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Joanne’s Status Report for 2.19.2022

This week I worked more on the Unity portion of our project. I am working on mimicking the translations that would be applied to the 3d model after a user produces a gesture (i.e. zooming in/out, swiping). I initially wrote script to get 3d object to move on its x,y,z coordinates when a user does specific key presses. This was to ensure that the object responds to the key presses and that the projected image also translates well. Next I got the swiping motion which translates to rotation of the object to work. The script currently takes x,y coordinates from the mouse cursor location and will rotate the 3d object. I am planning to work on the last gesture (zooming in/out) this week. I have been discussing with Anushka (who is working on the jetson nano part) about how the data should be serialized (i.e. what kind of data should be sent and in which format) when sent from the Jetson to the web application.

I worked on some portions of the design slides and talked as a group about our future design plans.

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Team Status Report for 2.12.2022

Welcome to our project website! We’re so excited to share everything we are doing.

This week we focused on initial designs of different components. We focused on the PCB boards, Unity, and hologram pyramid. For the PCB board, we designed and are ready to order, but we also decided to place an order for two sensor breakout boards so that we can start testing our measurements as soon as possible since that order will arrive most likely before our boards do. The Unity environment was intuitive to work with, and we were able to set up an environment that we needed for the hologram quickly. We created the layout necessary to project our 3d model onto our hologram pyramid. However, our biggest challenge this week was with the results of the hologram pyramid. 

After tinkering with the hologram, we are concerned about the scope of the component. We aren’t satisfied with the projection of the 3D image and we are considering either improving it or replacing it with another medium altogether. We have placed a demo video link of the hologram pyramid: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ip7AXfh7wN9jhmTKIRnzeADvgepjKqEY/view?usp=sharing. We will make a decision on what to do after our testing this week. Since we are working on this component earlier than planned, we have enough time to make modifications and it will not serve as a risk to our project at the moment. This may change our requirements, but we cannot make that decision at this time. 

Since we were prototyping with multiple pyramids, we had to incur the cost of the plastic. It isn’t a huge cost, since our overall projected budget is low, but we do not want to spend too much just cutting new pyramids after every modification. We will try to do more research ahead of time on what dimensions serve best before cutting more pyramids.

 

Next week, we want to accomplish several things, and below is our modified schedule. We decided that we’re going to parallely work on parts to prevent us from scrambling at the end.

  1. We’re going to be working on improving the hologram and seeing if we can get the image to be continuous across an axis instead of disjoint.
  2. We’re going to be placing the PCB order as soon as we get it approved.
  3. We’ll continue tinkering with Unity and exploring how external inputs can be applied to objects.
  4. We are planning to try out a different size design for the hologram pyramid to see if it improves the quality of 3d model viewing. 

Modified Gantt Chart with this week’s tasks and progress

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Joanne’s Status Report for 2.12.2022

This past week I worked on making the proposal slides with my team and I presented it during the proposal review. We got back feedback from our classmates and TA’s. One of the feedback was thinking about how we were going to implement the hologram visual portion of our project.

Thus for the latter part of the project, I worked on Unity to create the layout of the hologram. In order to project a hologram onto our plexiglass pyramid, we needed to place four perspectives of a 3d model around the base of the plexiglass pyramid. My main responsibility was to use Unity to create the four perspective view of a random 3 model and then export it to the web using Webgl. I placed a photo of the unity scene when it is running below. The white lines are drawn in by me to illustrate how the pyramid would be placed in respect to this view.

I exported the Unity scene onto a web browser so we can place the pyramid on top of my ipad (which holds now the link to the unity scene with the four views of a model). Edward and I helped Anushka in laser cutting the pyramid plexiglass she designed. An image of a basic hologram model that we completed is on our team status report page for this week.