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Week 1 Lab session

01/02/2019

Today We started the first lab session of our 5 weeks project.

Our year two project is augmented reality interactive sandbox which recreates the topography surface with real sand and enables users to reshape the terrain with an integrated Xbox Kinect and short-throw projector.

Our goal is to design a fun educational game along with the sandbox.


The theory behind the sandbox is a projector is used to create a topical representation on top of the sand. By utilizing the depth camera, the height of the sand is recognized and any changes are instantaneously identified and reshaped. Then the projector will adjust to the changes accordingly. 

The Augmented Reality Interactive Sandbox is a new way of engaging students in visual learning by providing an interactive platform. This project is a way of inspiring young engineers though not only interacting but building the sandbox,giving them hands-on experience to the typical classroom environment.

This project is split into two groups - hardware design and software design. Our group is responsible for the hardware aspect of the project.

Our group consists of George, Paco, Jaffer, Aisha.

The blog of software development of the project can be found here: arsandboxgame.blogspot.com

Our plan for today 's session is to assembly the sandbox and testing out the compatibility of our chosen equipment.

Here are a few pictures of us constructing the support skeleton of the sandbox. We use power tools to joint up the wood planks and wooden legs.









After we have built the basic structure for the sandbox, we started testing the functionality of the Xbox Kinect and projector.we tried to operate the projector, depth camera, and its software to see what kind of results we get so that we can make adjustments to our hardware to fit our requirement.




At this point, we only had a tripod that mounted to the projector and it was difficult to get the project angle and distance right. It took many attempts to get the image fit right in the box


We use Styrofoams to act as height changes in the testing of our Xbox Kinect as we still had difficulty using the depth camera as our source of input.
The following pictures show before and after removing my hand on the sandbox, as you can see in the second picture, a small hill had appeared after I laid my hands in the box. It disappeared shortly after I removed my hand.


























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