1 Design Doc Introduction

In the present emergent market, it is very trivial to locate and experience new advancement of the Human Computer Interaction but with some constrains. This is a field which still not unveiled to the society but could talk to a majority of population who do not have enough computer literacy at the moment. This emergent innovative field is still at research level at a certain degree. At a time where there are rapid advances in the field of Human Computer Interaction we have decided to give it another interpretation through the fulfillment of our project

The project “BubbleBoy” is an innovative, interactive 3D interface using full body motion. Obviously the interaction between the human and computers is done at the user interface which includes both software and hardware. Sometimes one may think is this something to be invented as there are some applications already of same nature and in that case is there a room for a research component.

HCI was one of the first examples of cognitive engineering, an approach which crosses boundary between academic disciplines and modern needs and professions have emerged; to effective human interaction. At the same time with the emergence of the area Software Engineering more attention was focused on non functional requirements such as usability and maintainability.

During the project BubbleBoy, it is required to follow certain software development model in order to achieve better quality output. Since the requirements and technologies which are changing rapidly, it is preferred to use a dynamic model which well comes any deviation without a conflict. In this project, it can identify a project life cycle with five different phases. Those are identification, plan, implementation, testing and completion. As it is planned, new technologies are welcome during any phase. So this eventually becomes highly flexible and up to date implementation. Even new ideas could arise while doing implementation. To create more competitive product, it should be up to date. This project basically can be defined as identification of an opportunity in the market. To meet up with these requirements, it is preferred to use an evolutionary/iterative model as software development model and at the same time team would make sure to adhere with coding paradigms and standards.

1.1 BubbleBoy the Innovative Interface

BubbleBoy is a project which facilitates the presence of hundreds of public who do not have enough computer literacy. This interface consists of several components which makes the life easy for the user.

• Environment which talk back to the user

• Reduced Processing cost due to Reduction in image processing.

• Reduced sophisticated hardware parts and do all those tasks in software phase

• Growing Artificial intelligence facilitates higher flexibility

Project consists of a sound environment which gives the experience of the real environment. This project will voyage the user to believe virtual realistic and demonstrate high interactive level with virtual world. To make user feel immersive, environment around user need to talk back to him as real environment do. As well as environment should consist of several continuous and distinct activities. Consider a user is walking through a jungle and stops where a leaf of a banana tree ahead. Now his vision is limited by that leaf. Now user is trying to lift the leaf and look forward. Then with a particular he must able to move it up ward and have the view ahead precisely. After he releases the leaf, it should come opposite direction and have some king of fluctuation until it become stable. That’s the level of talk back is expected from the environment.

This project uses makers to identify the movements rather than using pure image processing techniques. That was done with a great visionary. Image processing and identify user movements also possible. But it consumes more resources and utilizes much CPUs` processing power. This would be a higher risk since this is modeled by targeting the public market where there is lack of computers with enormous processing power. Not only that, this could possess the team to deviate from the core activities of the project.

One of the most important fact relate with this project is the independency of sophisticated hardware. As we can see there are few products on the current market, but with expensive hardware. This project will work with the aid of cheep web cameras which are affordable to any user.

This project will consist of Artificial Intelligence which would be able to grow with the experience. This component is going to use in user action recognition area and this will facilitate a system which is getting matured with time elapse.

1.2 BubbleBoy Implementation and Integration

Implementation of this project has three main components which should work independently. This independency facilitates the implementer to work without any conflict with other components. The entire process related to the project could be demonstrates by the Figure 1 and those components could be classified as follows.

• 2D to 3D modeling using maker based protocol

• Artificial Intelligence

• Environment

In 2d to 3d component it considers the image captured from the user in a sequential manner. This capturing tries to identify the markers on the user and develop a model from those details. Initially two web cameras are capturing images from the user and system which is going to implement would consider the time base and merge image to create a 3D model of the user. This process will continue for sequence of images and generate a sequence of 3D models. And these models will be forwarded to the next stage.

Artificial Intelligence system will be developed as a separate component. This component will get 3D model sequence as the input and deliver a prediction as the output which would be compatible with the inputs of the environment. This unit will examine 3D model sequence in precise manner and try to predict the user movement. Meanwhile this unit has the ability of growing with the experience. This will sharpen the probability of correct prediction.

