25th//may//2009//week 12// workshop

This week is the last week we have to complete our final product. Let's take a look at what is left. We need to use the buffer machine and buffer out the rough edges for the frame. Add in the slider so that the frame will be able to slide out and in smoothly. We need to finish the posters before the end of the week and send it for printing. We need to integrate the globe animation and the 3d landscape. We needed to build out mock up house with lego and program the lightings.

Since we all knew what is needed to be done, we spilt the work up and started working on individual portions. Vu and I headed to the lego room with the permission of Marie and just used whatever we could get from it to build out mock up smart house. We drew out a floor plan of the house and worked towards it. It was really the highlight of the project as this was really fun. It brought back memories of my childhood and it allowed me to use my creativity to build whatever I could think of. We used our creativity to create items such as television, dining table, cooking stoves and even an oven.

Luke did the buffering and I went to the workshop once a while to help him when he needed a extra pair of hands. Sean took over the task for the posters. He had to integrate the posters together by putting the contents and selected backgrounds together. Chris as usual was working on the phigets.

All in all the project looks close to its finishing stages. What we left is to discuss how to do the presentation. Which is the best way and best part of the room to do our presentation. There was no room for error. We needed to plan what we were each going to say. 

18 may//2009//week 11//workshop

this week was all about touching up of the project. Luke and I did the construction of the frame while Sean redid the globe animation in a bigger resolution as the previous smaller one turned out to be too pixelated. Chris was in charge of the usual phigets programming while Vu did up the posters for the presentation. 

I'll focus writing on what I did. Luke came in a little late cause we went to collect the new persplex as the previous ones did not fit well. We started by drilling a hole into each of the persplex and then using the jigsaw, we sawed off the middle making the shape to fit the monitor. We had to saw each piece to fit one another almost perfectly. The hardest part of this was to shape it even for the wires. After cutting all 4 pieces up we then had to file them even and to smoothen the uneven edges. The filing was really important for the aesthetics of the frame as it made the 4 separate pieces fit together nicely. 

After making sure that each piece fitted nicely, we then proceeded to glue them all together. We had to leave the glue to dry so we shall leave the rest up to next week and by then it should be all set for further filing. Luke and I then proceeded back to the labs to help out with the rest. I turned my focus to the posters. I went online to source for suitable backgrounds which would make out posters stand out. Vu was in charge of getting the content for the posters right. 

We don't really have much time left so we need to take things up a notch and get things done quicker. The end is nearing, let's all work towards our goal.

11//may//2009//week 10//workshop

This week was more or less just checking on the group's individual progress. We had a group meeting during the Monday lecture. Stephen was not very pleased as there were 2 groups missing from the weekly contact lesson. Each team was supposed to be present to report to them their progress so that they can get feedbacks as to how the team is progressing.

We had everybody in except Chris. We presented to the class what our progress was like and Stephen gave us feedback. He was pretty satisfied with our progress and was eager to see the outcome during the demo week. Luke and Vu were in charged of the frame and they have decided to use persplex, a type of aryclic to form the frame around the monitor. We did exact measurements to the monitor making sure we had the right measurements before purchasing the persplex. Luke and Vu travelled to somewhere near to their house as it would be easier for them to pick it up as we had to customize the sizes accordingly.

Thus, Sean and I were the only ones left in school and so we continued working on the landscaping. It was progressing well and we are glad to hear that Luke and Vu are progressing well too. They needed to wait till the next day before they could collect the persplex. Sean and I had some problems with the lightings. We could not set it exactly to make it realistic as the lightings set were either too bright or too dim. We decided to head down to school the next day to consult Dekker. As usual Dekker was the source to all answers and he assisted us. Our next task was to create the paranomic background display. That did not seem too difficult but we reckon we could do that over the weekend as we had to concentrate on our other assignments in hand.

Recognizing that studio 2 is a 4 unit course, we knew it needed twice the effort of normal courses. The same applies for results. If we were to get a grade 4 for studio 2, it will mean getting grade 4 for 2 courses. That would be disatrous. This served as a motivation to put in more effort. Scoring well was our utmost piority.

cwcw

4//may//2009//week 9//workshop

This week marks the start of the construction of the actual product we were going to produce by the end of the semester. To start things off, we distributed the tasks needed to be completed. Firstly, we had to add the landscape animation to the current flash animation of the globe rotating. That task was assigned to Sean and I. The second task was the physical building of the frame. Since Luke and Vu came up with the design of how the frame slide would work. It would be the most appropriate for them to go source for the best materials and putting it together.

