Project 4 - The last Day. So close yet so far away...

Today I wanted to get some testing done but due to complications of implementing a webcam into the program instead of a built in laptop webcam proved be much harder than at first thought. My computer wouldn't support the webcam for some reason and I ran into continuous errors. I consulted forums and found that I was not the only person to encounter this. I followed all instructions such as re downloading quicktime, Qtcap, and quicktime for java but nothing worked so  we tried it on Toms computer which worked surprisingly enough (dam macs). However his computer had MORE problems than i had. For some reason openGL would not work and we had to find patchwork code to fill in some gaps so that it would work on a mac. The arduino codes also did not work as the numbers were printing out random WTF values such as 0 and even 44 million. It was not surprizing that this caused major problems. To combat this error we worked for more than 4 hours trying to figure out the problem and evidently it turned out that the structure of the program meant that the arduino serial code had to be placed below the open GL code.... And this is the exact reason why i hate programming. Tedious problems take hours to crack. Another problem we currently have is that the video flickers if we use the flex sensor values to change the intensity of the 3D effect. The smaller increments of X and Y mean that there is less flickering which is strange because it uses much more GPU and CPU power. However if we play with the ratios of the arduino flex sensor values we could fix this i think.

We also decided that it would be a good idea to take the program out into the city using the webcam to see what kind of results we would see in the real world. We found that it worked very well, however in some places the sun was too bright and made seeing anything hard. However since the program works on brightness intensity we can use this to our advantage when objects are silhouetted against the brightness it will give a greater 3D effect. At the end of the day we managed to get one test in using the device on the fabrication concept. To get variation in texture we simply created our own course for it to run over using our books :)We used books because we assumed that this would be the maximum variation in texture we would encounter such as uneven bricks out in the city.