Simon Waters

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HUDini 7 second video

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Here is my final presentation, with the app successfully running through the HDMI adaptor which I bought from Jaycar yesterday. I had major issues on the last night (as with every semester!) trying to compile my app. For some reason the emulator I had been testing it on ran differently than when packaged into its own application, so it couldn’t find the correct path to the video file. I spent hours trying to fix it, annoyed that I hadn’t test compiled it before then but couldn’t find a single source path that would work. In the end I decided to load it on the emulator and just not close the app on my way into uni, plug it in and hope it didn’t crash, which it tends to do sometimes. Luckily it all seemed to be running fine when I left this morning so I was quite pleased with that, definitely a relief. I am pretty happy with how my overall presentation turned out in the end. The black card really made it look less makeshift while still keeping its ‘in development’ feel. Hard to believe my final semester is over now (apart from one more essay), now all there is to do is go home, sleep and hope that it’s still running when I go in on Friday. What a ride this has been, next step graduation!

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The last few days have been really full on with soldering up, designing, assembling and testing the simulator enclosure. I made the decision to build it out of cardboard and keep one side see through so that people can see how the light reflection works. I think I will add some black card around the outside to get make it look more presentable but after that I can finally relax! 

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After one more full on day, the project has come to an end. There has been many ups and downs along the way but it has definitely been one of the best times I have had during my time at uni. It looks great and the overall affect that the light has with the bubbles creates a mesmerising experience for both people playing it and those passing by. 

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Final space image sound hand in. Can’t wait to see it when the studio is darker!

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Stress testing

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Space Image Sound - Reflection

For me this project has been a journey, forever changing through each step of the process. The initial idea stemmed from something that I have always found quite interesting - the combination of water and light. There are so many different ways to explore this area and while it is a challenging task to work with water in an enclosed environment, if it’s done well it can be very effective. I think this was the general feeling for my team as well, as we were already getting excited about the possibilities. We soon came to realize that many of our ideas were ‘blue sky’ and would not be realistic to complete in the short 12 week period we had. Nevertheless we began our ideation process and went on to learn how light refracted inside water and how we could use it in our installation. After we realised that bubbles appear to refract more light than still water, our team was reminded of the Waterful ring toss game that we all had as a child. What I noticed most was how almost every person I mentioned it to would have the same reaction, for a moment they were taken back to their childhood and remember playing one of the first handheld games before apps came around. 

It was this nostalgic feeling which we all experienced that intrigued me the most, I thought it would be interesting if we could recreate that and see how our audience would interact with it in a public space. My favourite part of any project has always been seeing other people using and enjoying what I have spent so much time and effort on, and this encourages me to keep rethinking each step and do the most with the short time frame that we have. The build process has been intense but worth it, and while some of our blue sky ideas would have been nice to incorporate I am very pleased with what we have accomplished. 

However it hasn’t exactly been a smooth ride, and I’ve learnt many things throughout the build process - mainly that water is a bitch to work with. I can’t say I’m surprised because I knew it would be a challenge and everyone had expressed their concerns already, but we were determined to do it anyway. I just find it amazing how even when something has been completely sealed it can still manage to find a way to drip. I would say my main learning outcome is pay attention to detail. I would already consider myself a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to things like this, but working with water in this way brings new meaning to it. 

Looking back through my blogs throughout this whole process, I realize just how far we have come since the beginning of the semester. It has been an interesting process to say the least, and what started with pouring water out of a bottle while holding an LED behind has transformed into a large scale interactive light installation that surprised everyone and is actually waterproof. We have developed and engineered our original proposal into something that we can all be proud of, and picked up a lot on the way.

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Had lots of things to do today, and after spending nearly an hour trying to locate a new valve when all the shops were sold out I was ready to get to work. Yesterday Dale and I had the idea to have the LED strips on each side of the tank instead of at the bottom, this way the light will travel the whole way up and will sort of move with the bubbles. This unfortunately meant even more chiselling - although I’m getting pretty good now with all this practice. While I made a groove down the side frames, Dale made a recess into the base to house the Arduino and cables. It was pretty scary as the wood is less than 10mm thick and at one point it cracked so I had to do the rest of it trying not to split it right in half. We don’t have time to route/stain another one so luckily it turned out fine. I then soldered up the LED circuit and tested it and it actually looks really good, I can’t wait to see it all set up properly.

Also we discovered that there was a slight leak around each valve, I think this happens because they can still move a bit when bumped as the silicone is quite flexible. So we cut the existing silicone off and filled the entire area with a heap of fresh silicone - if any water gets through that I will be incredibly surprised. But we won’t know until tomorrow, so for now we just have to wait. Provided that goes well, it should just be a matter of putting all the parts together and it will be done. 

