Biometrics and Sensor Integration
This week while working on sending Heart Rate data from the Apple Watch to his phone, Zibo discovered that the API for monitoring HRV is kept private by Apple. Despite the ability to trigger short-term HRV measurements using the Breathe app, Zibo can’t integrate that feature into our own application. It’s been all hands on deck to solve this issue, with the first day of problem solving dedicated to seeing if we could calculate HRV from Apple’s 5 second BPM readings. Our conclusion was that this would not be possible without having the meditator take 20 second long breaths (10 seconds breathing in and 10 seconds breathing out) since HRV relies on measuring two intervals within the same half of the breathing process. The 5 seconds of bpm just isn’t minute enough for us to get a valid HRV from. After meeting with our instructors, we’ve made the tough decision to begin moving away from the Apple Watch. Since then we’ve been reviewing other sensors to see what will best work for our project goals.
User Experience
On Wednesday Constanza and Gillian interviewed one of Equa’s meditation coaches, Chad. Chad helped us narrow down how we want our meditation audio to be presented and what type of focal points we should look at including in our meditation. The team also began creating a larger domain map to help us contextualize how our app fits in the world of meditation. We expect to keep adding to this in the coming weeks.
Art
Lauren and Faris continued working on building out the waterfall environment we chose last week. Currently the color palate has been toned down, and the rocks and water have been completely rebuilt from the whiteboxing demo we’re building off of.
Sound
Gillian began editing the meditation guidance script from Equa to better fit VR and began planning the flow for how sound will be recorded and edited together. She and Faris talked about how environmental noises would be layered with the meditation guidance.
Production
Constanza made two more iterations of the half sheet and poster. Gillian laid out more structure for how meetings will be held and what is expected of stand-ups.
Team Building
Our team picked up some more hardware for the room including a Wacom tablet for Lauren and a Cintiq for Constanza. Since we’ve been busy with trying to troubleshoot our sensor issue, this week’s team building activity was confined to naming Constanza’s Cintiq. Right now we have three names tied for the lead, so we’ll be collecting votes from some more of our peers to pick a final name.