Group Process
How we worked as a group and what we did.
Company pitches:
As a group we had to make 5 pitches for 5 different companies who each had a different problem they wanted a solution for. We used Coggle.it (a mind mapping tool) a lot for these brainstorming sessions which helped us create a mind map and collaborate together in real-time.
So how did our process go? We first started brainstorming all 5 concepts on Coggle. We each took around 15 minutes to come up with ideas and jot them down. This is what we did for all 5 companies first making sure we had lots of ideas before we went into further details for the specific companies. Afterwards we created a planning to make sure we timeboxed each concept, making sure we wouldn't miss out on anything.
SpecialistenNet
We had a pretty difficult time trying to come up with a concept for SpecialistenNet because of lack of knowledge in the psychiatric department. the first things few ideas we came up with were about things like meditation or art for distraction which Melvin didn't seem too keen on when we asked for his input.
After a bit more brainstorming we finally came up with a concept we were all happy to make if this was going to be our company.
FRT
It took us so long to figure out what we wanted to do for fashion research technology. Troy gave us a pretty trippy pitch and we weren't entirely sure what Troy wanted as a solution. After talking to him a few times it was clear that he was interested in a LOT of different things.
We did a lot of brainstorming using Coggle and came up with a few different ideas.
Inspark
It took us a bit of time to brainstorm but after looking up what was possible with the Holosuite and testing out the HoloLens 2 from the lab we quickly came to the decision of an escape room. After testing the HoloLens we made a few adjustments like allowing the other users to interact with the environment after the HoloLens user had interacted with the objects with the glasses.
Gemeente Amsterdam
Gemeente Amsterdam started out as a pretty difficult one because of how serious the situation really was leading us to get stuck on the same kind of ideas all all having to do with something around a government building and some kind of training simulator. we iterated several times on this concept.
Shoeby
Shoeby was also a difficult problem to design for. First of all we were rarely on the same page when it came to fun ideas for Shoeby. Also some of us didn't find the problem very interesting to work on. After a lot of debating we came up with a concept we were all happy to work on. in case we got Shoeby as our team company.
After coming up with each concept we started working on a PowerPoint presentation for all of our pitches
Sprint 1:
Once we had our Company (FRT) we had to work on a sprint planning and design document. This turned out to be rather difficult. For one, because we had no real direction for the project which meant we still had to decide on what we were going to make for the company. Another reason was that everyone in our team was sick the first week into our FRT project (including me).
We decided to plan a meeting with Troy this week to get a bit more direction on what he was interested in so we could start working on the project. So we started off the design document with a very basic skeleton.
After our meeting with Troy we had a pretty good idea where we were headed. One of the proposals we wanted to work on this first sprint was multiple users in one body. Could we make it work? How would people react if they could verbally communicate and how if they couldn't? Another thing we wanted to look into was subconsciousness. Can we track heartrate and what can we do with it? Can we combine it with multiple users and change the environment based off that?
it took us a while to get there but by the end of the first week we had a lot of things we could work on. We decided to make a Coggle mind map and a Miro board for this.
During the second week we started working on a few different things. We decided we as a group what we needed to be able to have the bare minimal to start testing out prototype, which was a room/server which multiple people could join. Next was being able to control individual parts of the avatar and some kind of task the users were able to perform together. I started working on the server and detecting users that joined. Tirso and Anouk looked into the controller input of SteamVR while the others started looking into possibilities for user input.
We thought is would be fun to get user input from the real world and manipulate things in the VR world. The first idea that we looked into was heart rate monitoring, but this seemed a bit harder to do without any devices at hand (the only device we had was a Samsung active 2 and it turned out to be pretty difficult to connect that to Unity).
So the next thing that we came up with was audio. Grabbing the voice through microphone and using the audio input to manipulate the world and make it visible to the users.
Sprint review 1
Our Print review didn't go as as well as we had hoped. For one troy was not able to attend the review in person which meant he wasn't able to test it himself. Another reason was that we were not able to get a proper working connection wi. This led to a lot of things not working how they should of like objects being in the wrong position and having the wrong velocity launching them across the table making it pretty difficult to be able to do anything other than looking around and getting diy from the player that controlled the head. However almost everyone found the multiple people embodiment extremely interesting and Troy was also pretty pleased with the idea.
Retrospective 1
After filling the entire board we went through every card by category and person explaining what the card stood for. After we went through the entire book we categorized all of the cards.
The next step was to decide as a team what the most important things were on the board and we made a list of all the issues that could be improved upon during the upcoming sprint.
