Week 11 and 12
23rd January — 6th February
NDI-Out from Teams Call
Firstly, we have to share the huge progress made in our work with NDI. We have written a number of python scripts, which work together to detect NDI video sources. In a Teams call there is an option to ‘broadcast over NDI’, which means each persons video camera from a Teams call turns into an NDI video source. Our python code detects these video sources from the Teams call, and from the command line you can choose which video to open up. This replaces the need for OBS software, as our script gathers all the video sources.
The challenge now is to integrate this software into motioninput. Currently, motioninput launches the webcam; instead we need it to launch a selected NDI video stream, which we can achieve by altering the camera.py file. We aim to complete this by Monday 13th February. Once this is complete, someone with their video on inside a Teams call, will be able to use motioninput on someone else’s computer without needing to run any software on their own machine. The reason this can be so important to our project is because physiotherapy patients may not need to have motioninput running on their machine. The call admin can run motioninput externally using the patient’s video. With our target demographic mainly being people of old age, this will ease the patient’s experience.
This NDI work uses ‘NDI out’ feature in Teams. Previously, we had hoped to create a graphics overlay and ship this back into the Teams call using ‘NDI in’. However, Microsoft have now blocked this feature, meaning we cannot use this solution. This is a huge blocker, as this was the solution we had been anticipating to use for over 2 months. Now we are looking for different solutions to allow collaborative games to be played in Teams.
Teams Toolkit
For the app aspect of Teams, I have been learning Javascript and React over the previous 2 weeks. I aim to create a full template for the Teams App UI by Monday 13 February. All we will need to add to this template are different games to play. Also, Teams apps, by default, cannot be played collaboratively. This means if one person launches an app inside a Teams meeting, and begins to play a game, no-one else inside the app will be able to see what is happening. Once we find a potential solution, this will have to be added into the code for the Teams app.
Written by Adil
