Author: spandans

This week was really productive and I got a lot done, primarily in terms of testing and construction of the mat.

On Wednesday, after the final presentations were done, I met with my teammates and put the mat together to perform user testing. We are aiming for 10 people to test our mat and each of us are assigned to bring 3 testers (4 in Caio’s case). George was kind enough to agree to be my tester for the mat (which was really cool cause he has played DDR before).

On Friday, I came to tech spark to paint the mat as well as the Arduino black box. Using the following pictures, I will give you a brief glimpse of the process.

First, I took out the buttons and covered the velcro. My goal was to give the mat a galaxy effect to match our gaming screen.

After two-three layers of painting and giving touches with a white pen, I was able to produce this:

 

Second, I wanted to paint the arrows and make them look similar to the game screen. Through a friend’s help who was also in Techspark that day, I laser cut a plastic piece to create a stencil for the arrows.

Third, I painted using this stencil. Our paints were too watery and leaked through the stencil onto the mat. So, I decided to use Techspark’s paints and still had to do three coats of painting for each button. Afterwards, I took a Clorox wipe and clean the edges. You can notice the difference:

I repeated this process for each button, including the pause/confirm and where the player would stand.

Lastly, I painted the Arduino container box and also decided to give it a logo.

I am on schedule and will be compiling the poster today, create the final video and work on the final report.

 

This week was very productive and over its course, I made some significant progress with the game.

On Monday, I helped decide the content for the final presentation and on Wednesday, I aided in the testing of the different buttons of the mat. This testing revolved around FSR error rate as well as button coverage testing. I stepped on the mat in different orientations and also recorded videos in slow motion to better understand the latency in FSR and game screen responses. After insisting my team to meet on Friday, I created final arrow buttons for the mat through careful physical measurements of the tarp, the buttons with the FSR’s attached to them, and the Velcro’s. At one point, one of our FSR’s broke so Tushhar and I soldered a new one. Outside this, I have been advocating to be more involved with the final bits of software aspect of the game.

As the UX designer of this project, I am trying to incorporate feed forward and back designs into the software screen. I have found actual music files for the songs and integrated them into the code. While playing the game, I realized that there is a delay in Pygame’s output of music so though the game screen appears at a moment’s instance, the song does not start until 4 seconds after it. To account for this, I have delayed the arrows to coincide with the starting of the song. Also, to make the player less frustrated, I am going to add textual graphics along the lines of “Ready? Let’s Go!” to make the delay less obvious and awkward. Lastly, when the player scores an arrow, I plan to add a sound to reflect that as it would give feedback to the player that they have scored.

I am currently on schedule and will be working on the final presentation slides and the sound effects over the weekend. I aim to test the entire system with at hopefully 10 users (with the help of my teammates) this coming week as I understand testing is a significant part of our project. I am meeting with my team tomorrow (4/23) to walk through the slides and ensure they are ready for the final presentation.

This week I was able to recover on my progress affected due to getting the flu last week. Below are listed all the different things I worked on this week:

• Along with Tushhar, I soldered the sensors to wires and also the components to perfboard. Since we are going with using two different FSR’s for the parallel orientation for a single button, this took a lot of our time as we soldered 10 FSR’s. For the pictures of the soldering, kindly refer to the pictures on Tushhar’s post.
• I stuck these FSR’s to the back of the five wooden buttons and also attached support  (EVA foam) on each corners of the wooden squares to make them stable while being stepping on.
• I learned sewing on a machine and came up with a plan for the construction of the mat. The Velcro’s have arrived and I have noted down the availability of the Techspark guide who can assist us if anything goes wrong.

I am on schedule so far and this week, I will be finishing the mat construction as well as work on the final presentation slides.

This week I presented my menu screen at the interim demo that can successfully works with the circuits. My goals for this week were to work on displaying high scores with respect to each song and to integrate my screen with Caio’s. Unfortunately, I was struck with the flu so I was not able to meet with Caio and work. I felt much better today so I have started writing the code for displaying high scores but have not yet achieved visual results. On the other side, I tried learning sewing for the construction of our physical mat that my team plans to achieve this coming week.

This week was very productive. In a nutshell, I aided in the construction of the mat and mostly completed the menu screen.

For the mat, as my teammates worked on ensuring the circuit was compatible with our game screens, I added padding using EVA foam to each of the wooden squares that we will be using to make the buttons of the mat. I also aided in testing of the mat.

Additionally, as stated in my previous status report, I worked on the menu screen and have attained 90% of its completion. After taking help from our TA Joseph and fixing some bugs, I am able to make the rectangles transparent based on how far they’re in the menu selection. An image of the same is attached below:

The only thing remaining is displaying high scores based on the song selection but I plan to do it when both my menu screen and Caio’s game screens are integrated. For now, I am uptown speed with our timeline.

This week was a productive week and I was able to make progress on my menu screen. My menu screen is able to do song selections based on the up/down key movement and can navigate to a new screen when the right key is clicked. This is shown in the attached picture:

The current colors are just placeholders. To facilitate a smoother code implementation, I took help from Caio and came up with the idea of keeping the rectangles constant and just revolving text and album images when up/down keys are clicked. This way I will not have to worry about varying the opacity of the rectangles themselves, which is a hard job to accomplish in Pygame. As you can see, though the rectangles have varying shades of grey, none of them are translucent.

Moving ahead, I need to resize the text and album covers and make them movable with the rectangles. Additionally, I want to give the rectangles varying opacity. I am not worried about moving the text and album covers as the code I have written to move the rectangles can also be applied to moving texts and images.

Overall, I am slightly behind the schedule but hope to accomplish the full menu screen by Monday.

For this week, I primarily worked on three things, namely, ordering parts for construction of the game mat, understanding the ethical weights of our game, and lastly construction of the menu screen.

For the parts of the mat, I referred to our bill of materials and succeeded in ordering of most of the parts for our mat based on the two different orientations we are currently imagining our mat to use:

For understanding the ethical responsibilities of our game and how it fits into solving a social problem, I utilized my human-computer interaction background and tried to empathize with the users of our game. I tried to understand the pros of using our game (fitness, mental and physical well-being) and where our game fell short (it is not suitable for people in wheelchairs for example).

Lastly, for the construction of the menu screen, I watched quite a few YouTube videos and referred to the actual Pygame documentation to understand how animations work in Pygame. We need animations to enable the scrolling effect for our users. Currently, my idea looks like this:

• Have separate objects for album covers, texts, and rectangle containing this information
• Have another class containing these three separate objects
• construct a resize option that is dependent on “up” or “down” key press
• Use this resize option to resize album cover, song and artist names, and rectangle containing this information to give the user the effect of scrolling

I still have to implement this and am currently in the stage of coding the above solution. For now, I am right on path and will hopefully complete this on time.