Week 7 and 8

26th December — 9th January

Prototype Design

Happy Holidays Everyone! After the holidays, we have to present an elevator pitch to clients and partners of our project, so most of our holiday has been spent deciding and developing a plan of action for this pitch. To decide what to present, we consulted with Dean regarding what would be an effective prototype to demonstrate to the NHS to get them excited about our project, in the limited time available. It was meticulous that we should work on developing a new hand gesture which requires different muscle contractions to simple hand movement. We chose to implement a punching gesture, with an aim to track both the x and y coordinates. With this we want to demonstrate wack-a-mole in the upcoming live demos and in the elevator pitch.

Whilst working on the punching gesture, we teamed with Imaad from team 38, who was also working on the same objective. Our implementation of the punching gesture had semi-utility. This is because, we were able to accurately detect the punching gesture using motioninput, by using a “boundary”, so if your fist passes a certain distance towards the camera, with the fist contracted, a punch will get detected. However, we were not able to accurately control the mouse by dragging it, the mouse would move to the position of your hand when u punched. This meant that you would need to guess where to punch if you wanted to get the mouse to a specific coordinate.

The solution was working on a “one button game”. We decided to choose flappy bird. Why? Since we are able to detect a punch gesture, whenever a punch is detected, this punch can trigger a button press. For example, when you punch towards the screen, the Space Bar being pressed can be triggered. Since it is a “one button game” just 1 button press on the keyboard can play the whole game. Therefore we can play a host of games with 1 repeated motion.

This is what we plan on doing for the live demos and elevator pitch. In the coming 2 weeks, we hope to work more on the Microsoft Teams aspect of the project!

Written by Adil