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].

Project meeting minute - 05

Date & time, duration

The meeting was held on 2010-10-29.

Venue

Office room of Dr. Chandana Gamage

Members present

All the members were present there.

Topic of the discussion

Contribution to the project by each member

Brief Discussion of the discussion

As the deadline of the SRS was scheduled to be on 5th of November we discussed the important facts on that and Chandana sir wanted every of us to come up with the contribution for the project during that week. So we told to the sir what we have done on particular areas of the project since we have divided those topics among ourselves beforehand. Lahiru the team leader of our project had come up with his findings on the topic HMM (Hidden Markov Model) along with other details related to the area 2D to 3D mapping. In my case I have done my research on neural networks as a replacement methodology for HMM. And Thusitha and Hasitha did their researches on markerless models and interpretation of 3D virtual environment respectively. Chandana sir appreciated our effort and encourage us do further research on selected areas as we have finalized. For an instance for modeling 3D objects out of 2D model he advised us use neural networks rather than HMM based on the fact of the learning ability of neural networks. More importantly apart from the project related works he asked us to study other subjects also and ask us to study other subjects well also and not to let down them because of the project.

Key topics discussed

1. HMM

2. The good side of artificial neural networks over HMM

3. Approach of marker based models

4. Interpretation of 3D environments

Comments and agreements

Today sir went through the things we did as according to the topics we were assigned and make his feedback on several design decisions and asked us to continue those topics further ahead.

Features and operating environment of BubbleBoy.

BubbleBoy Features

BubbleBoy is a project that targets creating a simple user interface for the user to communicate with computer.  It contains following features,

• Operates with commodities like web camera which is easy to find for the user.
• Achieve all the hard work of program using software and user need not to be troubled about installing difficult hardware.
• Track the full body motion of the user and simulate the computer program accouding to it.
• Provides different kinds of experience (different environments) to user as it helps different users’ choices.   
• Provides a less complicated and low cost product to have an invaluable experience.

Operating Environment of BubbleBoy

BubbleBoy provides a scenery of a natural environment experience through computer screen.And it gives the chance of interaction with computer using full body motion(Actions). Operating environment of the system includes following features.

• Two web cameras for capturing the actions of the user.
• Computer with
• High processing power: Core 2 Duo 2.2 or more
• Secondary storage of 5GB separated for the application.
• System memory of 1GB or more

Sceneries that will be there for the end users

In the project "BubbleBoy"we are hoping to deliver a system which would enable interaction without any specific hardware development, but only with aid of software. Only thing user has to do is to paste the markers on him or her which another technique we have exploited to provide the user with better performance and effective outcome. We need to provide appropriate scene as required by the user. The user will enable to select one of following activities.

· Swimming in an aquarium/sea/river.

· Walking alone by seaside/riverside.

· Walking at a museum

· Drive a racing car

· Walking on moon/space

· Having a walk in a volcanic site

· Tsunami

· Surfing

· Snow board

We can add any kind of scenery since we are hoping to capture the whole body movement. We are hoping to design the graphical environment similar to natural conditions to some extent.

It should be noted that in the process of proving scenery to this application we have focus our attention on physically impaired people who are unable of having these kinds of experience during their real life the apart from the average users. They will definitely enjoy it as our application will be fully enriched with life like experiences.