Risks and Contingencies
- Identified that camera stabilization will be a significant issue for our project. We decided to add both hardware and software counter-measures to the project in order to mitigate this hazard with a stabilization rig using rubber bands and OpenCV software stabilization.
- We are not sure if using the typical TCP sockets will be fast enough to meet our 100ms latency requirement. Industry standard is RTSP or WebRTC, but these are relatively new technologies with few examples or libraries, but having done the preliminary research, it should be possible to switch to one of these if necessary.
Changes to Design
- After meeting with Professor Mukherjee, we learned that the IR circuit for sending messages would be more costly than anticipated, so we decided to simply detect the presence of an IR beam instead of receiving data. This saves money at the cost of the cars’ hit detection abilities, but there would only be minor consequences for the visuals of our game, i.e., one of the items may not render hits correctly in all cases.
- For communication between the PCs running the game, we decided to use Unity Multiplayer’s servers. This should speed up development time somewhat because Unity provides some matchmaking capability for free and also removes our need for a low latency web server.
Schedule Update
- No immediate schedule changes have occurred, but we plan on redoing our schedule soon when we next meet.
Team Status Report: Week 2