The virtual environment will act as the third and one of the important parts of this project. This unit is responsible to make the user feel the virtual realistic. This will be consist component such as environment talk back, sequential activities and distinct activities. This is the interface which user interacts with. So this should be well defined system in order to preserve the quality of entire project. Inputs will be provided from the AI and output is the experience get by the user. According to the user input environment must be able to change some artifacts of the virtual world in a real world manner.

1.3 Summary

This particular chapter gives a brief introduction of the project Bubble Boy which is innovative HCI. It is major discussed higher overview of the project in different perspectives while looking at appropriate project life which is suitable for entire project. Then under the sub section BubbleBoy the innovative interface, it describes more into the depth by describing several features which make the life easy for the user. The section of BubbleBoy Implementation and Integration, deals with the implementation aspects of different components and integration of those components without making constrains on integration.

Project meeting minute - 08

Date & time, duration

The first meeting was held on 2010- 11 -25 for about 30 minutes.

Venue

Office room of Dr. Chandana Gamage

Members present

All the members were present there.

Topic of the discussion

Regarding writing the Software Architecture Document (SAD)

Brief Discussion of the discussion

Today we basically discuss the topic of what should be the content that should be included in the project Architecture document. o Use of phrases like “To make the user feel immersive ” o Need for the components to be independent in the implementation process o Separate assumptions from the dependencies User will not be equipped any kind of dynamic § o Under assumptions High § Number of cameras § active devices but the passive markers resolution cameras will not be used Single user interaction § o Not to use the concept of 360 angle o How the environment get changed based on a fixed reference(point out these things as the facts which accounts this application to become unique among others) o Need behind the components to be independent in the implementation process o The high level architecture which shows the flow of the information o Architecture consisting of two main levels

• Information flow level (User to environment, Environment to user, And within the environment)

• Functional level o Interaction cues received by the application o Information flow towards the user (Statically determined information, dynamically determined information) o All what Chandana sir want is to get us to think about the proceedings of the project with our own imaginative thoughts

Key topics discussed

1. Document writing style guidelines

2. Feedback on the draft SAD.

Comments and agreements

Chandana sir asked us to come up with draft software Architecture Document in the next day and do the researches on key topic areas he has already mentioned.

Project meeting minute - 07

Date & time, duration

The meeting was held on 2010-11-19

Venue

Office room of Dr. Chandana Gamage

Members present

All the members were present there.

Topic of the discussion

Present health of the project and design document

Brief Discussion of the discussion

This is the second meeting for this week and what we discussed today was to what is the present situation of the project what it should be like in future. Here Chandana sir explained us some important points that should be illustrated within the content of Design document. Following are some of them.

• In the scope of our project how we are planning to attach the user in the virtual environment in physical sense compared to the other system in which the user is detached.

• How we are going to give the immersive feeling to the user in a constrained environment such as a forest, park or a aqua world

• What are the actions a user can do based on that constrained environment he is in.

• Within our system how environment talks to the user with or without a user talks to the environment while in other systems environment talks only when user talks to the environment And for the things we have to carry in advance he asked us to

• Define set of environments and think on how to construct those environments

• Think on how and when to talk to the user by the environment Chandana sir also said in answering to the question raised by Thusitha that since this is a real time system there may be things process level parallelism and system level parallelism(modules working concurrently) for sure from the technical aspect to achieve the targets of the proposed system. The very important fact that Chandana sir mentioned was to read trustworthy kind of research papers so that we can improve the writing things in scientific style and learn the previous work people have done regarding those areas of our interest. While reading those research papers we have to abstract the varieties approaches they have followed and check whether those can be applied to our project based on the requirements. Among those range of varieties of approaches sometimes we can use them as it is or sometimes with some modifications being added.

Key topics discussed

1. Contribution of the each project group member

2. Content that should go into the design document

Comments and agreements

1. Send Chandana sir a draft design document

2. Design the system targeting single user system rather than multiple users system

3. Keep a master plan for the things we do

4. Come with a record of the references we have gone through with the rationale behind them and a summary of that papers when we are coming to the next meeting.

