Week 8 (8 - 12.03)
I really liked the coaching this week. We had some time alone wit our teachers and could focus 100% on our project and their feedback. It seems like we have everything sorted out and we are definitely on the right tracks with our project.
Next step is to find a way to connect handtrack.js, Johnny Five and Arduino. Sanna is figuring it out as one of her API examples, since she is the best at programming. She also wrote down some scenarios, situations and questions for our user testing session, which me, Carlo and Patrycja, will be conducting on Wednesday.
Wednesday, 10.03
Today in the school workshop, we managed to successfully launch our prototype, using the handtrack.js API. We connected it through Johnny Five and Arduino, so if you wave at the laptop and camera detects your hand, the plant would start moving. We had three optional movements and if we wanted to use of those, we had to comment our the other two in the code. We were very proud of ourselves, however, the API didnāt work as well as we expected it to. It couldnāt detect hands effectively and sometimes it detected hands in other objects, so it launched movements randomly. We asked three people to try out our prototype and asked them about their feelings and experience, but we felt like it was not going in the right direction. We figured out that we have a lot to think through before the final user testing and also, we started wondering if we really should use the API to conduct the tests.
Video from user testing
API examples
This week, I also finished with my API examples. My first example, which I extended to prototype, is based on Victor Dibia's code: https://codepen.io/victordibia/pen/RdWbEY. I misunderstood the assignments directives and didn't copy it before extending it to the Prototype, so I added the Prototype folder afterwards and made some slight changes. I added a video of a shaking plant and made it play when a hand is detected by the API.
I had a lot of doubts about it. I didnāt know if the thing I would do, could even be called a prototype. But after readingĀ āThe anatomy of prototypesā by Lim, Stolterman and Teneberg, I learned a lot about what we can actually call a prototype and that prototypes differ when it comes to material, resolution and scope. And since I am not aiming to actually test anything with it, I can definitely call it a prototype and... it is my call ;)
My second example detects the hand position and logs it in the right column. I made some changes to the original code: https://codepen.io/md-azeem/pen/xxEZbrz.
I had fun with the API assignment and I didnāt find it very hard. We had time and strength to focus on our project too and I have an impression that other groups kind of ditched the main project for the sake of API Lab.
Link to our GitHub
The rest of the week went quick and it was all about our API presentation. During coaching, we showed Peter what we had and he was very excited about the hand tracking we used and the physical prototype we have built. We know that we are on the right track with the API assignment, but still, we doubt we are going to use it in our final prototype and user testing.
API Presentation

