We could definitely work in the workshop together, helping each other be it with the frame or the animation. The final task was programming the phigets. That task obviously belonged to our most skilled programmer Chris. Knowing each of our individual tasks, we sat down for a final meeting discussing what kind of materials and where to source for them. We also set datelines for certain tasks to be complete. We tried as far as possible to keep up with the timeline we drew up during the prototype reporting.

Sean and I went home that day and started straight on the landscape animation on 3DMax. We decided to trying sourcing google for images first. We could not find a suitable image. Some were either too bright and most of them had the buildings already lighted up. We needed the buildings to be complete without lights as the number of lights would reflect on the energy consumption. We then decided to start from scratch. We had to start building our own buildings to form a city landscape. We decided that we should do 5 buildings and then multiply it round to make it seem like a really huge city landscape. After this was done we will probably add a paranomic sky view to make it more realistic.

Creating the max file sums up the week. That kept us really busy till the end especially with other assignments coming along too. We did not have much time to waste.

28//march//2009//week 8//prototype presentation

Today is the day where we will present our prototype to the class. As we did not do very well for the previous presentation we were determined to make this one better. We had a short run through the slides together yesterday during the lecture. We were assigned to a portion of the slides. We made sure each knew what they were going to say and hopefully there were no hiccups.

During the Monday contact lesson, the group sat around and discussed who was going to say which portion of the slides. As the slides were still not fully done, we only knew roughly what to say. I was to complete the slides and touch up on the visual aspect of it that night. The animation was done, a mockup was done. What's left are the posters. Sean was working hard to photoshop to get the images up.

We were scheduled to be the 3rd group to present but somehow we were the second group up. We start by introducing ourselves and what our new approach to the project was. We highlighted the changes and showed heaps of visual aids. We might not be the best public speakers but I'm sure we make that up in the visual presentation portion. To summarize the presentation, we ended it by displaying the animation of the revolving globe which changes in size. It is still not in sync with the energy consumption but that is what we are working to achieve by the final product.

Next came the feedbacks. Stephen was not totally satisfied with the whole planet idea and thought that something was still missing. He suggested adding skyscrapers on top of the Earth. The more skyscrapers the higher the energy consumption. That was possible and was not too difficult to make. Marie on the other hand loved the idea. She really liked the idea of using the planet Earth as a metaphor and using the solar system to describe the whole energy conservation. We decided to work on both feedbacks and implement the skyscraper idea into the planet. We were really excited about that as the project was really taking off. We were starting to ge

20//april//2009//week 8//lecture

Welcome back to the second half of the semester. Hope everyone had a wonderful 'holiday'. As usual after a 1 week break everyone seemed lethargic and unmotivated to work. I decided to use this chance to ask Dekker for some help regarding 3DMax since no one is talking to him at the moment. He came over and took a look. He solved the mapping issue for us in like 5 minutes. Our initial idea was to do the whole animation on 3DMax but he suggested to us to take 360 screen shots of the globe in 3dMax and using flash to animate it.

He showed us a link on google of some tutorial. It showed us how to use a function in 3DMax to capture 360degrees of screen shots for the globe. It was really useful as we did not need to manually do it and that saved us heaps of time. After this I sent the 360 images to Luke to put it into flash and make it rotate.

My next task was to focus on the presentation slides. I summarized points from the previous reports and added the changes we had especially for the metaphorical representation. The most important part of the presentation is to highlight the changes and focus on what we are doing. This time we were definitely more focused then the previous. I had very good feeling about this presentation.

Sean's task was to come up with images of how the prototype will look like so that we can create pin-up posters for the presentation. It was not easy but nonetheless it turned out really well. I'm sure Stephen and the rest of the class would like what they see.

cwcw

13//april//2009//week 7//mid semester break

As Luke was out of town for work purposes, we tried as far as possible to work from home. Sean and I lives beside each other so it was easy for us. We were in charge of the front end of the prototype. We had to do some sort of animation either in 3DMax or flash showing the metaphorical representation of Earth with reflection to energy consumption.

