devices. We realized that synchronizing two different devices to show the same game would be too complicated and too risky, so we decided to centralize the game on a server to take away the synchronization headache. We don’t see any cost in this new solution as the servers we were planning on using for our MVP and final implementation should be able to handle this extra workload.
As of right now, everything is on schedule and we may be looking at completing our MVP as early as the end of next week, assuming no unforeseen problem arise. The shift of having our game be run on a centralized server is a minimal effort change for us that should not take more than an hour to fix.