This week has been very tense, motivating, and captivating as we finally have our capstone teams assembled. I am on the Augmented Reality for Realtime Strain Visualization(AR-RSV) team mentored and partnered with Professor Mike Bailey at OSU. The team has had a chance to meet together as a group and with Professor Bailey. He has been incredibly helpful so far and has basically left himself open for us to ask questions. I will be going through what has went well this week and what I am understanding about my project so far.
First I want to share how well the initial team contact has been. And how I have found how ideal the week has been in terms of communication between my peers.
We all immediately found an instant messenger type service that we prefer in order to have instant feedback from each other. We chose Discord knowing it might not have some of the versatility or features that some other services offer like Slack, but it is what we are comfortable with.
We are testing Asana as a Kanban board and general task management system for our assignments as I have had experience using it before. So I suggested to the team and we have all agreed to use for the time being to see how the workflow manages. I am confident that we have gotten off to a great start in terms. As we have already helped each other become accountable by requiring peer reviewing papers as early as our first papers. Additionally we are sending our papers to Professor Bailey in order for him to see if we are missing anything to further improve or have feedback on our assignments. He wants to be included so he can aide us through the capstone project and ensure that as long as we do the work, we will succeed.
The environment that has been created so far, even if it may be a honeymoon phase, has been great. A solid organizational foundation feels great compared to other group projects I have had at OSU. Previously I have had group projects at OSU feel very unorganized and almost confusing. Where messaging is done through Direct Messages(DM’s) and communication can happens days apart with no real update in progress. So I am somewhat more at ease going into this term than I initially was due to the clear organization of our team.
The general idea of the project is as follows: We will be programming a Microsoft Hololens 1 or 2, a mixed reality device, to display contour lines or heat maps in real-time as a concrete test is occurring. This will allow our client to be able to change tests as they see fit based on the values they see. The initial project meeting went well with Professor Bailey as he gave us a clear vision of how the product is to work and we will be able achieve it. We are pending to see if we can get a Microsoft Hololens 2 though. Professor Bailey stated that the differences from the first model and second greatly reduce the burden on the programmer in terms of managing software.
I am still in my preliminary stages of researching about the technology. Though I have learned enough to know that we can embed markers in images to be able to use as anchors for creating visualizations.
Based on the information I have synthesized from the meeting my initial idea is that as long as we add some sort of marker to each strain gauge, or an area that is suitable to represent it’s location, we can display that data whenever the user looks at it to show the current strain value. there is also the option of having a location based device in order to map the strain gauges, but it seems much cheaper and feasible to simply have a printed image on a location.
Although it is the first true week of our project, I feel that our team is poised for success with the amount of work we have already put forward to the organization and structure of our team.
Next week I expect to have learned more about the Hololen’s through reading it’s SDK to describe some features and possibilities.