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Studio - Update

Well end of semester is here yet again and it has brought the usual frantic last minute worries with it - what I thought would be a reasonably straightforward process of mirroring the tablet’s screen on a tv has turned out to be a bit of a nightmare. My original plan was to use Gary’s tablet to run my app and mirror the screen onto a tv. I have been trying multiple ways to do this including an Amazon Fire TV Stick, several apps and Samsung HDMI converter on two different tablets; of which nothing worked. I then discovered that neither tablet supports any sort of screen mirroring. I did actually get one app to work, displaying a mirrored screen onto my laptop through WiFi however it was very laggy and bad quality - not ideal when I need to play an HD video on loop. Another problem with going through WiFi is that at some point during the 3 days that it will be running straight, there is a good chance that the connection will drop and will have to be reset manually. At this stage, I was starting to think that I might have to use my own phone and just be without it for a few days. Then I realised Siso had a compatible tablet available for hire so I will be picking that up tomorrow, hopefully all goes well. 

On the HUD side of things, I am trying to think of a better way to display it in studio as there are a few problems with my helmet idea. Firstly, this would require each person to put the helmet on in order to view the head up display, and this could be unhygienic or annoying. Another potential problem is that if they have the freedom to move their head while looking through the HUD, it might not be obvious that the footage on the tv is corresponding to what they are seeing. Anyway I’ll keep checking things off the to-do list and will keep thinking about it.

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Finally the chiselling is done and the tank fits snugly in all 3 base blocks. This meant we were able to do our first proper water test with the extra support from the base. Aside from a few leaks on the bottom which should be an easy fix, it’s looking pretty good! We were even able to play a game by holding the pump hose to the valve and putting some rings in. We then stained the wood and it’s looking really good - luckily our tin of stain + varnish was just big enough. I think it will really compliment the brighter colours inside the tank and draw more attention to the installation.

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[kmandasheehancreativetech]

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I have now pretty much finished the programming and have got it to a stage where everything happens in time with the video and syncs up every 30 seconds. This ensures that no matter how long the loop runs for it will never get out of time. I ran into some strange issues when trying to display some of my bitmap files on the screen, as it didn’t seem to like certain filenames for some reason. Also the sketch is almost using up all the memory on my Arduino so have had to change some code and edit some of the libraries to reduce overall size. I might play around with the colours/layout some more but other than that it’s ready to be soldered up. Getting to those final stages of the project where I can begin to see the end but theres still so much more to do!

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App Update

I have spent all day pretty much completely rewriting the app with a new method I thought of for syncing the video with the HUD. As hard as it was to stay inside on such a nice day, I am pleased to say that they are successfully synced together so I am now able to add the navigation arrows, speed, indicators and distance at the correct point in time. This should be a reasonably simple task, the main thing I will have to watch out for is the delay which may be caused when drawing bitmaps etc to the display, as it doesn’t have a very high refresh rate. After that I will be on the home run getting it soldered to a PCB and ready to display in open studio!

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Success/disaster today; after distracting everyone in studio with loud banging noises for the better part of the morning, we managed to get the base completely cut out and fitting the tank quite nicely. The disaster part came when we took it out on the grass for it’s first water test - and despite my semi confidence, it completely failed. Luckily we have left enough time to re seal the side piece with glue now that we have identified the gaps, and hope that will do the trick. If all goes well with that, then we will almost be finished!

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Well today didn’t quite go to plan, but most of the base got done in the end so it’s not all bad. Dale’s jigsaw seemed to keep wanting to cut on an angle which got worse over time. I cut what looked reasonably straight and on the line, then I turned the block over and it was nowhere near the line. So after making an absolute mess of it we had to clean it up with the chisel which actually worked a lot better than the saw. We will have to chisel the 3rd bit anyway as it only goes halfway through, so that’s tomorrows job. Also got some stain and varnish to test on an off cut, I think it will definitely be easier on the eye and draw more attention to the tank and what’s happening inside.

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Studio - App/HUD Update

This has been driving me crazy, there doesn’t seem to be any way to access the timestamp of the video so I have had to come up with a plan B. Basically I start a timer with the video that resets each time the video restarts. I can send this number via bluetooth to the HUD and it should effectively be the same as using the timestamp. It’s pretty simple really but seems to be doing the trick. 

I have also been having trouble reading these numbers on the Arduino - as it displays them as ASCII numbers so I have to convert them back into characters. This part is fine, but once it gets to multiple digit numbers, each digit comes on a new line in the serial com, making it very hard to distinguish which number belongs to which line. I’m not quite sure why this is happening, maybe because the screen uses serial communication as well so it is splitting up the lines. Will have to keep trying things to get around this.