So there were speedbumps of many shapes and sizes. Large, small, technical and personal; production just kind of ground to a halt. This prompted us to basically bunker down and focus on our two largest challenges: a.) recording a file consisting of Kinect data to use during debugging, and b.) nailing down the angle tracking algorithm for our baseline skeleton-tracking-stick-figure-program. Caitlin took the reins on the data recorder, I worked on the maff.

The Kinect data recording bit is pretty straightforward and rather uninteresting, so I’ll just summarize: instead of having to get off our ass every time we press compile, we want it to just play a dummy so we can code a LOT more efficiently. We currently have a small snippet of data to access any time we need it.

The math bit is a hair more complicated, but can be summarized by saying that there are quite a few sets of quite a few points, which all need to run through an algorithm quite a few times. The goal is to create a baseline stick figure program, onto which we can build our puppets (or any other future programs for that matter), and we needed angle data for each of the joints on the skeleton, in three-dimensional space. The initial equation worked to calculate one of the angles at a time, but calculating all eight simultaneously became a data structure puzzle. My first instinct was to make arrays to hold these points, and multi-dimensional arrays to hold the sets of points, and then doing math with waaaay too many of [these] suckers. With Golan’s help explaining an object-oriented approach vs. the convoluted arrays that I had been using, we are now well on our way to finishing up the integration into the stick figure program.

In other news, this whole thing is somewhat changed by the fact that we did not get the Tough Art residency at the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum, meaning that we now do not have some floating due date in the future to worry about and thus just want to make this thing WORK. And well. More updates to follow.