13/02/08 - Trip to UCD

Today both myself and Graham went to UCD to meet with Dr. Lorcan Coyle regarding Ubisense.
He introduced us to some of the other researchers, who are working with the Ubisense system there and showed us some of the applications they have written for use with the Ubisense. Although they were impressive, the applications did highlight some of the Ubisense systems fundamental shortcomings: that it really isn't as accurate as advertised (in an ideal environment, a highly callibrated system would be accurate up to approx. 15cm, in reality though, in a normal environment, it is accurate to about a meter and is quite jumpy in movement). It is still accurate enough for our purposes, though we will need to play around with it to see can we eliminate or smoothen the jumpiness, as it could cause problems.

We will be returning to UCD next week in order to begin coding the Ubisense component for our framework.


Besides this, we have been looking into soundcards which support hardware accelerated HRTF, in the hope that we could get one to improve the quality of the 3D sound. Initial research shows that the high end Creative X-Fi cards support this, but not the low end ones. OVer the next week, I plan to choose a soundcard with HRTF support (basically, a price features balance - but since we are only interested in HRTF and don't care about such things as MIDI and so forth, this shouldn't be a problem - though, if I had the money, I would love on of those cards!).