#handtrack

This week we had our exam and were presented to API assignment.

We presented our final concept to the teachers and got pretty good feedback. The only thing I remember seemed to be doubtful was why we presented a slide, which included a description of our concept works. We put the slide right before our video prototype and it explained all the features of our concept. Teachers couldn’t understand why we did that and we responded that this was a requirement in our Project Guide. We were asked if my doubt that our video explains the concept and its features, which we didn’t. Johannes drilled the topic for a really long time and that was the moment I thought that hopefully, this is the only actual criticism he has in mind right now ;)

Our presentation can be found here.

API Lab

Later this week we were introduced to APIs and API assignment. The term API ringed a bell for me before, but I didn’t really know what an API was. Two weeks before that we were introduced to GitHub and terminal, but it seemed surrealistic to me - I didn’t understand it even after watching Coding Train Tutorials. The  Eloquent JavaScript, Ch. 11, Asynchronous Programming seemed like black magic to me. I even had thoughts that maybe I don’t really know English, because I was reading the sentences one by one, but didn’t understand a thing.

I had fun reading two other papers: “The computer for the 21st century” by Bill Weiser was a little bit like a look into the past. The author in this article written in 1991 is trying to predict how people would coexist with computers in the future and to some extent, most of his predictions is pretty accurate.

In “Radical Atoms” by Hirosi Ishii et al., the authors are taking a look into the future? Or are they? The proove to the readers that the future is now and the things we cannot even dream of are happening, evolving and being developed right now.

Finally, we were introduced to our API assignment.

Since then our work started to revolve around which API should we choose and how to use GitHub. We settled that any API doesn’t really add anything to our project. We really wanted to go with Johnny Five, as we can and should use sensors in our project, but it turned out we couldn’t use, because it would be used during following workshops. We needed a lot of guidance on that and finally we decided to use the API that is the most relevant to our project - handtrack.js. We thought that maybe instead of using a proximity sensor, we could use hand detection and this might be just a branch of our project as we don’t know if we’re gonna end up using the API instead of the sensor. So, our API is chosen and mainly for the sake of the API assignment.