This week was FDR week and our last week of the IPPD program. We presented our project to our liaison on Tuesday and received great feedback about the system and the potential application of the components! Afterward, we also presented our project to the public at the Reitz and received many positive responses from the audience who used the product itself. It was a great experience!

To finish off our IPPD experience, Gearware traveled to Tampa and presented our product to employees at Fanatics. They asked many insightful questions and applauded our efforts of making an innovative product. It was a great experience that we were so happy to have been able to do!

As this is the last blog post from Gearware, we wanted to say thank you to Ben, Dr. Silva, Dr. Latorre, and IPPD for this amazing opportunity to be a part of a wonderful project and the chance to meet such great people. We have enjoyed our time in this project so much and can’t wait to see what future IPPD projects will accomplish! Gearware on 3- 1,2,3, Gearware!

T-Minus 4 days until FDR! Gearware has been hard at work to place the finishing touches on our project this week! We worked on incorporating edits for our FDR report as well as finished the handedness script for the gesture control and login page. The user will now be able to select handedness before the start of their session. This will help with gesture accuracy and improve their overall experience with the asset viewer!

We also had the opportunity to present our project at the Cade Museum to various investors in the Alachua area. We had a great time presenting and showcasing our project and what opportunity IPPD brings!

This week, Gearware has been busy working on getting the final poster design and video ready for the Final Design Review. The poster above is the final design for the poster that we will be presenting at FDR! We also have been at work incorporating final touches on the gesture and UI scripts to include handedness and improve human-computer interaction with the asset viewer. We are really excited to showcase what we have accomplished!

This week, Gearware worked on getting additional user studies completed by our peers in IPPD. We aimed to get additional feedback on top of PID 2 as well as to test some implemented changes based on the PID’s feedback. This included modifying the delay between the static open hand gesture and the dynamic swiping gestures. We trialed a few different values and settled on a threshold of 15 frames fewer than the threshold from PID 2. We hope that this change will make the application feel more intuitive and will have a snappier response time from the user.

Gearware also worked on the preliminary designs for both the video and the poster. We had planned on incorporating demonstrations of the product within the video and trying to give off a tech informational video format. In terms of the poster, we plan on incorporating a center graphic that looks like our hardware prototype and with text on the sides of the poster to explain the implementation and the different components of our project.

Next week, we plan on completing drafts of the videos and the poster as well as adding additional parameters to the static gestures to account for edge cases.

This week was prototype inspection day and Gearware presented its integrated product to the judges. This came not without trials as we had issues with the server the night before PID! However, we were able to get that running for the judges before PID and were able to receive really good feedback.

From PID, we received a lot of feedback on the intuitiveness of the gestures with the major consensus that the gestures have a learning curve with learning the gestures in a short period of time. We plan to incorporate more in-depth tutorial instructions to help aid the user better.

We also included the 3D model viewer with new assets that integrated really well with the current web application. We plan on incoporating gestures with the model viewer so that the user can interact with the 3D images as well.

We plan on integrating the feedback we received from PID into our current implementation and continue testing in the next couple weeks leading to Final Design Review!

This week, Gearware has been hard at work to get our prototype ready for Prototype Inspection Day next week. Starting with the gesture domain, we decided to include a static gesture before initializing a dynamic gesture (swiping in different directions). This will help the issue we were having with segmentation with matters of intent from the user. Meaning, that there were stray hand movements with the intent of no gesture being recognized as a gesture (i.e. moving the hand to be at the user side would be recognized as a down swipe with the current implementation). Therefore, we are incorporating an open hand gesture between swipes and hope to have this finished by PID.

In addition, we also included gifs during the tutorial. We hope that the additional visual cues will be helpful in aiding the participants during PID. In terms of the UI, we also incorporated a drop shadow when the open hand is detected to provide a cue to let the user know that the elements are ready to be moved with a dynamic gesture.

Gearware plans on allowing the judges to demo the web application so that we may get some useful feedback on the gesture input and UI since this would be the first time they will see both parts integrated as an end-to-end product. We are very excited to showcase our product!

This week, we worked on implementing changes to the tutorial side and incorporating the web application onto a server provided by our liaison. This now allows us to deploy the site for others to use on their personal devices which should make it easier for future user testing. We hope to continue development and apply the changes to the server.

In addition, we also created a series of gifs and images to display during the tutorial phase of the web application. These images and videos should help aid the participants in learning the gesture library more intuitively. The image below displays the assets that we will be using, but it is not the library itself.

We also worked on getting a preliminary analysis of gestures accuracy by using footage received from PID 1 last semester. Upon review, however, it became apparent that handedness creates an issue when running the footage through the scripts (i.e. the script will recognize the incorrect hand, the one not in motion or doing the gestures). Due to this, we plan on incorporating handedness in the future to help with testing and potential false readings from the wrong hand being detected.

This week, Gearware prepared for their second Quality Review Board. During this presentation, Gearware presented their additional changes to the UI as well as demonstrated a functional gesture-controlled application using both static and dynamic gestures. As of QRB2, Gearware has completed a minimal viable product for our sponsor and we are super proud and excited at the progress we have made so far!

We also discussed our future plans of alpha user testing, incorporating the application onto a server, and improving upon the gesture input based on testing. As of right now, our product is on the path to success by the end of the semester.

This week, Gearware continued developing their product and made progress in all domains this week. In terms of dynamic gestures, we worked on doing preliminary testing for the gestures and found some potential issues that may need to be handled. These issues include handedness and orientation of the camera. We also worked on a different and more robust way of implementing static gestures with a new library. This allows us to use both hands for static gestures when before it was only limited to one.

We also worked on reducing the file size of the displayed items on the application. As of right now, we were able to reduce the files down by 86.1% ! In terms of the tutorial, we also added additional functionality to the mobile application including calibration, logout, and restart tutorial.

Next week is the second Quality Review Board and we plan on presenting all of our progress thus far. We are excited to show off our product to the panelist of judges!

Hi! This week, Gearware was working on improving on the current implementation of the algorithmic approach of the gesture control, finishing the tutorial aspect of our prototype, and learning the application Cloth3D. In terms of gesture control, we have decided to move away from a machine learning model and working on optimizing the algorithmic approach. In doing so, we are able to now recognize dynamic and static gestures with React App. We are excited to show this feature off for the next QRB. In terms of the tutorial, the scripting is complete and we are going to be working on the CSS as well as implementing animations to help guide the users for the gesture library. In addition, one of our team members, Austin, met up with our liaison to configure and learn a tool we will be using to render 3D files, Cloth3D. We hope to have a few of these items completed within the next couple of weeks.

We are making steady progress towards our end prototype and we are excited to continue its development!