Project meeting minute - 06

Date & time, duration

The meeting was held on 2010-11-18

Venue

Office room of Dr. Chandana Gamage

Members present

All the members were present there.

Topic of the discussion

1. Structure for the Software design document

2. Present health of the project

Brief Discussion of the discussion

Today basically gave his feedback on the draft structure of the Design document we have sent to him through mail. He explained what the things that should go to each sections of the design document. And more importantly he praised us for doing great job in order to come up with proper SRS. Anyway we wouldn’t be able to do that without his guidance was not there. So the regarding the section of “Introduction” of the design document he explained following are the things that should go into.

• Several passages on the nature of the project

• Why the exploratory development model as the software process model

• Within our project how we are moving from well structured and well established domain which includes Image analysis, HCI etc into a not well established area of implementation As Chandana sir explained in the section of methodology we have to explain the things like

• Type of the interactive system.

• The nature of the exploratory work we have to carry because of the inherent innovative work included with the project Other than that we have to explain the following also

• The rationale behind choosing exploratory development model with related to the requirements and future technologies to come

• How we are going to present the virtual experience to the user as he feel like real without being in the place.

• How we present the system to the user so that he will readily pay something to be of that.

• How to immerse the user in the virtual environment

• How far we can go with visual perceptions And regarding the format of the design document Chandana sir told we can use the Rup templates as the base and not to depend on that structure.

Key topics discussed

Structure and the content of the Design document

Comments and agreements

Chandana sir asked us to come up with draft design document and meet him on tomorrow.

High-level System Overview

This projects main target is to provide a product to interact with the computer without wearing any advance equipment on the human body. High level architecture of this project would explain briefly in this section. Web cam would act as the primary input device for the project while spots on the user act as identification. User will wear spots on him and act his role to interact with the computer. These images are captured with the simple web cameras as a video stream. It could use 15, 30 or higher frames per second but it depends on the processing power of the machine. Images on this video streams will capture. Then a unique algorithm will capture the human image along from the frame. then It considering the image sequence captured and try to model it in to a 3D model and predict the movement of the user. This process would consume lot of processing power in this project. Identifying the movements of the user would be done through an artificial neural network. This can grow the knowledge base as it gets matured with time. With the aid of this neural network the engine would give the information of the user movement to the environment. Then user should be provided with a high end graphical user interfaces to interact with. This project contains environment that user could interact with and have a real life experience. According to the input from the prediction the environment would change. It could be certain objects in the environment or the entire frame [34].
 Usability
This projects` main target is to deliver a simple and user friendly interface to interact with the computer.
o Training Time
It is anticipated to deliver an output which would makes easy to the user, to be familiar with the system. It would be the case in both normal user and power user.
o Switching Cost
User will able to switch between activities without any issue or cost. Since the all the controlling aspects of the system would control entire by user movement.
 Reliability
o Accuracy
It is required to deliver a high resolution environment with product. Accuracy acts a main role in this scenario. This has to demonstrate a high accuracy when changing objects and frames of the environment. Each activity has to be continuous, as well as well defined.
o Mean Time to Repair
The mean time to repair would be lower, since the best practices and standards are used with project implementation. Using well defined design patterns in coding would help on this.
 Interfaces
o User Interfaces
According to the user movements the system will capture the frames and process. And then the environment should change according to the movement of the user. To estimate the motion, it is require considering overall body movement. And respect to the motion it uses a neural network related thing and try to identify the motion. It will identify as the movement as related to the natural human movements. Then it would consider the real condition and the nature of the current environment. In the natural case, area of the scene changes only when eyes move. Other than that it should be the same angle of the environment. But objects of that area could affect by the user movement.
o Hardware Interfaces
One of the main requirements of this project is to deliver an innovative computer interactive method without using any additional hardware. We only use cheep web cameras to capture the images.

o Software Interfaces
Designing a Graphical Environment was done related to the project, while going through the research. This projects` main target is to interact with the movement of the user in real time. As the project requirement, this interaction should reflect via a high graphical interface. So it was tested at several choices and did some testing to ensure the ability of available resources [18, 19].