Tag: Process

Robotics – Class Assignment 2 : Come On Barbie. (SuHwee and ZiFeng)

Our Initial idea was to have a head to bang onto the wall/table just because it will be sadistic and funny to watch. So our basic idea was to use strings and wires with plates for the head to move in any direction like to swivel around as it adds to the eccentric aspect of our idea. We did lots of trial and error as we were not sure what could work or not. First, we 3D modeled the servo mount which will pull the strings.

Meanwhile, we also went to look around in carousell for heads which could fit into our project nicely and is near for us to purchase them so we asked countless of dolls/plushie sellers on carousell

Then we realized that a square base we did previously was relatively inefficient as the part of the servo that spins was not centralize within the mount so we re-designed the 3D model.

After which, we did experiments with the plate for the “Neck” of the doll.


One spring in the middle was too flimsy until we added strings

emulation of 3 motors and movements, We were impressed.

And we fixed everything together and tied it with fishing lines.

With the setup above, the doll head was relatively heavy when attached to it,so it does not come back to the standing position so we modified the system with some blue felt to strengthen the system by a bit.

and then after some coding……

Cross Streaming Technical Test (With Bao)

Since the last time we cross streamed during the lesson:

part 2. Adventure in ADM

Posted by ZiFeng Ong on Thursday, 14 September 2017

Video from my phone which I am unable to embed in this post, not sure why but all the setting are the same, >>CLICK HERE FOR VIDEO<<

we noticed that there were two major flaws in the cross streaming system, During that lesson, we used Bao’s Windows Laptop and my phone, both connecting to the ADM internet, since the Laptop were supposed to stream a live video and produce a stream at the same time, we could say that it is downloading and uploading at the same time hence the total bandwidth the computer had was split into two. The biggest problem we found in the cross streaming was that by having the phone connecting to the school internet, every time when the phone goes to a different area in ADM, there will be a short breakage with the connection in the Live video as the Wifi connection changed router, moreover, if the phone Wifi isn’t strong, the quality of the live video drop drastically, The lagginess was amplified by the low bandwidth of the computer, its as good as watching an already choppy movie with lousy dial-up internet, the overall experience wasn’t good.

HENCE! Through reverse engineering, by judging from the quality of the video, we could see which area in ADM have the best internet connection!
The connection in the classroom was the worst. look at the pixelated graphics, I am not moving and yet the terrible quality.
The Internet connection at basement was as bad as in the class, everything was blurry, cant even recognize the people in the video, BAAADD~
The Stairs to the basement doesn’t seem to have good connections and blurry visual doesn’t look pleasing at all.
The Lounge was having generally acceptable connection and hence the better quality
The Lounge’s connection was really stable and the quality is great
IM room got one of the best connection out of all place and the graphical quality was superb even when I was swinging the camera around. (Please scroll up to see the quality of the basement classroom, you will notice a clear difference in the relationship of better internet = better video.)

 

This is why, we will solve it, by hook or by crook.

The easiest problem to solve was when the phone connects to the school Wifi and the connection breaks when the phone switch router among ADM. Since the problem is with school’s Wifi, we tried to use our own phone’s Mobile Data, there was almost no lag and furthermore, the quality of the stream improved drastically due to the faster uploading speed from the phone, resulting in higher definition of the live stream.

Songyu Bao experiment 1

Posted by ZiFeng Ong on Tuesday, 19 September 2017

Notice that when I changed zone within ADM, from IM room all the way to the handicap lift near the library, there was no breakage of the connection even in the handicap lift. This, I must say, is a great improvement.

Next, is the problem of watching stream and uploading a stream from the computer and split the bandwidth into two, there is no way around it, the only approach we can do is to find a place with good internet connection and make sure that the speed will be sufficient to produce excellent streaming experience. AND GUESS WHICH PLACE IN ADM HAVE GOOD INTERNET? So, without further ado, we went to the IM room as the internet connection was relatively stable there.

Again, I can’t figure out why the Video doesnt want to embed, so.. >>CLICK HERE FOR TEST VIDEO FROM BAO<< 

but here’s the Screen shot from the video Bao and I Crossstreamed 

Overall through our test, it worked really well with minimal lag and there were no disconnections, quality were much better than we thought and we hope that we could be replicated it during the class.

