Day 23: 123D workflow tested in full

Animation13 Prep

As mentioned yesterday we will have a pretty amazing setup of two demonstrations going on in two separate rooms, 123D Catch with Hoops in one room and Augmented Reality running on Katy in another.

Today I updated the AR program to allow the addition of 10 models whilst running, and we tested the entire workflow with quite positive results. It works, put simply.

The 123D Catch of Anna next to three spotlights was a pretty good success, definitely our best attempt yet. Tomorrow we will be moving to the Martin Harris building and testing everything out in finality.

We are currently using cygwin ftp commands in order to move models generated by 123D Catch on Hoops to Katy, and to move gifs generated on Katy to a special folder on some webserver where they can be displayed on a webpage in real time.

Unfortunately the cygwin ftp commands are not working over wifi, and we have no idea why. Getting ethernet connections in the Martin Harris building may not prove to be easy, so we need to fix this. Toby suggested using sftp and just automating the authentication, so I'll test that out tomorrow. If that doesn't work we shall resort to a spot of manual labour - a USB stick gets models from Hoops and they are run via humans to Katy, where they are copied off and processed. Not ideal but if we have no other choice then it will have to do.

Augmented Reality code improvements

I spent the afternoon cleaning the horrible hacked together AR demo program. Removed the copy-pasted codes and used a bunch of arrays and for loops to automate different parts of the process. It is now almost at the stage where it can accept any number of heads to add to the program as it runs.

One problem is that there is no way to validate the loading of a head, to ensure the loading occurs only after I've replaced the placer files with a real head. If the load button is pressed, that's it. If the placer file for that model was not replaced then we lose the chance and that potential head can never be used until the program restarts. I used my head for the placer files, so in any case a lost head means my head will show up in its stead.

So how can we ensure the load button is not pressed before we're ready? To assist this I have set the program to require the user to press M to enable the next model to be loaded, then they must press Z to load the model. The keys Z and M are arbitrary, and chosen because they are at opposite ends of the keyboard. To load the next model M must be pressed then Z. This dual key requirement will hopefully help to avoid mistakes on my part (I'll be operating the keyboard).

Tomorrow, further prep for Animation13! On to Martin Harris we go