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Joseph’s Status Report for 2/25/2023

This week was mostly spent going over some issues brought up in our design presentation and working on our design report. I have messed around with a bunch of the extra gameobjects and functionality provided by the ARFoundation and ARCore packages within Unity. I was delayed by a Unity bug I have never gotten before, in which the Unity Hub failed to open any of the Unity projects I have downloaded on my laptop, which took a decent amount of time to figure out.

Our progress is mostly on schedule, maybe a little behind due to hardware parts taking time to get here. In order to catch up, we will focus heavily on the hardware for the next week. We hope to have this flushed out in the next week.

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Team’s Status Report 2/25

Most of this week was dedicated to flushing out issues brought up in our design presentation as well as working on the design report. There were a few holes in the hardware that needed to be addressed, specifically regarding how the pen would be calibrated. We have narrowed it down to two potential methods: requiring a calibration stage that places the pen on the ground or requiring another static device that doesn’t move to serve as a reference point. We want to discuss more during our meeting to see which one may be better.

We have adjusted team assignments so that Anthony will be assisting Sophia with hardware more so in the beginning. There are a lot of areas that need to be flushed out more fully so having two people will hopefully make the design more robust and created more quickly, which is a necessity due to the software depending on the hardware.

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Anthony’s Status Report 2/25

This week for me was a little lighter in terms of work for the project due to presentations that were taking place during the week and the fact that my progress relies in some aspect to waiting on the parts coming in and my partners getting a few base components working. I helped this week on updating and getting started on our design report. In addition to this I have been researching further on the packages we plan to use for our ar technology (Like AR Foundation) as well as starting to play around with unity to remind myself how the software works. Actually using the AR Foundation technology is still not possible, since I do not have access to an android device, which I also researched about potentially searching to allow our team to test. I started also researching how to create the game scenes for our mini game, so that we can start to create the game structure itself very soon. Next week I hope to actually get started on creating the game scenes and gain access to an android device to assist Joseph in figuring out how to use and how to apply AR Foundation to our game. I will also be assisting in creating the design report and anything that Sophia needs help with when it comes to working with the hardware. We are on track for the most part, although trailing a little behind. In order to make up for this though, we will be making sure to keep steady progress and possible make some extra progress during spring break if it is necessary in order to progress at a steady pace.

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Sophia’s Status Report 2/25

This week was spent working on the design presentation. There were a few gaps that needed to be addressed afterwards, which included how we were planning on calibrating our device and the feasibility of our hardware and software communication plans.

We discussed and narrowed down our approach to potential two methods. One would be to place the “hardware pen” onto the ground as a reference point in the beginning to serve as the start. This, however, may potentially cause calibration issues due to increased drift and may require the inconvenience of constantly having to place it on the ground to refresh the starting point.

The other one would be to place another device on a static spot as a reference point for the pen’s movement in the air. This may reduce the issue of drift, but will also require the inconvenience of having more equipment which would increase the cost of our project and make it less user-friendly. We will likely need to discuss with our advisors to see which one would be a better approach in the long run.

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Joseph’s Status Report for 2/18/2023

This week I spent a lot of time working out some kinks in actually getting the AR application I built in Unity to port to an android phone without problems. I solved the app ported to the phone crashing for no reason sometimes, and also the app simply showing a black screen instead of the real world sometimes.

The rest of the time this week was spent working on the design presentation slides and preparing to present them. This involved doing more in-depth research into the packages and systems we would be using, in order to fully flesh out our pipeline for the project. Our progress is on schedule therefore.

I hope to build in Cloud anchoring functionality into the test AR app I have made so far, in the next week, as that will be a core part of our project.

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Anthony Status Report for 02/18

This week I spent most of my time researching how ARCore functions and the different packages that can be used in conjunction with the software itself. This was to make sure as a group that we have a solid understanding of how the packages work before we dive in and begin to use them. Much of the other time was spend working on the design slides, which was information that was collected from research about ARCore. The general game scene design was also constructed both for the presentation, and in order to better plan out how our game will be developed.

This is on track for the most part with the schedule we assigned, although a goal at this time would have been to get started on the framework of the game itself. This does not put behind though, since having taken the time to design it should make coding it relatively straight forward.

Next week, the plan is to start creating the skeleton framework of the game itself, based on the design we created this past week. We also hope to start developing our prototype for our game, so that we create a base interface to start testing and using the AR capabilities being offered by AR Core

My focus has mainly been related to looking at documentation for software and considering software designs. The main courses that have aided in this would be 15-122 and 18-213. A bit of experience from participating in game design also helped with designing the framework for our game. 18-202 will most likely start to come in handy once we start programming and potentially require performing measurements for our actual design.

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Sophia’s Status Report for 02/18

I wrote a simple IMU and Wi-Fi connection script to test the hardware when it arrives. I was able to test it on an older Arduino model I have at home and it seemed to be able to work fine, so the script should be able to work well on the ordered devices. Additionally, I designed a communication protocol for how our hardware will send data over to Unity and other devices.

Much of this week was dedicated to making our slides and flushing out our design presentation for next week.

Applicable courses I have taken are 18-220 and other hardware design courses such as 18-341 and 18-447. Additionally, I have participated in Build18 for several semesters where I have used many of the devices and microprocessors I will be using for this project. Additionally, taking math classes classes like 15-462 (graphics) and 18-660 (optimization) will aid me greatly in calculating lines from the IMU raw data.

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Team Status Report for 2/18

We spent most of our week flushing out our design. Aside from this, we did a small amount of work to begin our project. For hardware, we spent some time writing some testing scripts. For software, we were able to port out a simple AR app to an Android phone and run it successfully.

One principle that our team used to develop our design solution was communication between hardware and software. This was inspired by a hardware handshake protocol similar to a USB’s NAK-ACK.

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Joseph’s Status Report for 2/11/2023

This week I created and setup our Unity project and environment. I have setup the project to build to Android as well as downloaded all the necessary unity packages to get AR working. I have built a small sample AR “game” in order to test all of this. I have also setup our git repository along with git LFS and some gitignore edits in order to ensure all the Unity files can be stored remotely regardless of size. All the files were successfully added, committed, and pushed without error.

I will confirm that my other teammates can successfully clone and run the project. If necessary, I will also setup the project to work on IoS. Afterwards, I will join Anthony in doing more in-depth research into the packages we will use in implementing our project.

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Team Status Report for 2/11

This week we worked on our project proposal and presented it.  Our project of AR Pictionary includes considerations for entertainment and social bonding. This project attempts to take a game that a lot of people recognize and make it more active, interactive, and fun to encourage social bonding and playing games in a more active way.

This week, we worked on researching both the hardware and software aspects of our project. In terms of hardware, we have narrowed down which devices want and will want to test. For software, we have set up the Unity environment and have started researching the AR packages that we will want to use like ARCore.