PING Platform

Wrap Up

Our proof of concept is complete! Well, sort of. Here is what we originally set out to do with the month of October:

According to the schedule we have tentatively set, our plan is to create a small scale proof of concept by October 1st, 2008

Well, we actually created a full-scale proof of concept by October 8, 2008. It meets and exceeds all of the requirements we made in the beginning. However, our next tentative goal was to build a full scale proof by November 1. What we have currently achieved doesn’t meet our goals for that deliverable in a few ways:

• Only 2 Player

  We currently have built and developed just 2 sides of the PING Platform table. We want all 4 in a full scale proof.

• Only Uses Long Range Sensors

  During the very beginning of the proof phase, it became quickly apparent that we would need to come up with some way to adjust for the 7-8″ dead zone provided by each sensor. We originally thought we could compensate for this with the opposing sensor. However, that is less than idea. So, we realized we would need a much shorter range sensor at each corner, in addition to the aforementioned long range sensor.

So, this leads us to…

Next Steps

What are we going to do next? Well, there are quite a few things we can work on that are independent of our quest for funding. They are:

1. Complete (4-sided) Full Scale Proof

   Allow all four sides of the table to be interactive.

2. Add Short Range Sensors

   We have one short range sensor to test with. We’ll need to adapt the software to handle multiple sensors at each corner.

3. Software Platform Expansion

   There are several important features of the software platform API that need to be completed before we can release it and start developing the OS and games.

4. PingOS design/testing/development

   We’ll need to flesh out several of our ideas about interface/interaction design and test them. We can obviously then develop what we build into the platform.

5. Game Development

   After all of the above are done, we start to make and adapt games to the platform.

More info on all of these threads to come soon.