The purpose of the project is to investigate how tangible devices, WebRTC and image analysis can be used to simplify communication and let users share a common workspace. The tangible devices would provide additional ways for the user to receive output and provide input to applications.
One common issue with current conventions is that annoying popups interrupt you when you are working. If you instead rethink that your monitor is a region that is dedicated to what you are currently doing, and introduce other objects - tangibles - to provide an unobtrusive way to notify you of events unrelated to what you are currently doing.
The tangible objects that we are currently playing with are Sifteo cubes and Sphero balls. One scenario for notifying the user of an incoming call could be for a Sphero ball to start changing colors. The Sifteo cubes could at the same time display information, such as a picture of who's calling.
The project is based on a proposal by a research group here at Luleå University of Technology. The proposal is available on the course homepage. The course itself is a project course spanning over a whole term (roughly until the end of this year).
We are 14 fifth year computer science students working on this. We divided ourselves into three groups, namely an image analysis group, a WebRTC group and a tangible devices group.
- WebRTC group
- Jonas Brood
- Johan Andersson
- John Viklund
- Karl Öhman
- Image analysis group
- John Ek
- Patrik Burström
- Nicklas Nyström
- Jimmy Nyström
- Elias Näslund
- Tangible group
- Stefan Sundin
- Alexandra Tsampikakis
- Mattias Lundberg
- Viktor Lindgren
- Samuel Sjödin
In our first meeting, I volunteered to become project lead. Once we had divided into groups according to our interests, I decided that the first name in every group should be the leader of that group. To give everyone a chance to have some responsibility we decided to change the group leader during the duration of the project. This brings us into the planning part.
The project will use Agile software development methods. We will work with two-week sprints, which will result in 6-7 sprints before the end of the project. At the end of each sprint, the responsibility of group leader will be handed over to the next person. We are working to define the goal of each sprint, and will post this information when available.
The first sprint will mostly deal with getting stuff up and running. We've already had some success with the WebRTC and the Sifteos. More details about this in later blog posts. The first sprint will conclude on September 27th.
We have the intention to release all of our results and code to the public. Our code repository is publicly available on Github.
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