Personal Contribution - David Yule


Introduction

Group A consisted of 4 members who had decided to implement a glove human-interface device for PC use, similar to the P5 glove which is picture below. The idea mimicked what had been demonstrated in the film Minority Report. The device was to support the ability for the user to move his hand in free space and for that movement to be mapped to an equivalent movement of the PC’s cursor. The system could be extended to support more complicated ‘gestures’ to allow the user to perform more complex tasks. In effect, the system would be a gesture based human-computer interface device which we called GeReMI (Gesture Recognising Mouse-free Interface).


The Vrealities P5 Glove Mouse

The team were provided with Orient 2 and Prospeckz devices. For our implementation the Orient 2 sensors were used to map the user’s arms position in 3 dimensional space and the Prospeckz devices were used to implement the two button inputs.

The group broke the task down in to four separate sub domains in order to distribute the work amongst the team. My task was to take the information from the Orient 2 sensors and translate it to move the mouse cursor on screen. My section of code was essentially the interface between the pre-existing code supplied by Alex Young and section of code named the ‘mouse controller’ written by Simon Spencer. The mouse controller simply took two arguments, an x and y value, and moved the cursor the designated number of pixels supplied to it.

We were initially given a java based system which allowed us to experiment with how the sensors worked. The system displayed a basic model of an arm with appropriate joints which would move in accordance with the user’s arms movements. Sensors were placed on the chest, upper arm and fore-arm of the user. This visual representation would prove very useful in the tricky debugging stage of the project which I will talk about later.


Slip Group A At Work

Requirements Capture

My section, as outlined earlier, had to fulfill the following requirements.

Functional:

Non-Functional: It was really important to us to create something which the user felt comfortable operating. The world-wide acceptance of the mouse as the primary human-computer interface would mean that our system would have to feel both functional and intuitive in order to be accepted as a valid HCI device.