MD318 – Blog 4

This week the girls and I accepted that we would be producing a projection based project without the interactive board. We focused on finding the most suitable material to project onto and our design. We borrowed the projector from Mark who said we could keep it for the foreseeable future – or until he needed it back. This was great news at we would constantly have it at our disposal whenever we needed. While setting it up ourselves we had trouble with the connection although the projector itself worked perfectly despite being an old model. Unfortunately none of us had the correct output for the connector on any of our laptops or even the Macs. Thankfully, in the lab on Tuesday, Jack was able to successfully connect it to his own Microsoft laptop so we could carry out a proper test.

We practiced projecting onto many different surfaces. As you will see above, we attempted to project onto a white board. The overall display was clear and bright. However, there was an expected glare from the lens against the shiny surface. But, we may test this surface again but from a greater distance as the projector may have simply been too close.

We projected onto many surfaces such as metal, white brick, wood and paper. The surface material we found to be most affective however, was white painted wood. It had no glare and the image was presented clearly. The material is also sturdy enough to paint on and move around. Paper was not bad but a little too transparent. Perhaps we will play around with thicker types of paper or card if painted wood falls short.

The design aspects of things are developing very slowly. The three of us have a vague knowledge around adobe software such as photoshop or animate. Javad introduced me to Aftereffects last week as he thought it would work best to animate my design ideas. I watched a few tutorials to learn more as we didn’t have much time last week. However, Javad was absent this week and I really struggled with the application. Therefore, the animation of our design has come to a bit of a standstill. Fingers crossed Javad will be able to help me next Tuesday and I can get the animation up and running in time for our beta version.