Projector group - reflections

Time for a report from the Projector group!
As you know, we’re back from our trip to Delft. During our demonstrations in the university there, we made a number of interesting observations which we'll now share with all of our dear readers :

• Our system is very sensitive to changing light conditions: A lot of manual calibration to the camera settings is needed to cope with this.
• The virtual buttons need to be more intuitive: people didn’t realize what they did, and often pushed them by accident.
• The virtual buttons push themselves when the video stream on them change drastically, meaning that you can turn other users’ incoming video streams on and off.
• A single user with bad settings ruins the experience for everyone in the shared workspace. As their bad projection is filmed and sent to all other users.
• Unstable workstation setup poses a problem. The projection gets thrown off if the camera or projector is slightly moved.
• When the shared workspace was used by an architect teacher to teach Jimmy some basic drawing concepts, we noticed that the teacher’s ability to see the students face was very important.
• High demands on the Internet connection: a slow connection results in low resolution video, to the point where the system becomes unusable.
• We need better resolution on the video streams, which Jimmy is currently trying to fix by rewriting the code to use WebGL for our transformations.

A last observation is that people didn’t seem to notice the technical issues the way we do (since they were having too much fun drawing, maybe?), which was a positive surprise.

That’s all from us!