 

 

Interactive Devices – Final Project Research 1: Brainstorming

For Interactive Devices Project, I Intended to do it as a solo project so that I could possibly learn more through the exploration process.

After some research, I’ve got 3 general ideas in mind which I might consider:

Wearable Devices:

  • Could be for Fashion

    – Something that look nice

  • Could be for Entertainment

    – Something that is amusing to the user/viewer

  • Could be for Practical uses

    – Something like an Air-condition system

  • Could be for medical purposes

Musical Devices:

  • Could be a totally new instrument that is not available in the market.

  • Could be a system which plays existing instruments:

    – Strum Guitar
    – Blow Pipes/Flute
    – Ring Bells

  • Incorporate the pendulum

    – Pendulum is a interesting object which produces beats
    – is rather amusing

  • Reads Music sheet and play it automatically

    – Could be like a music box

Magnetic Devices:

  • Magnets have really interesting properties
  • Could be a combination of permanent magnets and Electrical magnets.
  • Magnetic could result in levitation of objects which are really amusing

Conclusion

Overall, out of the 3 main categories of Wearable, Music Instrument and Magnetic devices, I like the idea of making an musical instrument more and my initial idea is a device which could read music sheets like a music box. I shall explore more on music box in the next research post.

Butterfly Effect(SuHwee & ZiFeng) Week 12 Milestone

This is the first time I’ve seen the butterfly emerged from chrysalis, these chrysalis of lime butterfly were given to us by our friend YaYu.

 

 

These 3 different species were given by the conservationist Mr.Foo, there were a total of 7 Chrysalis, 5 Leopard Lacewing, 1 Plain Tiger and 1 Lemon Emigrant. All 5 Leopard Lacewing had emerged this week and the other 2 will be coming out tonight or tomorrow morning.

Did a lot of butterfly related task this week which includes getting the chrysalis from Mr.Foo, setting the chrysalis up for documentation, waking up way too early to get the video of the eclosing process. laser cutting and build the final casing for the butterfly and presentation, Researched on what butterfly eats and how to feed them. buying Curry leaves from supermarket with vegetables for the butterfly to live with. And tried to get a second hand monitor screen from an online seller, the seller did not turn up and did not reply. Our 160 degree wide angle web camera had arrived from china and we will test it out really soon with Max.

While I was writing this post, The Lemon Emigrant eclosed! (and I diden see it nor video it!) now that the Lemon Emigrant came out, the last one that will be coming out will be the Plain Tiger.

Also for coding, we further researched about our max patch and spend most of our time studying and trying to merge/tweak the standard patch as well as what other people did for their project, some of the patch were too hard to understand until today’s lesson when LPD explained most of what the patch does then we understands(slightly) what the patch does.

From this week to next week we will focus mainly on the max patch and get something that could roughly work in terms of butterfly/motion tracking, visual generation and output to control a real life appliance using UDP or the wireless I-Cube X.

 

Butterfly Effect(SuHwee & ZiFeng) Week 11 Milestone

Planned Milestone for Week 10-11:

  • Write up a rough Max Patch for Motion tracking using camera and particle/visual generation from the point/blob that was tracked by the motion tracking.
  • Catch more caterpillar/cocoon from different area and see how long they need to become butterfly + research more about butterfly.

Actual Milestone Done in Week 10 -11

  • Purchased the materials and built box for the project using acrylic.
  • Purchased a mini webcam and tested it with Max, the viewing angle is
  • Tried to find caterpillar off the wild and also met two community gardener in different location who said there wasn’t any caterpillar seen recently.
  • Managed to get two chrysalis of butterfly from friend.
  • Managed to talk to a conservationist in Singapore and he agreed to give us some chrysalis of butterfly of different species for our project.
  • searched for particle system and tutorials for Max and had been trying to make them work.

 

We went to Dama in Ubi to purchase our acrylic to build the box for this project, the box have the length of 2.5ft by 1ft by 1( 76 x 30 x 30 cm ) and net will be attached to one side of the box for ventilation.

Helping the Chrysalis to shift the house from the insect container to a proper container for better documentation process and prepare for the timelapse during the emerging process.

