Tangible group - reflections

The team is back in Luleå again after the Delft trip. We're happy to report that the days here have become even shorter, the weather has turned colder again, the snow is back!

The tangible group has returned to the basement lab and started to reflect on our impressions concerning the role of the tangible devices' in this project. Here comes a couple of thoughts:

1. In Delft we discovered that in that setting, the surface of the sifteo cubes were too shiny for the camera to be able to recognize the qr code images on the cubes during calibration. Our solution in delft was to instead print QR codes on paper.
2. Our group did feel a bit superfluous during the demonstration in Delft. It turned out that demonstrating the initialization phase, including resizing the shared space, was very cumbersome to do many times, due to the fact that the hardware for the cameras needed to be re-calibrated every time the webpage was reloaded. This caused the team to choose not to demonstrate this part, with the result that the tangible devices was not used at all in delft.
3. Overall, we feel that the architect use case does not need tangible devices. All we do here is using them for accepting a call and calibrate the shared space, but we don't think doing only this justifies their existence. Other use cases would be needed.
4. A new use case was suggested during a reflection session in Delft. One could use a Sphero to rotate 3D objects on the screen - for example during an architect teaching session when a student is to draw a sketch based on a 3D model.
5. Another use case could include using sifteo cubes for showing and moving around virtual documents, like a pdf document, in the shared workspace.
6. While running in a web browser sounds like a better idea from the user's perspective, it did not set the user free from running programs locally in our case. The user had to start the driver locally, he had to  repeatedly press 'allow' to start the camera in the web browser. The user also had to leave the web browser window open in order to be able to accept an invitation to join a room. We believe that the experience would be more smooth if the whole program was an application running locally at start-up.

We hope that these reflections relating to the tangible devices will be helpful input for future projects.

Samuel, Mattias, Viktor, Alex