Blog Posts

FDR Event

This week the team NeuroMediSim presented our Final Design Review (FDR) presentation to our coach, the sponsor, and the rest of the IPPD faculty and members. The presentation was mainly focused on the system architecture, prototype demo, testing plans, and final product results. The team received a positive feedback from the audience. This was our last event as members of the IPPD program. The team would like to thank our coach Dr. Peters and our sponsor Dr. Winesett for the continuous support throughout these two semesters. It was a pleasure working with you and we hope our final product fulfilled your expectations. We would also like to thank the whole IPPD faculty for giving us an opportunity to be a part of this amazing community, and work on and create a product that we all were very passionate about.

Project Video

Poster

Posters & video

The team is currently working on finilizing the poster and video which will be displayed or played during the Final Design Review event.

Early version of our poster

For the poster, we are working on analyzing our test results so that we can include them in the poster. Also we are trying to make the center part of the poster more attracting.

During the lecture, we received some helpful suggestions on the promotional video, we are also actively working on reorgnizing the current content as well as adding and removing new and old clips from the first version.

The Second Prototype Day

The past Tuesday was our team’s second prototype inspection day. During the event, our team presented our latest prototype and explained our accomplishments so far as well as our plan for next steps.

The PID event
A game scene in our system

We received valuable feedback from the event and are adjusting our plan to address some of the issues identified during the event. For example, the team is prioritizing generating 3 to 5 polished and well-executed game scenes for future demonstration. We are actively working on improving our implementation as well as working with our sponsor to arrange for our user testing phase. The team is starting to prepare for the FDR event at this time.

Prototype Progress

As we apparch the second prototype inspection day, our team is working actively on puting together our working prototype for the demo.

We have successfully set up the pipeline for converting the motion capture data into animation.

the motion data displaying the markers

We have also implemented a basic version of User Interface and are looking forward to any suggestion on the UI for future improvement.

The main menu of the program

The team is ready to present our prototype during the PID event and are really excited to demonstrate what we have put together so far. We are positive about our accomplishment so far and will keep on working to deliver a more refined version at the end of the semester.

The True Power of Motion Capture

We mentioned couple weeks ago that our team and sponsor “accidentally” found out that we have access to a true motion capture setup using the Vicon system. After weeks of experimenting and testing, we are now producing animation captured with the mocap system to be used in our own simulation system.

Animation generated using data captured by the Vicon Mocap system

As you can see, the quality of the animation is much better than what we had before which is captured using a single depth camera. The team is actively working on testing the new data and fitting it into our system. We are excited to demonstrate our progress in the coming weeks for the prototype inspection day.

QRB 2 And More

This week, our team delivered our presentation for the second Qualification Review Board event. For this presentation, we focused on updating the current status of the project as well as the team’s plan for the next steps, including the development and testing plan. We received valuable feedback from the review committee. We were glad to know that the committee believed that we are on the right track to deliver the final system. One suggestion we received is to include a demo or prototype for our current system and the team has been working on this subject since the event and are confident to have it for future presentations.

Another exciting news comes from our sponsor. While the team is focusing on the development of our system using our current data, Dr.Parrish Winsett finished the initial test on the Vicon Nexus Mocap system and has provided some raw data for the team.

Mocap with marker

We are currently working on analyzing and processing the data we received and hopefully these data can greatly improve the quality of our animation.

A Pleasant Surprise

This week, as the team is actively working on the development of our system, we discovered a pleasant suprise when working with our sponsor Dr. Parrish Winesett that could possibly improve the animation quality of our system by a great margin.

Long story short, we now have access to a much more advanced motion capture setup: 18 cameras and markers. The software and system is called a Vicon Nexus.

Motion capture with markers

Now, as we prepare for our second QRB event, we are also working closely with our sponsor to test the new mocap setup. If this proves to be caompatible with our goal, it will greatly improve the animation quality produced by motion capture.

QUALIFICATION REVIEW BOARDS

This week, the team attended the first qualification review board of the semester. We presented our current progress on the project and the team’s plan in the future to the panel of Dr. Karl Gugel, Dr. Philip Jackson, Dr. Jorg Peters, and Dr. Andrea Goncher. With the feedback receieved from this event, we are able to identify some potential risks in our plan and is currently working on addressing them.

One of the risks mentioned above is the quality of the animation generated with our current pipeline. In order to address this, we invited DR.Winesett, our sponsor, to a initial test on the motion capture process. After testing and discussing, we were glad to conclude that although limitation and problems exist, we are on the right track and have enough to move forward with our project.

Our model with & without animation

All in all, we ‘ve had a full and productive week and some positive news. We are excited to carry on with our project throughout the rest of the semester.