Personal Project

Brief: Build a personal project and make a blog. For this project we have been tasked with developing a project that is not within our personal skill set and is out of our comfort zone, so with this in mind the first thing I must do before I can formulate an idea is to take a look at my personal comfort zone so that I can pick a project that will meet the criteria for this module. To be able to accomplish this, I will conduct a personal SWOT analysis so that I know where I would be interested in pushing myself.

Idea: Building a Time-Lapse Camera; the idea being that I would create the camera that would then be used as a tool for creating time-lapse videos, which can then be used in many different forms. I would primarily like to see if it will be possible to use a time-lapse video within a 3D game environment and, should this go well, also within a virtual reality (VR) game environment. For example, I would like to put a time-lapse video running inside a window frame, inside a room but from the players perspective it would look like just a window.

For the camera, at first I was thinking of using a GoPro or another commercial camera, but after looking at the different specifications and cost, decided that a bespoke camera would enable me more options when making the videos, and would be a more cost-efficient choice. After a few internet searches and bit of research, I managed narrow down my search to two options; create the camera using a raspberry pi or create the camera with Arduino hardware - neither of which I have used in the past, so making the decision between the two systems would be a financial one. As I already have an old Raspberry Pi 2 starter kit buried away somewhere in a cupboard that I have never got around to using, I decided that creating the camera with the pi would be my best option. With this in mind, I started to research what it will take to make the starter kit into a time-lapse camera, after looking at various sites I came to the conclusion that all I would need to make the camera using the Raspberry pi, would be a camera module and some basic hardware making the Raspberry pi the most viable and feasible option.

For this project I will be splitting the project into three key stages each with their own development cycle;

· Stage One: Build time-lapse camera.

· Stage Two: Creation of the time-lapse videos and file type integration into Unity.

· Stage Three: Creation of a Unity project, with the creation of test scenes to test time-lapse in VR and 3D.

Constraints

· Revolution

· Kinetic

· Reflect

The three constraints above were produced as a group in one of the hackspace sessions by way of democratic vote and I will need to try to tie in these constraints to my project in some way. I feel that my chosen project fits these constraints very nicely; I feel that as it will be a bespoke camera that I have made myself with what I feel is revolutionary technology, it definitely encapsulates the idea of revolution. As I intend to make the camera portable, in order to get many different locations for time-lapse videos, it also nicely fits into the kinetic constraint. Finally, I feel that by it’s very nature, my project is reflective, as photographs and other such imagery are in and of themselves reflective of past situations.