What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours).
I spent the majority of this week researching different ways of tracking the actions of players, reading cognitive psychology papers on what types of motors improve the immersiveness of games and inspecting different motors and vests to add to our parts list.
Prior to presenting my team’s proposal, I asked my cognitive psychology professor to recommend some papers to me that evaluate the effectiveness of haptic suits in providing realistic physical feedback. I was interested in understanding the types of motors that these suits utilized and determined that vibrating motors will be the most appropriate type motor to use as opposed to thermal pads that heat up different body parts of the user and or the combination of both vibrating motors and thermal pads.
The readings helped inform me on the types of vibrating motors we should include within our parts list. These motors were scrutinized on the basis of their rotations per minute (RPM), size and price. Moreover, I also researched different (non-haptic) vests that will fulfill our users’ comfortability, sizeability and safety needs. My teammates and I reached a consensus on purchasing a “bulletproof” style vest that fits all of our criteria, while also being aesthetically pleasing (as shown in Figure 2).
I also cloned “The Last Spartan” repository and evaluated different ways of approaching how the player’s game data should be tracked. I narrowed down the approaches to accomplishing this as the following:
- Console logging the output of certain gamer actions such as attack, forceful jump, getting hit and low health
- Listening for each game event and casing on the actions that we wish to track (i.e. attack, forceful jump, getting hit and low health)
The decision on which method is better will be primarily contingent upon how we intend our Node JS server to interface with the game software (Figure 1 shows this simple relationship).
Figure 1. Shows how the game software will use socket.io to relay information to the Node JS server. The server will then use the serial port package to send this information to our Arduino.
Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
We had planned to put our orders in for parts this week, however this plan has been delayed by a few days. These delays will affect my collaborators more than it will affect my contributions to our project, because my role within the team primarily focuses on our software solutions.
What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
I plan to finish ordering our parts and help my team make the design presentation slides. The more pressing tasks I have to complete this upcoming week include deciding between which idea to implement for tracking our game data and then beginning to implement that method.
Figure 2. Shows the vest we plan to purchase