DIY Sandbox

This weekend, we had the opportunity to show off our sandbox at a couple of open days at University of Liverpool. This gave us a chance to receive questions from students and parents about the project and gain a better understanding of what interested people about the project. The most common questions were concerning the practical applications of the sandbox. People were interested in how the software could be used to simulate floods and landscape planning. There were also a lot of suggestions on how we could further develop the project for more uses. Some of the most interesting suggestions included adding biomes or giving the option to define regions by function, such as defining industrial land and residential areas. Aside from questions about the applications of the project, there was also a lot of interest in the process. Everyone seemed either amazed or amused by our usage of an Xbox Kinect sensor and a lot of people wanted to know more about the software. We were aske...

Thanks Alex for your answers below: Q3. What are the required throw and resolution of the projector? 1. WXGA resolution (1280x800) 2. 0.9 Short throw lens Q4. Identify some projectors (on the market) that satisfy the above requirements. CAMERA: 1. Microsoft XBOX 360 Kinect Sensor(Renewed) $48.95 ( https://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-XBOX-Kinect-Sensor-Certified-Refurbished/dp/B005GA1H4C/ref=as_li_ss_tl?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1496892258&sr=1-1&keywords=Kinect+1414&linkCode=sl1&tag=bealss-20&linkId=c2a2678db07fef673024376b1c699604 ) ADAPTER FOR KINECT: HDE USB AC Power Supply Cable Adapter for XBOX Microsoft 360 Kinect Motion Sensor $ 12 99 ( https://www.amazon.com/Power-Supply-Cable-Adapter-Kinect-Sensor/dp/B004S7GA46/ref=as_li_ss_tl?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1496892258&sr=1-2&keywords=Kinect+1414&linkCode=sl1&tag=bealss-20&linkId=05500010cd5957fab9130243f0bc232f ) PROJECTOR: 1. Epson EB-W05 WXGA 3300 Lumens Projector...

Thank you Reuben for your responses: 1. A water basin is a ridge of land that separates flowing water into different rivers, seas or other large bodies of water 2. The kinnet works by firing ir beams at a surface and then times how long it takes for the beam to bounce back to the ir receiver and then it will create the image of what it “sees” 3. Ideally we would go for a 4:3 ratio throw on the projector. 4. We could go with a projector from the internet, like from epsom however we could possibly use one from the schools projectors to cost the project much less. The avg. price for a viable projector would be £300 5. The type of file that our printer uses is a STL file. 6. 75l of sand, weighing around 98kg or 216lbs (using google's translation). We also should go for a non-toxic play sand type. Something like this https://www.wickes.co.uk/Tarmac-Play-Pit-Non-Toxic-Sand---25kg/p/160212?utm_source=google&scid=scplp160212&sc_intid=160212&ds_rl=1255408&ds_rl=125541...

Although Mac OS X is not recommended by UC Davis for their sandbox program, I tried it this week. Driver NVIDIA GeForce driver is the base to realize the display of flowing water on the sandbox. It is compulsory to realize the raining function. The default graphic driver (GPU) of lab Mac is NVIDIA GeForce 9400. It seems to be possible to install required programs and toolkits of the UC Davis Sandbox. However, when checking the server and client vendor, they are not from the NVIDIA corporation. To solve it, the NVIDIA driver should be reinstalled. Nevertheless, there is no available version of NVIDIA GeForce for Mac OS X 10.6.3 (Figure 1), which is the operating system of the lab Mac. Figure 1: NVIDIA Driver Downloads As a result, although the current driver in Mac could support the program, its installation does not conform to the objective state and the version is outdated. There might be possibility to try if the old version could work, so further steps w...

The details of the current projector BenQ MW632ST are shown in Table 1. It seems to be good, but if the throw ratio and the weight can be smaller, it could be better. Smaller throw could allow a lower brightness. However, the resolution should remain the same. It could be better if the cost is lower. Table 1: Details of the current projector Based on a large amount of searching resources online, the possible alternatives could be viewed in the Table 2. The red highlights indicate the index is worse than expected, while blue ones refer to better than what we want. It seems that the Acer K138ST might be the best choice, but it still has drawbacks on the brightness. Table 2: Details of alternative projectors In conclusion, it is hard to find one projector perfectly satisfies the expected requirements. The cheaper ones have larger throws, and those with better configurations are much more expensive. As for the weight, lighter projectors have smaller throw, but the issues o...

Today, a new version of sandbox program was tried to be installed. However, there seems to be problems. The attempt on a private PC I tried the installation on my own PC. The first step to install the Linux system was successful. When it comes to the second step, the required driver, NVIDIA driver, cannot be found in the PC. The reason was that the GPU of the PC does not have sufficiently high configuration to support the NVIDIA driver, so that corresponding 3D graphical display cannot be realized. Then, manual installation was tried, but it seems the CPU is the old version. Only CPU shown in Figue 3 supports the driver installation. Overall, the solution might be getting a computer with configurations like " Intel/AMD CPU running at least 3GHz, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970, 1060 or 1070 graphics card ", based on instructions from UC Davis.  Figure 1: CPU of the student PC Figure 2: Failure of installing the required driver Figur...

This is Week 1 of the AR sandbox project during the summer period. Some pre-work was done in this week. Members and Participants Two students are responsible to the project in 8 weeks. Yuchao will work for the three weeks, focusing on making the existing sandbox more presentable, simpler and safer to use. She will also helps some high school students to understand how the sandbox works. Henry will join in the project from the third week and continue the work. His objectives is to create an online resource for high school students or other people who prefer to play it to build their own versions of the sandbox. There are more than ten students from a high school, aged from 12 to 16, participating in the project. They visited the lab and played the sandbox game on the first day (3rd June). They shown great interest in the game and will learn further about the project in the next few weeks. Finally, they could build a new sandbox device by themselves. Thus, explicit instructions ...

As agreed, here’s your homework for week 1: Q1. What is a watershed , and what are contour lines ? Q2. How does the Microsoft Kinect depth sensor work? Q3. What are the required throw and resolution of the projector? Q4. Identify some projectors (on the market) that satisfy the above requirements. Q5. What file format does your 3d printer accept? How can your depth maps be converted to such a format? Q6. How much sand will we need? “Produce a shopping list” of materials, equipment and tools needed

As agreed, I’d like you to look into the following 8 questions for next week: Dimensions : what’s a practical size for your needs? Budget : how much can you afford to spend on it? Functionality : what do you want it do actually do ? Materials : what should it be made of? Portability : will it be stationary or mobile? Risks : what possible hazards are involved, how likely are they? Commercialisation : is there a market for these things? Schedule: do you have the resources to complete this by the end of July?

I suggest you spend some time browsing the UC Davis augmented reality sandbox blog : https://arsandbox.ucdavis.edu/ There are some step-by-step instructions and some resources you might find helpful. (Our sandbox will be better. Much better!)

Welcome everyone! It was good to see you all today. Let me start this blog by acknowledging the work put into the sandbox project as you saw it today; our team of keen electrical engineering students achieved all this on their own in 5 weeks: Aisha, Al Yaqthan, George, Jaafar, Kaixuan, Liang, Paco, Yanqin and Yijie. Here are the blogs for the two parts of the project: the sandbox and the game: http://year2interactivesandbox.blogspot.com/ https://arsandboxgame.blogspot.com/ Please have a browse and feel free to leave any comments on this (our) blog.