Vu was in charge of managing the team, making sure everyone does their task. Chris was the main man. He was in charge of programming the phigets. Sean and I worked on 3D max. Creating the sphere was easy but mapping the Earth material onto it was not easy. We kept trying but it never looked exactly like how we wanted it to be. It was either too pixelated or it was just multiples of the square earth textile we uploaded to the library.

We tried googling but was to no avail. There were many tutorials but none for spherical objects. I guess we had no choice but to wait till Monday to consult Dekker. He was the tutor for 3DMax or something so he'll definitely be able to help us. In the meantime Sean and I will work on the presentation and sketching of sketches. We'll see on Monday how far the group has progressed before evaluating if we are on track or not.

cwcw

6//april//2009//week 6//lecture

We got back our results for the reports. We did really bad for this assignment the only good we can take from this is that all other groups did as bad as we did. That was not an excuse though. We really had to step up in order to do well. I'm a very results oriented person and thus this served as a motivation. We sat down straight after talking to Marie, Stephen and Dekker. We went through what went wrong and what went right? What needed changes? After consulting the tutors we came to an agreement that we were still not focused enough. We were still attempting to do too much and the class still did not understand where we were heading for. We needed to focus on just 1 portion of the room.

After discussing we decided that we needed to focus on just 1 portion of the room and we came to a conclusion that we would be doing a SmartFrame. The SmartFrame would be just a frame sitting on the wall but instead of displaying just a picture, there would be a monitor embedded behind which would display the energy consumption for the month. It acts as an application to monitor and keep track of how much energy the household is consuming. Which applicance is using the most energy. How are u faring in comparison to the neighbourhood.

The main part of this project is not the reflection of the energy consumption in numerical data. It's the metaphorical representation using the solar system and a planet to represent your household. The higher the consumption the bigger and the brighter the red of the planet gets. The lesser the consumption the smaller and green the planet looks. This could be further expanded into using the solar system to represent the entire neighbourhood. We decided on using planets as a metaphorical representation instead of the energy tree cause we got feedback that it was too common. We too agreed about that and thus we brainstormed and came to the conclusion. We all felt good about it and distributed the task before heading off to complete each task before the next meeting next week.

Next week was the mid semester break and we knew we the importance of allocating tasks to individual members. We would most probably be meeting once during the mid semester break to check on how everyone is going. This mid semester break would prove to be the crucial part of the prototype.

cwcw

30//march//2009//week 5//project proposal report and lecture

The project proposal report is due on Monday 9am. There was a little miscommunication between myself and Vu. I thought he was going to submit the report online after I send him the final copy after editing and he thought I was going to do the submitting since I was the last to edit the report. We didn't realize until we met in class during the lecture and we thought one another had already done the uploading. We explained this to Stephen and luckily he was kind enough and accepted our reason. Not a very good way to start the week but nevertheless I think our report was done pretty well especially since putting in many hours during the weekend to work on it. We assigned everyone individual task to complete for the report.

I was in charge of doing up the timeline and project constraints. I spent time doing some research to get relevant data from the internet before writing up something for that portion. The time line was pretty easy to do as I have done heaps of timelines for our group projects.

24//march//2009//week4//project proposal presentation

This week we were suppose to present to the class about our project proposals with the use of 2d/3d sketches and some form of presentation. We decided to use the online brainstorming tool introduced to us by Stephen last week to present our ideas to the class.










The presentation did not really go as according to plan as we did not really rehearsed for it. Having spilt the work up into 5 so that every one would have a portion to research and talk about, we knew little or nothing about the rest of the group's portion. There wasn't much integration and consistency between each of us. We started the presentation by going through the background research and it was rather lengthy and many of the class did not understand much of the first half of the presentation. It was too technical and it failed to capture the attention of the class.

Luckily we had heaps of sketches in comparison to the rest of the class and hopefully that impressed Stephen enough to give us a upper hand.



























































We had to learn from that mistake. Majority of the class only understood what our project was all about only after 5 minutes of presentation. After getting across to the class that our project was about smart house technology, the next problem we faced was that it seemed like we were aiming to complete a project which is deemed too huge to be completed by 5 people in such a short time. We had to be more focused thus we evaluated and decided to focus on one room in the house and it was the kitchen.

Our main problem was that our proposal was too broad. We had to narrow it down and make sure our report due next week is much better. More effort is needed if we want to score well for this course.