Action Points for sprint 2
Sprint 2:
One of the first things we did for sprint 2 was make our sprint planning. Due to sprint 1 not going as efficiently as we had hoped we made a few changes to the way we planned our Trello board. First of all we needed to make our tasks a bit bigger. Because we were making smaller tasks in sprint 1 and we are working with Kanban we amount of tasks that were in the "in progress" card were too many. This led to tasks that were dependent on other tasks not being able to be added to "in progress". One example of this was the player controller. We had split the player controller up in to multiple cards, Head movement, left/right hand movement. All of this depended on controlling the player which meant all of the player controls had to be finished before we could review the player controller, this led to 3 cards being taken up in the "in progress" section.
Another thing we changed in the Trello process was that the definitions of done weren't being completed before taking a task. The action we took for this was appoint a Scrum master who would look at the Trello cards being taken and making sure that they had a definition of done before being worked on.
The amount of platforms being used was also a problem. Well maybe not the amount of platform just the way we were using them. Our discord server for example was extremely ineffective. We still had several different categories for each company, multiple obsolete channels that contained duplicate information and the links to each platform were all over the server. We as a team decided that I would start organizing the discord server, as I was the one that made the server that was the obvious choice.
During this sprint we came across a lot of network issues that we just couldn't get working. The combination of Photon and SteamVR wasn't working well so we came to the conclusion that we needed to find another solution for this.
Sprint Review 2
For our sprint review we weren't able to show the concept we wanted due to networking not working the way we wanted it to. This meant we had to separate out game mechanics and scenes into to different single player experiences. However the mechanics we had in the single-player prototypes were mostly enjoyed. Troy once again came up with a lot of new ideas that we could add to the prototype like how it would be to walk in a MC Escher kind of environment, lots of geometry, having multiple people using their echolocation from different positions.
One of the main points of feedback were to bring everything together into 1 playable experience. As we had created multiple different mechanics to test, it was time to bring this all together.
Retrospective 2
Action points for sprint 3!
The main problems that came out of our retrospective had to do with communication and teamwork. A lot of the time whenever something was designed this was done by only 2 maybe 3 team members. We decided it would be way better to have input from the entire team when someone comes up with an idea or designs something. This meant all members would work together on something first for about an hour and afterwards the others that continue with the rest of the task would present their plans to the rest of the team once worked out.
Another thing was not everyone knew what each team member was working on so we agreed it would be a good idea to give a small presentation om what members were working on during stand-ups which would make it clearer for everyone.
Whenever someone starts working on a task with little to no experience they will either get help from someone with more knowledge on the topic or at least get some direction from them on how they can approach the problem.
Group coaching
During this session we received feedback that we need to communicate with Troy more, which is something we kind of already knew and agreed on and we also added this to our list of action points. Were pretty lucky that Troy was so enthusiastic about our progress and ideas.
Sprint 3
For me this sprint was extremally inefficient. After looking into different options for getting our network working properly we decided to switch from SteamVR to OpenXR. I started working on some kind of scene manager to load in the different scenes but due to personal reasons I missed out on almost 2 weeks of being able to help the team.
Sprint review 3
During the sprint review we received some very positive feedback, however we were also told that it was definitely time to start making a complete package of everything we had. In all of the sprints we had shown different mechanics and that we needed to start bringing it all into one big experience.
Other feedback we received was that the 1st echolocation mechanic was more pleasant then the current one (we first had a blue ripple that lit everything up when the player spoke and now it was pretty bright from anything that made sound).
Another thing that would be interesting is using multiple people to influence the environment together. Alone they would be able to see things with the echolocation but together would influence the environment (for example 5 people shouting at the same time could turn on a waterfall).
Retrospective 3
Action points for sprint 4!
One of the main problems we had during this sprint was not enough communication towards teachers. If we had asked for more input from teachers we might of been able to create a better prototype. For this we decided to have a spokesperson that could communicate and get feedback on our project. Seeing as I was the one doing this towards Troy and also communicating about things we needed for the project.
Sprint 4
Sprint review 4
Retrospective sprint 4
Sprint 5
During the final sprint not a lot happened due to Christmas holidays and there only being two weeks left for the sprint, however during this sprint we had to work from home again and were still able to work together in a pretty efficient manner.
Looking back
In previous project groups I always had to jump in and try lead the direction of the team because of the effort from other team members. This time I did not have that problem. On occasion I needed to help get the team back on track when they were distracted but I did not have the feeling that members were taking it easy and leaving tasks for the rest.
Teamwork went very well despite having to work online most of the time, we would get together in separate discord channels help each other out when needed and in general the team got along really well. I must admit that this is one of the best teams i have had during group projects until now.
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