Week 2

So I've been doing a lot of different things in the lab this week.

• Joe showed me all of the different sensors that we will be using and showed me how to set them up / how they work.
• The list is: sole pressure sensors, force plates, bio sensors, and cameras. Eventually we will also get eye tracker sensors.
• Working on the Jello Cube project. I’m hacking away at it slowly but surely.
• Learning about WebGL. The lab wants to set up a website that holds all of our motion capture data (along with the data from the other sensors) that is readily available to the public.
  
  
  To be more specific, the website will not only have the data available for download, but it will also give a visual representation of the motions the user can download. This way when the user searches for say, a running motion, he or she doesn’t come up with 15 motions and then blindly picks which motion to download. That can be time consuming and annoying. So hopefully this website will not only have tags describing the motion, but also it will incorporate a visual representation of the motion. We are throwing around ideas such as a visual skeleton picture uploaded to the site for each motion, or a video that actually shows the motion. However we will also need a visual representation of some sort to show information from the other sensors.

To start learning about WebGL I stumbled upon this awesome website:

http://learningwebgl.com/blog/?page_id=1217

From here I am going through the lessons to learn how to set up web pages to incorporate WebGL and how to display things. Joe suggested I first draw a box, move on to drawing three boxes, then a row of boxes, rotate the boxes, then eventually replace the boxes with skeletons.

So on to what I did: to use WebGL you must have either the updated versions of Chrome, Safari, Opera, or FireFox.  It will not work on Chrome under version 10, as well as Firefox 3 and under.

Then on to actually coding, you set up a canvas, and everything will be drawn on this canvas. The program is a mixture of HTML, JavaScript, and OpenGL. Surprisingly (?), after spending a few hours finding out exactly what everything did in the sample program I looked at from the learningwebgl blog, WebGL really isn’t that hard. I’m sure that there are still a lot of things to figure out, but I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to accomplish whatever I have to implement. 

Boxes I made using WebGL

After this I went further and made the three boxes rotate. 

Rotations!

So now I will go on to trying to replace the boxes with skeletons.