Client’s Step Back:
After reviewing the week 2’s list of challenges for a few days, the client, and the producer on his end, Marques, talked to us, aiming to forgo the idea of motion tracking and replace this project with still videos for the performers to choreograph from.
The team, on the other side, felt a bit surprised because this is what this project is set out to motion track and project interactive visuals over performer’s bodies.
We decided to convince him to pick back up the idea of the motion tracking, and aims to understand the reasoning behind such a back down. So during the weekly meeting, the team shows the client with current progress, with much lower latency and solutions for overlapping.
We also actively communicated with the clients and confirmed (both verbally and via a letter) that those challenges are set out to be conquered than to be avoided.
What We Agreed On During Meeting:
- To use one projector to create an interactive piece (going back to our previous goal)
- (Maybe) Thinking about the idea of a back up plan (still video)
- Provide recommended speed from now on during video demos.
- Give final hardware constraints during week 5 Feb 13-17.
- Five performers for sure (High priority).
- Overlapping (High priority).
- Slow of speed during interactive performance.
Mikael’s Reasoning Behind The Back Down:
- Budgeting does seem to be an issue that they are concerned about, so they really want to keep it one projector.
- The 5 Performers are a must.
- The fact we were hesitant over overlapping was a turn down for them. Now it seems that the issue is somewhat resolved, they are a little more confident.
- They are worrying about the final deliverable. They are still a little hesitant about an interactive piece, but they are still pivoting towards having a still piece (mostly the producer wants this to happen so they can take it and travel.)
Latency Problem Breakdown and Projector Latency Test
While we spent time convincing Mikael to gain confidence in this project, we are also making sure that we don’t stop our pace.
Latency has been an huge issue for this project. There are three sources for that latency. The Azure Kinect that reads and tracks the motions, the TouchDesigner Software that generates visuals, and the Projector that projects the visual over the bodies. The Azure Kinect and the Projector both have significant latency.
We tried to fix the Azure Kinect latency issues for a while in this week but due to it’s hardware limitation, we were not able to get significant progress. So we turn and looked into Projector’s own lag. In the end of the week, we conducted a projector latency test to quantify the latency using various projectors from ETC, as well as one projector from IDeATe.
Week 3 Demo
In this demo, we tested the latency of the current stage and compared the projector latency with the monitor screen’s latency.
Team Photo & Half Sheet:
