Welcome to our blog!

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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.


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Few more homework responses

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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...
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Public Reaction to the Sandbox

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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...
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Week 1 Homework

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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
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AR Sandbox at Big Bang North West

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This Tuesday (2 nd July 2019) UTC Life Sciences were exhibiting at the Big Bang North West, and I got the opportunity to go with them to help demonstrate the AR Sandbox. The event took place at the Exhibition Centre Liverpool and was open to schools and educators. During the event, there was continuous interest in the sandbox. We had kids as young as 5 years old building mountains in the sand, as well as older students asking questions about how the system worked. There was also a lot of interest from teachers (especially geography teachers) who were fascinated by how engaged the students were with the sandbox. The software also held up very well for the entire day. The only time we had to re-calibrate the software was when our laptop (which we forgot to plug in) ran out of battery. I was very impressed by the performance of the program and the projector after a very extended period of usage.
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Attempt of UC Davis program on the Mac OS X

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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...
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Check out the UC Davis blog

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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!)
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Estimation of possible alternative projectors

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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...
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