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Project Feedback

Feedback on Project Teamwork

It seems that the team worked together very well and they were rather happy with each other. I said “seems” because sometime the task division was not clear to me, although it might be clear internally inside the team. This brings an issue during the project: The team did not maintain active communication with coaches and clients, although I have been pushing the team doing so.

The team worked very hard towards a working prototype, especially in the second half of the project, but the workload was not balanced. The excuses of this could be that some of the team members were ill during the last two weeks.

Feedback on Design Process

The project went through idea generation, concept refinement and prototyping, but throughout the project, a careful plan was missing and the goal of the project was shifting around.

In the first half of the project, the team developed ideas and concepts by brainstorming, categorizing, and the team also did a lot of research on emotions and facial expressions, and the speech technologies as well. In the second half of the project, the focus was on how to use visual output to convey emotional information. But there seemed a faultage between the first half and the send half of the project: the research results and concepts developed earlier did not contribute that much to the final prototype.

Feedback on Project Objectives

In the second half of the project, the team focused very much how to give immersive video feedback to the speech input, but gradually shifted away from the original objective of the project: "to do something with speech recognition and emotions". Apparently lacking a good understanding of the project objective, the team did not develop an integrated and coherent vision of the different aspects of the situation they designed. The integration of speech technologies with the well demonstrated virtual reality could have made this project very compelling.

Feedback on Project Deliverables

Although the final presentation was not very satisfactory, the virtual reality demonstration with surrounding video and 3D graphics output was impressive. A working model as such needs a lot of effort and time. The hardware could not be available in place in time can also be an excuse.

Feedback on Presentations (interim and/or final)

Interim presentation

The team presented six concepts: 1. Emotion is something you leave behind!" 2. "Emotions are to be collected!" 3. Characters 4. "Emotion is a medium of exchange!" 5. "Emotion is a choice!" 6. "Freeform-effect" controlled by hand in water. The clients were impressed by some of the innovative concepts, for example, the concepts of “emotions are to be collected” and “the freeform effect”

The final concept should be a combination of the above, addressing the use of the speech technology.

Final Presentation

The demonstration was impressive, in the sense that it is more powerful than just a presentation, but it also made clear the weaknesses in the project – the role of the speech technology was not clearly stressed.

The team was very busy getting the demonstration work so that they didn’t get enough time to prepare the final presentation. The presentation was rather flat and did not get the audience really involved.

The final presentation could not give the audience a concrete idea how the demonstrated pieces could work together in terms of the project objectives. A use case or a scenario could have helped a lot.

Overall Conclusions

The strong point of this project is the working prototype and the dedication towards such a prototype. The weak point is that the team had put too much effort and focus on the visual output (the virtual reality rather then integrating the speech technology. A good plan and a clear goal could have helped a lot to balance the effort and could have made this project very successful.

The team worked very hard and often give surprises to the client and the coaches; however, once again, there shouldn’t have been such surprises if the team had actively communicated the project process with the clients and the coaches.

Pictures

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