We’re ready for round 2 of camera placement, having met with Lab advisor Sigrid Norris on Monday. We’ll go back to focusing on the wave- and touch-tank areas and getting full coverage of interactions. Basically, our first test left us spread too thin to really capture what’s going on, and our programmer said face detection and recognition is not robust enough to be able to track visitors through the whole center yet anyway. Though now of course we’re running out of ethernet ports in the front half of the Visitor Center for those extra cameras.
One thing we had been noticing with the cameras was a lot of footage of “backs and butts” as people walk away from one camera or are facing a different exhibit. Sigrid’s take on this is that it is actually valuable data, capturing multimodal communication modes of posture and foot and body position. This is especially true for peripheral participants, such as group members who are watching more than driving the activity, or other visitors learning how to use exhibits by watching those who are there first.
We did figure out the network issue that was causing the video stoppage/skipping. The cameras had been set up all on the same server and assumed to share the load between the two servers for the system, but they needed to be set up on both servers in order to make the load sharing work. This requires some one-time administrative configuration work on the back end, but the client (what the researchers using the system see) still displays all camera feeds regardless of what server is driving which camera at any given time. So now it’s all hunky dory.
The wave tanks are also getting some redesigns after all the work and testing over the summer. The shore tank wave maker (the “actuator”) won’t be made of aluminum (too soft), and will have hydraulic braking to slow the handle as it reaches the end points. The wave energy tank buoys are getting finished, then that tank will be sealed and used to show electricity generation in houses and buildings set on top. We’ll also get new tables for all three tanks which will lack middle legs and give us probably a bit more space to work with for the final footprint. We’ll get the flooring replaced with wet lab flooring to prevent slip hazards and encourage drainage.
