The Snowballers: Work in progress, Part I

Hi again! :)

The snowballers team work almost came to his end... but not yet!

During these weeks we worked a lot to design our final prototype of "Robobally" and to create our product video. With lot of meetings and brainstorming a lot of nice ideas came to our minds.

For the product prototype development we decided to focus our attention on the visual appearance prototype and on the interactive one, (instead of the paper prototype that was mentioned in the previous blog post). We thought that proceeding by this way, the product "functionalities"could have been shown better.

From the visual and appearance prototype point of view we created the Robobally shape and the physical keyboard using a 3D design. during this step we Started creating  the model with the help of a web 3D design software, and concluding the work with the actual printing at TUTLab.

For the interactive prototype we created it using a voice command web service that permit us to show a little bit of practical scenarios where our product could be used. We used https://www.sayspring.com/ for creating our voice prototype for the robot.   We first created three scenarios where the user forgets his laptop and how robobally should respond, how he uses robobally to check his schedule and how the student tracks his phone with the help of robobally. Further, we decided to refine these voice commands to show robobally more interactive and how robobally can also be used at home. The sequence in sayspring was divided into three scenarios according to the script, and for each command the system was fed to a predefined answer of how robobally should interact.

Concerning the scenarios, we focused our attention on problems that robot usage can solve:

• a student that forget his phone at home (university context)
• a student that is not able to check right map to go to the class room in his/her laptop  (university context)
• a student (home context) that stops his/her alarm to the phone and continues to sleep, instead of going to his/ her class.
• A student that forgot about his deadline and realised very late. 

How can we include these in our product video?

We decided to film just two of the three problems above, including the first and the second one in a unique scene. We filmed this part in Bitti café in the university: we considered it the right place in terms of luminance video conditions.

 Here below there is a picture of two of the Snowballers with our "actor" for this scene: