Tangible group update

Hello again. It's time for a mid-sprint update. We might have neglected to mention it on this blog, but each sprint start and end on Thursdays. We have weekly meetings every Tuesday, where we discuss what everyone has done, what we are going to do in the coming week, and if we need to coordinate between the groups.

So far everything is on track and we published a preliminary gantt chart last Tuesday. I think the chart provides a pretty good overview of how the project will progress. The chart also shows when we expect to make releases. If everything goes as planned there will be a website up and running where anyone can test the progress.

Regarding the tangible group we have made some progress. You have already seen the video where Mattias shows some progress on the Sifteo cubes. When interacting with the cubes we are using an API developed earlier by another student at the university. This API is intended for the web and makes it possible for us to interact with the cubes from JavaScript. Part of this sprint is to plan ahead, so we are investigating if this API is enough for our needs or if we have to make some additions.

There is also another interesting thing with the Sifteos. It appears the company is gearing to release a new version of the Sifteo cubes, and a new SDK. Information about this is really difficult to find, but this blog post has the best information I've found so far. It is unclear if the new SDK will be compatible with the cubes we got now.

We have had less progress with the Spheros. We have set up a meeting next Tuesday with a student who worked on them earlier and hopefully that will speed things up. It appears that since the Spheros are meant to be controlled via a smartphone, there is no official support to control them from a computer. This might mean that the most convenient way is to route commands via a smartphone, but this remains to be seen.