The lid of the container was replaced with a net hotglued in place for proper ventilation for the Crysalis.

Also, I’ve joint a butterfly community in singapore and tried to ask for people to help me to get caterpillars of chrysalis of butterfly, and Mr Foo, a conservationist in Singapore agreed to give us some chrysalis for the project!

 

Year 2 sem 2 – Narrative for interaction Week 10 – ADMRPG NPC System

During this week, I tried out NPC chat by colliding with them, the Render Texture Camera of Unity is applied to the NPC chat so that their “Display Picture” is rendered in real time which is showed in the dialogue, through this, Vladimir suggested that I should make it mouse controlled camera as most of the games in the market is mouse controlled, so it will be more user friendly to so to. I’ll try to figure this out soon.

In this, this will be the basic system needed to complete the game, By talking to one NPC, another will be spawned or despawned, if i place the character on places where the spawning of new character cant be seen it will create a sense of exploration as the user will see different things in the same place even though they past by the same area, the things there will be different. i think It would be interesting and user might just want to see different stories in the game. By having this system of character spawn and despawn, i could make a game that is linear and there could be path for different story depending on which npc the user talked to and spawn the path for them while closing all other path by despawning the npc for the other path. I think this will be fun as many user could come to different story line within one game.

Butterfly Effect(SuHwee & ZiFeng) Week 10 Milestone


Our Project will take the idea of “The Butterfly Effect”

Basically for this project, we will be having many butterflies in a container with a habitat that allows them to survive for weeks, the butterflies will be used as an input for the camera’s tracking system and every time a butterfly fly over certain area, a visual will be generated through Max MSP.

The whole container will be placed on a specially made table with a projector in the table and a square hole directly below the container of butterflies, the bottom of the container will be opaque and the projector in the table will be projecting up to the bottom of the container through the square hole, making a screen like appearance at the base of the container.

For our project, we need to have real butterflies, after our research, we found out that Oh’ Farms will be selling caterpillars, on Saturday, we went there trying to purchase the caterpillars, however they were sold out and said the primary school purchased all of their caterpillars and they will restock in 2 weeks time, the shopkeeper also said that it will take around a month for the caterpillars to fully grow into butterfly, so unless we got the caterpillar this week, it will be not possible for us to have butterfly for the submission. So… Alternative plan is to go catch caterpillars/cocoon of butterfly ourself
 This is Stick insect Oh’ Farms sell, I think its kind of interesting.

As for the butterfly, I think the best way is to find for butterfly in the park and instead of catching the butterfly straight, it will be easier to catch caterpillar or cocoon, therefore we went to Parks and look for butterfly, since there is butterfly of the species there, there will be its caterpillar nearby.
Acraea violae (Tawny Coster)

Eurema hecabe contubernalis (Common Grass Yellow)

Zizula hylax pygmaea (Pygmy Grass Blue)

The above photo was taken in Yewtee Park, I also found 4 cocoon from the trees and bush there, it might be the cocoon of moth, but nonetheless, if it look like butterfly, it will work

 

For this week Milestone,

We’ve got our idea out, found where to find butterfly/cocoon/caterpillars and got ourself some cocoon to try wether it will become a moth or butterfly, we also purchased some cheap mini webcam from the web and will use it for our project.

our planned timeline for our project will be:

Week 10-11:

  • Write up a rough Max Patch for Motion tracking using camera and particle/visual generation from the point/blob that was tracked by the motion tracking.
  • Catch more caterpillar/cocoon from different area and see how long they need to become butterfly + research more about butterfly.

Week 11-12:

  • Build the Container for the butterfly and test the max patch within the container with fake butterfly mockup from paper.
  • Catch more caterpillar/cocoon from different area and see how long they need to become butterfly + how long could a butterfly survive + more butterfly research + get food for butterfly/caterpillar

Week 12-13:

  • refine the max patch to get it to work with a smooth flow and generate good visual worthy for submission
  • try to connect two computer together
  • learn how to output control real life electronics like a fan or light bulb, either straight from max or serial to Arduino.
  • Catch more caterpillar/cocoon from different area + get food for butterfly/caterpillar

Week 13-14:

  • further refine everything and make sure all component of the project works seamlessly.
  • Shoot the video for our final submission
  • Edit the video
  • Catch more caterpillar/cocoon from different area + get food for butterfly/caterpillar

Before 21st April:

upload everything we have onto OSS.

