This project has been a great one for me because it has given me the opportunity to get familiar with multiple new technologies that I have never used before including the Microsoft Kinect 2.0 for Windows and the Microsoft Speech API. But, apparently, I didn’t want to stop there. Awhile ago, after playing with Nintendo’s Wii […]
Tech to Teach the Teacher: Part Eight – The Attention System
In part seven of this series I talked about how empathy for the students plays a key role in the philosophy behind this application. By that, I primarily meant that the user must continually monitoring the students’ actions and behaviors in order to try and estimate why, or why not, they might be paying attention at any […]
Content over Immersion: Using Kinect instead of a VR headset and how it worked better for us
In this post, I will describe a virtual reality teaching simulator that I am working on and why we chose to put a hold on our plans to develop for a VR headset, like the Oculus Rift, and opted to use Microsoft’s Kinect instead. Although this example is specifically for a teaching simulation, there are many […]
Tech to Teach the Teacher: Part Seven – Focus and Empathy
You might notice in the screen shots for this post that I started roughing in the walls and floor of the classroom itself. I put some windows to the student’s left and have some dynamic sunlight coming through. I also added a dynamic ceiling light. Not totally sure what to do with the walls at […]
Tech to Teach the Teacher: Part Six – Variety, Seeing and Viability
Up until now, I have been using a single character to test and make demos with. I did, however, duplicate that character and give him two different names for testing purposes. This was done to save time initially. I wanted to start laying down a foundation of functionality before charging head strong into creating additional art […]
Tech to Teach the Teacher: Part Five – Moving in Space
After experimenting with voice commands using the Kinect, the next thing I wanted to experiment with was tracking the users movement. Using Rumen’s examples I was quickly able to start recognizing all the joints of the body that Kinect is able to track. Kinect can capture positional and rotational data of a user’s center of hips, spine, […]
Tech to Teach the Teacher: Part Four – Kinect with Voice
I mentioned in the first post of this series that our initial intentions were to make a teaching simulator using virtual reality; focusing on the Oculus Rift. I also mentioned that given the early stages of that technology, and the immediate and obvious difficulties with it, we decided to put that part of our plan […]
Tech to Teach the Teacher: Part Three
My character’s head is sufficiently working inside Unity. All the animation keyframes I set up in Studio Max have been translated into Unity’s animation system and I have both an Animation Controller and code setup to control and blend the animations dynamically. The next thing I chose to do was give this character a body. To create […]
Tech to Teach the Teacher: Part Two
Now that I have a full textured, rigged and animated head model in 3D Studio Max, I want to export it and bring it into Unity to start exploring ways of controlling it inside the game engine. To do so I select everything, mesh and bones, and export the selection as an FBX file. The FBX […]
Tech to Teach the Teacher: Part One
In late March, six faculty members gave a short 5 minute presentation on an innovative idea that could enhance teaching and learning in higher education. The presentations were watched and then voted on by a large audience with the expectation that my department would help the winning idea become a reality . The winning idea was to create a […]