Milestone 2 - Navigating Through the Development Process

The two major focuses of this previous week involved making progress on the development of Story Mode and working through the challenge of getting the facial recognition software to work optimally.

Starting with Story Mode, this game mode involves the user choosing a story of interest where the objective is to guess the emotion of the characters in the "story" based on the character's facial expression. If the guess is correct, the player is rewarded with points and will also unlock characters. The next steps for this mode will involve the following:

1. Adding some more randomization for where the characters are located

2. Seeing if it is possible to include more human characters as well

3. Offering some sort of reward for unlocking a character

The other major focus of this week was navigating the facial recognition software. A large part of the discussion in the first week was concern regarding the challenges in getting the facial recognition software to work. This anticipated concern, without question, turned out to be valid, as it does indeed seem to be significantly difficult to get the software to work optimally. In particular, the main issue is that the MoodMe SDK that we are using, in its out of the box form, relies on the webcam to do the facial recognition. Intuitively, swapping the webcamera with the AR camera seems as though it would be trivial task, but unfortunately that does not seem to be the case. Nonetheless, we have continued to experiment with the software and make progress adding more to the gamification aspect in our express mode. The main hurdle that we are trying to clear is now getting this software to work in conjunction with the AR camera.