 

 

Year 2 sem 2 – Narrative for interaction Week 5 – ADM Building part 1

ADM Layout Research: Floor Plan Searching

2017-01-18-12-11-53I tried to find floor plan of ADM online and after long period of searching, I could not find any Floor plan that contain any information information I need Therefore I took a photo of ADM floor plan at level one near the lift to use it as the base to build ADM so that my general proportion is correct(hopefully).

First Blender Usage – Gave up.

2017-01-21-02-31-58I’ve tried blender (since its free) and seriously dont like it as I am totally not used to it, all the basic control is different from what I am used to, therefore I’ve decided to stick to Sketchup since it can be exported into FBX and be used as Unity Models.

 

The Start of BUILDING ADM.

 

In the end, sketch up is much better since the function is more basic and is able to be used to create a low poly model(note: my game is phone base game therefore highly detailed models might lag game and reduce the overall experience while playing).2017-01-21-13-22-22I have the picture of the Floor plan of level one. But the height and other thing like the slope gradient I’ve used google image search to estimate how tall it should be, how steep each slope is and roughly model ADM out visually(i am sure it is wrong structurally speaking, but at least i tried to make it as visually similar to the real thing as possible.) Every line was actually drawn by me(except the little human figure which is there by default when sketchup is opened, which i used it to gauge the scale of whole ADM and i changed the scale a few times afterwards)

2017-01-21-15-07-09When I tried to build the Sunken plaza, I realized that I’ve modeled ADM wrongly in the previous picture the ending of the two slope (product design room and the animation room side) are on different height and tried to fix it to the correct one below.
2017-01-21-20-12-55
 2017-01-21-20-54-48

As the top of ADM is a slope and curvy, everything near to the top of ADM was REALLLYYY HARD to align as sketchup is good only in making XYZ alignment but not otherwise so I need to draw many line in XYZ direction just to align the position and delete those lines afterwards, which took me a lot of time.

After that all this modeling, I’ve made the rough exterior of ADM out but I am sure that the bigger problem will be the interior which will take up most of the time, at least I’ve got the easiest part done, FOR NOW.

Year 2 sem 2 – Narrative for interaction – Learning Unity Part2

After trying out the tutorial in the last post, I found another one which is much better!

I’ve went through this tutorial twice by accident as my save file got overwritten by another file when I tried to explore the asset store. so yeah, this is the most basic of Unity, the way to move something without animation.

ANDDDDD THE MAIN POINT OF THIS POST!

This is Unity Chan!!!

most probably the character I am going to use for my 3D game, Unity Chan is a free to use character model by Unity(I am sure of it as I’ve read all of the licencing, Grant of License, Condition of use, as well as their official page FAQ.*They even allow it for normal commercial use*)

After this Tutorial, this is still insufficient to create the basic control of the game as there are many mechanics lacking (camera panning, the character dont even move well), but I still gain important knowledge from here and trying it out, this is a tutorial focusing on animation than movement. 2017-01-30-18-42-41

I’ve also did my scripting and modified it to make it animate and move slightly better than in the tutorial, so yeah, that’s about it, the exploration of unity and learning lots of stuffs in it, maybe one day I could be a game producer 😉

 

After a few more attempt and followup on the project, i managed to make the camera to follow and pan according to the character movement which i really like it, this should be the base to create the final project.

Year 2 sem 2 – Narrative for interaction – Plot V1.

Chapter 1 : Orientation Week

The Story Happens in ADM Building.
Main character enrolled into ADM as first year.

All the tutorial for control and mechanics happen here as the first few task guided by an Non-Player Character (NPC).

The player are required to walk around the common area of ADM to make more friends(NPC) and they will give random facts about the school, survival tips to survive ADM life, there will also be intractable objects lying all around and player are required to complete certain number(10-20) of NPC talk and interacting with certain number of intractable(15-25) to complete the task.

Upon completion of the task, The player will be directed to proceed to the office at level one to collect their matriculation card which unlock their entry to Foundation Drawing, 2D, 3D and 4D room.

End Of Chapter 1.