COMP241 Team Allocations

Up in the Scratch-o-Sphere

This project is aimed at kids, and combines the idea of the Scratch programming language developed at MIT Media Labs, with the nifty new gadget, the Sphero ball.

The key idea? To get kids in interested in programming using a much more phyical and tactile way than the graphics based Scratch language. Shades of Logo with it's turtle robot, but brought into a contemporary setting.

Plenty of programming work to get your head around for this one. Main development would be on a desktop machine, with some periphery work needed on iPhone and/or Android devices. If the desktop development goes well, then a possible further direction would be making everything (Scratch-like IDE, as well as controlling the Sphero ball) run off a tablet. Or how about using a Raspberry Pi to run the IDE?

The team should definitely familiarize themselves with existing off-shoot projects that have been developed around Scratch, particularly in the mobile space, such as catroid. My personal preference to mobile app development is Android.

Squeek!

A Really Kinnected Symphony

Utilize Symphony, the large-screen wall to the university's cluster computer to allow people to stand in front of it and conduct a computer orchestra (each screen an instrument or section to the orchestra).

Potential (but not exhaustive) list of features to consider: Only allow in 10 mins between lectures? Use Kinnect to get conducting input; when not in use choose/derive/compose music derived from data and information sourced from the local sources, such as the university's calendar.

For development purposes a single PC with two screens would a useful baseline to develop software for. This could then be extended to two PCs each with multiple screens.

Of note, a previous project at Waikato has developed libraries that allows a regular OpenGL program to be operated on a multi-screen wall, without the need to recompile.

Biking Fantastic

The aim of this project is to develop a 3D game using a Kinnect device for input, where you are riding bikes. Users would have to make an up-and-down motion with their feet/legs to simulate riding a bike. The faster you perform this action, the faster you ride. Other than that as the basic setup, the premise for the game, and game-play itself is up to you.

Some suggestions to get the creative ideas going: how about real-world courses? Google Sketch-up could be a useful source here. Or how about more of a stunt-bike/BMX style game, where there are ramps to go over, and holes to avoid ... watch out for that truck coming in from the side (swerve that body!). And these two ideas wouldn't have to be mutually exclusive. The stunt-bike game could be played down the streets of New York ... or London ... or Tokyo ... or Hamilton (not sure how many building models have been done for our city though). Just describing the idea of the game is making me tired, so how about power-pills you can cycle through that give you an "energy boose" which would actually translate in to you not having to continue the cycling action so fast to maintain current speed. Just a thought!

Live Top Trumps

The game of Top Trumps, but played on smartphones with live data. For example, the "city" deck could have data for current temperature, population, time-to-get to work(!), etc.

For a version with an NZ flavour, www.digitalnz.org is a good source of dta-sets available within Aotearoa. Open data backed by government support is becoming a big thing too. NZ Government open-data is available through data.govt.nz. There are many other similar sites around the world for other countries, along with people who are starting to aggregate such information across countries.

Learning Expeditee Expeditely (see below)

Expeditee is a saptial hypermedia system like no other you will have encountered. The brain-child of Rob Akscyn—inventor, boffin, visionary, and round brainy-dude, currently in residence at Waikato University—the developed software challenges many of the commonly made assumptions about how best to create, interact with, and manage digital content. The "accidental" Web 2.0 revolution (viewed in this context) has pretty much been about adding in ideas into our web experience that were already there in Expeditee, and even then the latest web browsers still fall short of much of the capabilties embedded in Expeditee.

But it's not all a bed of roses. A key impediment to using Expeditee is knowing just how exactly to get going with it. Given how different the software interaction is, most people find it has a very steep learning curve indeed, leading to many to shy away from it.

This project is about finding ways to dramatically lowering that start-up cost.

Possible avenues to explore include developing "tutelets" within the Expeditee system itself (adding support for video as a first-class media element to the environment would be a crucial step), and drawing upon game design, where users learn how to play the game by playing carefully controlled games that take the user through the various features of the environment.

Expeditee: the new black (see below)

... a project for any budding graphic designers in the class.

Without being too unfair to the developers of Expeditee, the visual elements used in the software are really only the sort of thing that would appeal to the the computer geek. Some of this is connected with the "need for speed" (see Akscyn's Law) which is an core functional requirement in the software; however, with ever increasing computer processing speeds, the time is ripe to push beyond the current graphic rendering in Expeditee and develop a version of the software that is more aesthetically pleasing to the eye, but yet still retain fast interaction speeds.

Achieving this through this project would make Expeditee the new black in the world of hypermedia.

OpenPat meets Expeditee: Programming, Learnability and Style

The output reporting stage to OpenPat is extended to output interactive visualizations that can be viewed by Expeditee, right the way down to the code. Edit the code in Expeditee, and the rerun the OpenPat process to regenerate the latest version of the visualizatoin!

Indie Film Software: Directing with depth (student proposed project)

Develop a software application that uses the depth information from Kinnect camera to help the director control what happens to the camera focus during filming.