Some of the game development and programming has taken a backseat to real life for the moment.  However, in that neck of the woods I’m still debating on how to do the camera.  Testing has shown that 3rd person can be fairly buggy and you have to be constantly aware of your environment to prevent the camera clipping through objects/terrain.  I was thinking of doing a just-off-of over the head style-camera.  This also helps in some level design, and ultimately reduces the amount of model work I’ll have to do.

In other news, my research robots are coming along.  Breakbot, a robot that is an embodied alarm to denote when to take breaks in a work-place environment, is just about together.  I’ve constructed the prototype out of left-overs around Robot-House, and the sensors are ready to be attached.  Zach worked like a maniac on fire and has the PHP coding and Arduino-Arduino communications done, while I’ve coded the robot to perform little “dance routines” to denote its behaviors.  I’ll include some pictures later on today of this glorious stress-tested prototype.

Steve (our ERRATIC-MOBI) robot is winning hearts left and right.  It’s really great to sit back and watch people teleoperate him.  I’m hoping in the future to incorporate some novel means of control.  <a href=”http://www.neurosky.com/”>NeuroSky</a> has a great little product that measures brainwaves or brain activity and translates it to controller commands.  So my one experiment I’d like to try is removing as much of the experience of directly controlling the robot via physical devices (a computer, a laptop, looking at a monitor) and measuring how “immersed” people become in the controlling.  I also want to do some work with Arduino to overlay some more sensor information on the video feed for the robot, it’s still difficult to determine depth and obstacles in certain “blind spots” on the robot.

Robotics work is going well, using skype for a live video feed was a darn good idea.  We now have cameras set up in some parts of the robot house to let us view interactions with participants.  The visiting undergrad is coming along nicely, she’s starting to get the idea of formulating your own research questions and seems like she’s swimming fine in the deep end of things.  I’ve wrapped up a prototype for another project.  It’s funny looking at it, I made it out of Arduino parts and plastic cups, budgeted-style.

Game programming is coming along, doing all the coding is a bit rough and slow-going, but oh well.  I’ve done a bit more refined third-person camera, and incorporated some textures and terrain for the world.  The controls allow you to run holding the ctrl button, you move with the standard WASD controls.

My next little goal will be to get started with Processing.  I want to do some sort of fun visualization with some real-life data feed as a seed.  It doesn’t have to be something informative or ground-breaking, just fun to code and pretty.

UPDATE:  The Unity embedding plugin has some issues showing multiple Unity objects at one time.  So if it seems like there are repeats that I’ve included in a post, go ahead and click the link for the post, and the actual embedded file should appear.

So, I’ve graduated and decided to redesign and restart my website and blog.  I’m currently working for Professor Sabanovic on some HRI investigations.  Currently I’m testing usability and overall software performance for a handful of robotics platforms.  Additionally, I’m preparing another robot, Videre designs Erratic-MOBI (aka Steve), ready for teleoperation and a bit of ethnographic studies.  For the sake of time, I’ve set up it’s unix computer to be SSH’ed into and it has Skype installed and running.  So all you have to do is connect via SSH, run the controller software, and make a call to a Skype contact for a live video feed.

On the side, I’ve been reading on various little programming projects and starting a few of my own.  I’m currently working to complete some small, proof-of-concept game.  As you know from my old blog, I surveyed many engines and flip-flopped between them.  I really feel pulled towards the Unreal Engine, it is incredible versatile and pretty well documented.  But frankly, you can still tell it is geared for people with a budget.  There are others that are made so you don’t feel like you’re constantly ice skating uphill, so I settled on one such game engine, Unity.

At the moment I’ve just set up a basic 3rd person camera and stage.  Hopefully I have it embedded in this post.  If you fall of the stage, that’s it.  This is just a simple sample program for me to test the camera settings.