COMP242 Groups
Roadtrips: Are We There Yet? ... Who Cares I'm Lovin' This Music
| Waleed Al Harthy (PM) | ||
| Ricky Gush | ||
| Richard Sanger | ||
| Anthony Barr-Wmith |
Wayne: I think well go with a little Bohemian Rhapsody, gentle-men
Garth: Good call
In short: see Social Music in Cars. Now implement!
In detail: a playlist generator for song selection coupled with access to a distributed network of self-contained digital music libraries for storing, organizing, and retrieving items (the collections of songs the various people travelling have) are useful building blocks to developing such software; however, to achieve a digital music host, what is needed ultimately goes beyond this.
In broad terms, we envisage a software application with two phases: initial configuration and responsive adaptation. During configuration, the applications gathers preferences from individual, such as do they enjoy singing along to a song, etc. The collated responses are then used by the software application to generate an initial playlist.
During the trip, the application makes use of a variety of inputs to dynamically adjust the sequence of songs played. Here significant gains can be made from the use of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) techniques. The response to inputs could vary from the prosaic use of individuals wirelessly voting (using their smart phones) the currently playing item up or down as an expression of like/dislike (relevance feedback), to more inventive uses of temporal and spatial information, even data sensors from the car. For instance, if the application noticed the car was going above the speed limit for that section of road (GPS) it could alter the selection of the next song to one with a slower tempo (beat detection); alternatively, triggered by the detection of the conversation lapsing into silence (noise cancelling) the next song played could be altered to be one labelled with a higher interest value (sourced from semantic web technologies, and captured in the digital music library as metadata).
Keeping in Musical Touch (+ handwriting recognition)
| Kohl Bromwich (PM) | ||
| Greg Cannel | ||
| Simon Campbell |
A digital music stand is the electronic analogy of its physical counterpart. Being digital, however, there are augmented capabilities it can do that would be hard to achieve in the physical world, such as starting a page turn before the musician has finished playing that last line of the current page, but drawing it gradually over the current page, starting at the top. This way the musician has time to finish playing that last line of music on the current page, and if they complete that before the full page turn is completed this presents no problem as the staff lines to the next page are already present at the top of the screen. More impressively, a digital music stand could be listening to what the performer is playing, and choose to automatically start the page turn when they get near the end of a page.
Digital music stands have been around for a while now, and the recent popularity in slate/tablets makes for a great general purpose device to develop such a product around. Attention, however, in these projects has largely been on supporting a single musician. In this project we look to go beyond that, and think about groups of musicians rehearsing and performing together with their digital music stands, hence the title to this project.
This project is less about building a cool standalone digital music stand (although that will obviously be part of it), and more about how to design them to function together: rather than get everyone in the orchestra to turn to a particular bar in the score, why not let the conductor automatically push this information out to the others; or how about bowing information from the first violinist being shared with others in the violin section. And if that isn't enough to get done in time for the Smoke and Mirrors presentation at the end of the semester, an extra challenge for the group would be to support a heterogeneous mix of devices, such as iPad and Android slates.
In terms of an implementation approach, we have some established work in the area of digital music stands based on our Greenstone digital library software for desktop machines. In other work, we can also run the Greenstone server standalone of devices such as iPhones and Android tablets. Putting these two things together makes for a viable platform upon which to tackle this project. To help achieve the ability of the end result working on a variety of tablet devices, then PhoneGap is an interesting technology that might be applicable.
Interactive Kids TV
| Michael Ashman (PM) | ||
| Cane Jameson | ||
| Lesley Payne | ||
| Sam Shute |
Kids TV shows often give the illusion the characters can hear the what the kids say ... convincing for all of 2 seconds! Here's one example of this from Dora the Explorer and another Blues Clues
The aim of this project is to develop an environment for producing TV shows that really are interactive.
Speech recognition
wired up to Kinect to notice movement? (jump with me!)
Possible to accomplish within the far-reaching MPEG-4 standard?
Alternatives include: developing a custom application that reads your own file-format, or working something up in Flash or HTML.
Crazy Golf
| Daniel King (PM) | ||
| Zac Johnson | ||
| Aaron Matengg | ||
| Jesse Watson |
Also called mini golf. Not much to say about this one. Go implement and have some fun. You might even say, go crazy!
Fireworks Simulator: A Bright Idea!
| Leo Dizon (PM) | ||
| Jayvin Bearsley | ||
| Jason Grinter |
Firework displays, such as a city council puts on for its inhabitants, are not cheap affairs. Yet the standard practice is to employ a company to develop a show for you, in consultation with you of course, however you essentially end up paying for it, sight unseen.
Now imagine if there was a software system that allowed you to virtually see what the fireworks display would be like; how it would be synchronized with the music, and how the music and fireworks would be viewed from different locations around the venue. More so, the software tool could be used as part of the consultation process. The customer can give instant feedback over what they do and don't like, and adjustments to the show can be made there and then.
Why imagine it, when you can be part of the team that builds such a piece of software!
Flighty
| James Bridgwater (PM) | ||
| Tim Leathart | ||
| Henry Gouk | ||
| Jeremy Utting |
An idea inspired by James May's Airfix episode of Toy Story. The project: to develop an environment that lets kids develop and test out their own plane designs—change the shape, position (and number!) of wings on the plane; type of, number and placement of engines; or no engines at all, and it's a question of see who can design a glider that flies the furthest from a given height; and so on.
Gary's Mod is one possible graphics/physics engine that could be utilized to do this, but there are several others. If an education theme (as opposed to game-play focus) to the project is pursued (e.g. develop a plane out of the following resources that can travel distance x with fuel quantity y that is realistically modelled), then Gary's Lab (a former project at Waikato) is something the team might also want to look at.