Blog Posts

FDR and the last post

Last Tuesday, the Flux team completed the FDR(Final Design Review). Dr. Goncher, our team coach, and Dr. Segal, represented the Harn Museum attended the meeting. We reviewed our work over the past year, from problem discovery, plan preparation, actual development, user testing, and final delivery. We are grateful to Dr. Goncher and Matt, our liaison, for their help and support throughout the year. And we can finally say we did it!

We presented our actual prototype and some of its technical constructs at FDR, including the project video posted on our blog last week. We got some suggestions for future development, which we included in the final report. The final reports have been submitted and signed by our coach, liaison engineer, and executive sponsor.

Ziyang completed the final software debugging and delivery this morning. We will complete the Check Out Meeting with the IPPD director, Dr. Latorre, next Monday. At that time, the one-year IPPD project will finally come to an end for us. Here, thanks again to my team, Harn staff, and all IPPD members. Hope to have a chance to see you in the future.

Project Video!

FLUX’s project video

FDR is a few days away, and we’ve just released our project video, looking back at what we’ve done in the past year and what changes we can bring for the Harn!

Poster & Deliverable

The team demonstrated and delivered the prototype to our liaison engineer, Matt, on Thursday. We talked about how the prototype works, customizable parameters, and potential improvements in the future. We will still make some changes to the prototype to improve the user experience, but the functionality will remain the same.

Our first poster is finished and we have only a few weeks left to the end of IPPD. Stay tuned!

video filming & final function test

The team film footage for our video this week, including prototype and interface demonstrations, museum environment, and interviews with museum staff. We will show the function and significance of our products through the video, which is expected to be completed by the end of this month. It is also a meaningful opportunity for us to review our work over the past year.

The team also made the final function addition and test for our product. It can now recognize the user’s right and left hand and project the movement range of the hand to the screen accordingly. We plan to meet with our liaison next week for a live demo and delivery.

Prototype Inspection Day & Users Testing

This Tuesday was our prototype inspection day, and the team presented our prototype, test plan, and improvement plan to the three committees. We received some helpful feedback, one of which was about our prototype’s user guide and tutorial. We improved our user introduction based on feedback so that users can learn how to use the product interactively.

User instro page

We continued our formal user testing and museum-goers testing this week, and the product worked significantly better in a brighter environment. We plan to continue some user testing over the next week and further modify some of the visible interfaces, as well as use more data to train gesture recognition algorithms. We will also begin to prepare for the FDR(Final Design Review).

Museum-visitors testing

After two weeks of formal user testing, the team gathered lots of feedback and made some minor improvements. All members of the team met offline this week! We discussed the product with museum staff and collected their views.

The team with our coach and liaison, Dr. Goncher and Matt

Since most of our formal testing users are engineering students, we wanted to get more diverse user data. We set up a prototype area at the entrance to the museum this Friday to get some feedback on the experience of museum visitors. Many visitors have shown interest in our products and have given us many suggestions, which we are delighted to get.

Next Tuesday is our Prototype Inspection Day, and we probably won’t be able to make significant improvements until then. However, there is still some time to go before the Final Design Review, and we will use the feedback obtained during these weeks to further modify and improve the prototype!

User Testing

This week, the team went back to the Harn to try setting up the Touchless Touchscreen prototype. Since it went smoothly this time around, we were able to start user testing this week!

During user testing this week, we were able to gain a lot of insightful knowledge about our system that we never recognized before. We are learning a lot about how a user who has never experience this system before would naturally react to trying it for the first time! We have been recording our observations and are still in discussions of how this data will create changes in our system once we are done with testing.

We will update with more soon!

A Day at the Museum

This week, we went to the Harn Museum to start setting up the system to make sure everything worked for user testing. We had some hiccups with the code not running as expected on the touch tables that the Harn provides.

Our software wizard, Ziyang, was busy this week trying to figure out how to get the software working again. Luckily, it’s up and running again! We plan to go to the Harn next week to finish the setting up the system on the touch tables and starting user testing by the end of the week!

Olivia and I have been busy prepping all the material we need for user testing such as the questionarrie as well as prefecting the test tasks and testing script. We are currently working with users to see what is the best day for them to come in for testing.

We will keep you all updated as we dive into the testing phase of our project!

QRB2, Final Prototype V.1, and Testing

The team just presented for QRB2 this week! Overall, we received positive feedback with constructive criticism to help with adjusting our test plans for user testing.

In other news, we also finally have our first version of our prototype! We were able to merge the Kinect with the full version of the software so we are ready to put the system into the Harn. We say first version because there is a possibility, that after user testing, there are some tweaks that might need to be made before we put the final version in the actual exhibit. This is all depending on the feedback we receive during user testing…

Speaking of user testing, next week we will begin setting up the system in the Harn to prepare for bringing users to test the system. The team has been hard at work writing test plans and searching for volunteers who are interested to try the prototype! If you are interested, check out the included documents. All are welcome (see our flyer for specific user groups that would help to improve accessibility). We will be following COVID-19 precautions & scheduling appointments to minimize the amount present during testing. To sign up, fill out this form

The first prototype

It is a week (actually 4 days) away from our QRB2. This week, we completed our first basic prototype, and now we can control the cursor’s basic behavior using gestures. The tool we used to control the mouse is PyAutoGUI. Because of its different interfaces for different mouse behaviors, we may need more gestures than we planned for different operations. Since we can currently recognize nine different gestures in our program, we believe it is enough to handle different operational needs. We will discuss what is the most intuitive gesture to use these days.

We also completed the test plan this week, and we will finalize it next week. We gonna discuss our test plan in detail in our blog post next week. We are also planning to put out an email/flyer for volunteers to test our prototype. These are also scheduled to be released next week. Stay tuned!

Screenshots of the prototype demo, we were unable to publish a GIF 🙁