This post has been a long time coming. We are finally doing our experiments! If you've been reading our last few posts, you've probably heard about it here and there and then it would go silent, be brought up again, and left unsaid. But after SO MUCH planning beforehand, everything is going according to plan.
Through this whole process, I have learned so so much! We've made a lot of careless mistakes along the way, realized what I envisioned didn't turn out as planned, and so on! I wanted to share some of the things we've done and learned so if you're planning an experiment you hopefully don't make the same silly mistakes as I did!
The post is going to turn out longer than expected, but I wanted to share with you the WHOLE process and more of the experiment in details. We've conducted a few experiments and weeks trying to make it work, so it's a whole lot to share.
I'll start from the beginning. Since the day we started this MDP project, we were provided with a Samsung Galaxy Tab S2, but it has been lagging ever since we started creating DEVIANT, until we decided we couldn't deal with it anymore. We decided to bring our own personal tablet, Samsung Galaxy Tab A6 with S Pen, and it worked out better than expected. The newer tablet worked faster and better than the last tablet that we had. We were so excited to proceed with the project and envisioning the big picture of DEVIANT, which made us really excited and motivated to get going.
TABLET ONE. Our first experience with the tablet was all that we had to work with and it was provided by the school, but during the very beginning of creating this project, there were some technical issues that we faced, one major issue we faced was that the software was very delayed and it had a very long loading time. We have been having a hard time and lost time trying to resolve our doubts and because we thought we were close to figuring out our conflict about things, we continued with the resources we had and tried to make full use of it. So we proceeded, continue with what we're in the midst of and thought what we did was right. When we did our due diligence on finding solutions to our problem, we found that we were still far from the finish line. There were no other methods to make our current project work without going back to square one, which means countless hours lost for all that we have created until today. So we decided to bring in our own tablet and tried with another tablet and the same version.
TABLET TWO. Honestly, I had higher hopes for this new tablet, Samsung Galaxy Tab A6 with S Pen. The one thing that we manage to resolve was the major delay. With the new and improved Vuforia Studio experience, we managed to speed things up a bit and we're finally on schedule. We managed to utilize the tablet, as mush as we can. A couple of months went by and we've had great improvement since the last tablet. Better detection, lesser loading time and greater progress. And when we thought things was going smoothly, we hit yet another pit stop. The tablet still lacked what we needed. This pit stop hindered our progress so much that we're far from being done.
TABLET THREE. When everything went better than expected, we had a missing piece left that we didn't consider before. It slipped our mind that we needed a specific type of AR tracking in Vuforia Studio, Spatial Target. So, we made one last change to the tablet, we made our final choice, the iPad, and then months and months went by and we've had drastic progress since then. We instantly fell in love with how DEVIANT looked on the iPad, better rate of detection and lesser delay in loading time. Similar to the previous tablet, but this time around, it has the special feature that we lag in the other tablets. With the previous tablets, we continually complained about the quality of the tablets, it was SO frustrating.
Since there were many tablets to choose from, this formed our first experiment, Comparing Devices. With the different specifics and Operating System (OS) of each tablet, this experiment was to decide which of the three is best suited for the experience. The procedure of this experiment is further elaborated in our report. To summarize, the iPad was the best suited for this experience and the main reason why we picked the iPad was because of the spatial target that the iPad had that the others didn't. Here's a piece of advice, make sure you research what you need before starting on any projects because you might find yourself in a dead end and having to start from the beginning all over again.
Once we resolved the issue of deciding which hardware to use, there was also one major software issue that we faced. We were stuck with the detection in Vuforia Studio when using a .ipt file, from Autodesk Inventor. Despite having three devices to choose from, we figured that there was one that would manage to detect fast and the best. Yet again, what the team envisioned didn't turn out the way we wanted it to. It wasn't easy trying to solve this issue.
In the earlier phase, we assumed that there was an issue with Vuforia Studio. We spent some time looking into this problem and we noticed that there was a HUGE difference in the file size between .ipt and .fbx, exported from Autodesk 3ds Max.
Once we noticed the great difference in file size, we attempted to detect the tools with each file type and we also notice major results between the two file types. The results will shock you as it did to us!
To put it simply, due to the major difference in results, we opted to proceed with the .fbx file. With the new changes, we managed to create a more reliable experience for the user.
So now things are rolling!! We expect to collate the information from the experiments before report submission! I wrote waaaaay more than I expected to. If you have anything to clarify with the process or objective of this experiment, feel free to ask any one of us! I'm so excited to share the rest of the progress with you and hope things go better from now!
All the best & See you!
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