Farsight Round 1

I'm cracking on some farsight example code today. My goal is to have it running by the end of the day. If we can get this running in an open video format then we can start wrapping it with a GUI and get this thing rolling.

Multi-platform Research

I've been looking up ways that we can take OVC multiplatform today. It looks like the best way may be using Farsight. Tomorrow I'm going to try to play with it and make some prototypes hopefully.

The Summer Research Luncheon was today. There was a huge turn out. I'd estimate fifty or more people came. Hopefully this will be a catalyst for the Center for Student Innovation to get a central server for all these students to open wikis and blogs on.

Summer Week 1!!!!!

So we're back in the new and improved Foss Box. This week is just going to be the same old bootstrapping. The OVC team is pretty set but we're helping out the other teams that are new to RIT Storytelling and the Open Source ecosystem. Our first goal this week and next to to check out the RTP fix to Gstreamer. If this is fixed properly we should be able to do a lot of optimizing and add some features. The RTP bug has been a real bottleneck for us in the past. We have a research orientation meeting later today in the library. Should be interesting. Peace

User Testing Summary

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NTID Survey Results

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Total Participants: 14

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1. How comfortable are you with American Sign Language?

5: 11

4: 1

3: 2

2: 0

1: 0

0: 0

2. How clear was the video?

5: 1

4: 7

3: 3

2: 2

1: 1

3. Would you like the option to remove the preview window to increase the size of the main video?

Yes: 11

No: 3

4. Would you use this product to communicate with a Deaf person?

Yes: 12

No: 2

5. Would you use this product to communicate with a hearing person?

Yes: 10

No: 4

6. Would you use this product for text chat?

Yes: 12

No: 2

7. Would you use text and video in the same chat?

Yes: 12

No: 2

8. Would you like the windows to change size if you closed the chat window?

Yes: 11

No: 3

Additional Comments:

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Comments were generally positive. The negative comments were about things that we could not change. People complained about the hardware and asked about how we will set up internet in other countries. These are issues for One Laptop Per Child to consider. We may not have conveyed that we are only responsible for the software, not the hardware or deployment.

End of the Spring

So this last week we've been finishing up stuff for the spring quarter. While I was off doing user testing last week Jlew posted OVC on SugarLabs' site. We've had 1299 downloads in less than a week already!!! Unfortunately the code doesn't run on the XO 1.0 due to numerous issues so the majority of those people probably couldn't use the software. At least people are aware of it now though. Hopefully the 1.5's get deployed widely soon. Tomorrow I think I should be able to get one of our tickets closed. I don't know why it wasn't done before O:-)

OVC User Testing Day 1 & 2

It's been a busy couple of days. Fran and myself have been posted up on the NTID side of campus showing off our project. We're trying to get input from actual ASL users. We hung out near the RIT Commons for a couple hours today and yesterday and we actually had a decent amount of people stop by. Fran and I got to practice our ASL skills too. The responses we got were mixed. Some people were very interested and took the time to fill out our survey. Others saw that we were making a video chat program and just kept walking before we could explain. All in all it's been a cool experience. We got got a cool hook up with this guy named Andrew that wants to help us market this to the Deaf community over the summer. I'm interested to see how he can help our project.

Busy Busy Busy

Wow so I haven't blogged in a while. I've been crazy busy getting ready for ImagineRIT all last week. Jlew and myself got to go out to dinner with John Resig, RIT Alum and creator of jQuery. We also got to meet with Walter Bender, Stefan Unterhauser, and Adam Holt from OLPC and SugarLabs on Friday. Walter was in town to give a talk for the GCCIS Dean's Lecture Series. He talked about the importance of education and how the XO's are helping this.

After the lecture we went into high gear preparing for ImagineRIT the next day. Imagine was so awesome. We got to show off Open Video Chat all day. My favorite part of the day was teaching two little boys how to sign their names to each other over our video chat.

Walter really seemed to like what we're doing here. He gave us a shout out on the sugar-devel mailing list http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2010-May/023676.html