Friday, April 17, 2009

Final Week - Project Sketch 3

For the last two weeks, we have been continuously working on our Air Guitar project. I managed to finish all of the presentation which includes our project concept, research, logic flow and our experience with our project.

Besides finishing the project, I also met with my team to discuss our project and to put everything together to get it to work. The first time that we met up during the final weeks was to see if certain things worked with each other. It worked out the way we wanted, but with minor tweaks to improve it. We also took some pictures for our presentation and documentation.


During the final week before presenting, we met up again to finalize everything. We tested the project by ourselves and also did a multiplayer experience with each other. The Air Guitar that we made, not only acts as a single player instrument but also gives a multiplayer experience. How this works is that one person could be wearing one glove while someone else wears the other. One person can bend the fingers, while the other person strums to the combinations. A third person can also interact with it by playing with the pitch (proximity sensor).


The next day after our presentation day, we decided to start and finish the documentation video. We gathered our data from our presentation and wrote out an outline and script for our video. We decided to include background info, research, project concept and interviews. We got two people to test our project and give feedback. We managed to record our script and also interview our users. From the information we gathered, we created a documentation video.


The presentation, max patch and essay can be found below:

Presentation

Max Patch

Air Guitar Essay

Sunday, April 5, 2009

Final Project - Week 12-13

Been very busy the past two weeks with school coming to an end, and managed to get some stuff done for 320's final project.

We've met up with the team to discuss our project in each of our roles in Week 12, seeing where we are in terms of the project and talking to each other about different areas. Each of us have presented to the team what we have been doing, how much more we need to do and so on.

The research slides that I have completed were to be presented to Jinsil and Greg but I did not go due to an exam the next day so instead I gave Kay the slides I finished and told her to present it to Jinsil and Greg. Kay sent me feedback on the slides and said they wanted research on traditional guitar playing and the videogame Guitar Hero and why people were so interested in playing guitars. From their feedback, I began to do more research on this topic this week.

I have added two more slides on research to our presentation, traditional guitar playing; what it is and what it does and also a Guitar Hero slides where I talk about the game and why people like to play it.

I have also begun to work on the concept slides themselves, revealing what our project is and also creating schematics for our presentation. I have talked with Drew about the logic flow of our implementation/technical aspect of our project and how it exactly functions in Arduino and Max MSP.

I am planning to meet up with the team next week and hopefully we'll be mostly done so we can take pictures, document and I can finish up the presentation from the final implementations.

Below are just some reference pictures of some of the new research that I have done:

The above is a picture of an acoustic guitar. This is the classical version of a guitar. The first ones that were originally used by musicians.

This one above is the electric guitar. We can see that it's very similar style to the guitar in the Rockband game. These games try to mimic a guitar as closely as possible so that players can feel like they are really playing an actual guitar.


The above picture is a screen of the game guitar hero. Players have to match the notes on the screen when it slides down to the fret buttons.



People playing the Guitar Hero game. As we can see, they hold and carry it like a guitar. Their motions are also in line with how the guitar is used.