Weather the Weather in Action

Video Footage from Imagine RIT, and RIT Spring Fest. Edited by Dan.

Aight, so I’m going to go back in time to when I started working on our tracking system. The year is 1923, alcohol is illegal. That must have sucked. Fast forward to 2008. I had a decent tracking system working using color tracking with the JMyron library for processing, a webcam, and glow sticks but decided that it wasn’t reliable enough because the tracking system kept loosing the points. The distance and angle of the glow stick changed the color that the webcam was seeing.

Infrared seemed like the next logical step. Communication with another team working on New Media Team Project lead to the use of another processing library. Wrj4P5 grabs the image from the infrared camera in a wiimote and tracks ir points in a processing sketch. Combining this with the work I had already done with JMyron resulted in a prototype that was used in a presentation.

What next? Make it work better. I was running into trouble with the wiimote swapping points causing the paddle to flip. I spent some time devising a system that could tell point A from point B. The wiimote assigns the points to an array based on the x and y values of the point starting from the top left corner, so I wrote a class that each paddle end could be assigned to. This class keeps track of its last known point and goes through the wiimote IR points array and its current point is assigned to which ever point is closest to its last point. This seemed to have fixed the flipping problem for the most part. But there was still some funny business going on.

When you point the wands away from the wiimote the sketch loses the point and when it comes back it likes to flip. You can’t expect the user to be aware of pointing the wand directly at the wiimote. I added some more if statements that check how far the new point is from both ends of the paddle and a boolean that checks if the points array is less then two and thats were we are today, ever closer to a perfected tracking system.

There are still more bugs to be fixed. I tend to be a perfectionist when it comes to my development, especially when I’m working on something that I am excited about and interested in doing. I will continue to tweak the tracking engine in my spare time until I feel that its done.

Now that the initial rush to get to Imagine RIT is over, team MYO will be taking the time to finesse the game details and update this blog with our process work. Pictures and video from the festival will be coming soon, as well as a new website for the game! Please stay tuned

MYO would like to thank everyone that stopped by and watched and/or played Weather the Weather. Seeing people enjoy our game made all our hard work worth it!

Team MYO is fortunate enough to have friends. Seriously, people like us. And we’re extremely grateful for that! Especially when they help us make great music and sound effects for our game.

Thank you to our illustration, industrial design, and radio station friends, as well as siblings, for being awesome!

Team MYO was excited to find out where we will be during Imagine RIT!

You can join in the fun at Building 7A, Room 1560!

Our developers were playing— I mean, working hard when they shot this quick video to show your their progress.

MYO’s Weather the Weather Demo Video

As of right now, Team MYO is most grateful to our professors, Michelle and Adam, for allowing us to use their projector and screen, respectively.

We are still looking into the option of a short-throw projector, but are happy with what we have.

Color testing and calibration will commence shortly to ensure that the designers’ gorgeous works looks as amazing as they should.

We now know where will be presenting our project for Imagine RIT on May 2nd! Building 7A, room 1560. It’s a nice big room, so we will not need an outer enclosure as previously thought. Instead we plan to build a pretty much ginormous screen for some ridiculous game play. We’re talking 10′ by 10′. Huuuuuge, Rochesta, huuuuge.

I’d say come visit us on May 2nd, except I’m writing this post-fact. Oh well.

After a bit of discussion the paddles have been finalized! Unfortunately, as it stands now, we are not able to include the extra animations bit we wanted originally, mostly because it would put our dear coders under even more pressure for time. Because of this, some tweaks needed to be made to the original designs, for example, the gloves are now holding on to the strings instead of dangling around, which would have needed to be animated.

We also decided that to keep continuity we should have hands on the paddle for every season. So, I present to you, the final paddle sheet! This has been cut up and handed off to Mike for implementation.

And this is how they look in their respective seasons: