Chapter 5 – Through the Looking Glass

Week 5: February 13, 2023 – February 19, 2023

Blog entry by Damian Xie

Summary of the week: This week our overall project progress is Promising, everything is on track and the direction is clearer, we finished the final design of half sheet and poster, iterated the UI design and connected the UI framework in the engine for the first time. In addition, we worked on the different Arduino sensors, and then Steve gave us a link to the audio library, where we started trying to find available audio content and organize it. Sadly, this week Lori got COVID and started a home quarantine, but we’re still working hard to keep things moving forward.

Logo and half sheet final version

It’s great that we finally have the final version of the poster and half sheet, which has now been sent to the school for printing, and we’re really looking forward to the final product!

Our beautiful poster! Thanks to Randi’s hard work!

New version UI

Felicia conducted an overall iteration of the existing UI based on the last interface playtest, which was designed to make the existing interface simpler and easier to understand, and to make the visual aspects of each function more prominent.

We can clearly see that the first version of the UI design tries to put all the functional interfaces on the same plane space, which makes the user may feel overwhelmed, and the dense amount of information also makes the focus of the whole tool is not clear.

**The revamped interface looks significantly fresher and cleaner, with a higher visual finish, while readability and functional clarity have become better.**

The completion of the UI framework built in Unity

The entire UI structure framework of the tool is built in unity, so we have a basic prototype that can be used for future functional testing, and we can finally stop playtesting with paper prototypes. (The entire structural framework of the UI is completed in unity, and you can start using the full version of the software features in future user testing.)

A demonstration of the basic import data function can already be completed.

Arduino sensor research

We conducted detailed research on the different types of sensors that Arduino can use, and we hope to apply them to our project as part of a physical interaction device.

Felicia has documented the results of the research in detail, see the link below:

Felicia-Potential Interaction Setting – Google Docs

Some examples of the sensors we researched

Classification of audio libraries

We got the sound library link from Steve, going through and picking out the sounds from it and doing editing on the selective audio files, organizing different categories from those sounds.

**Lauren’s audio classification results**

Design documentation

Damian finished writing the first version of the design document, the current design document is in a preliminary stage of the beginning lack of standardized format and overall framework, so the subsequent need to standardize and restructure.

**Wrote a feature analysis on the PPT function and the subsequent design of Ideas.**

Playtest preparation and time schedule

Felicia completed the playtest documentation for the background removal feature：

Remove Background Tutorial – Google Drive

Lori completed a tutorial on audio editing tool：

Sound Editing Tutorials – Google Drive

Lori through the Looking Glass

A sad thing happened this week, we lost a precious teammate, Lori infected with COVID-19 makes her work with us only remotely, but first let her in the looking glass encounter for a while! But the good news is that she seems to be doing fine, and we sincerely wish her a speedy recovery! (In fact, maybe next week she’ll be back with us from quarantine.)

Programming progress updates

There were some new developments in the program this week：

Finished (database function) files save and load function
Connect with windows default resource manager
Files input function(connect UI and its function)

We made more definite progress on the direction this week, and we decided to head over to Museum Lab on Monday to test out the new device and confirm that our current design is working on Promethean.

Well done team! We will continue to work hard next week!