Overview
This week I’ve made some great progress on a variety of different elements regarding thesis exploration and class projects. I’ve broken down this check-in into a couple sections that detail my progress in specific areas.
Thesis Explorations
So, this week I’ve been watching and exploring some tutorials and materials to help my transfer my knowledge of the Manus Haptic Glove system into Unreal engine. I am familiar with game development in Unity but this will be my first time developing inside of Unreal Engine. The system is fairly similar, but there are some key differences in the way Unreal engine works that are slightly challenging to learn. Nonetheless, I’ve set out to start learning some of the basic components of the software to have a working simple haptic gloves experience by the end of this semester. The Manus Gloves system works by bringing in positional data from the Manus Dashboard program into the game engine of choice. Then, you take the positional data and retarget it to the mesh/skeleton of your choice. In my case, I’m targeting the data onto a simple set of hands that will be present in my experience. Once I get this working, this will have solved a huge issue I’ve been having in my development process.
In addition to progress on my exploratory progress, I’ve also made great progress on my committee proposal. I’m about 15 pages in and plan to deliver my formal committee requests by this weekend!
Class Projects
This week I also made some excellent physical progress in my Makey-Makey puzzle system. I’ve already laser-cut a new prototype, and will soon begin integrating the circuit into the new puzzle board. The new board is also printed in opaque acrylic, so the pieces feel sturdier and more grounded than the previous thin wooden pieces.
