The site you are visiting is the result of a student group project undertaken in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Waikato, for the course COMPX241 Software Engineering Development which goes more affectionately by the name Smoke and Mirrors.
The Hey There project is just one example from a long running series of projects — going on for more than 20 years now — that challenge our 2nd year Software Engineering students in the BE program to take on, at first appearance, seemingly impossibly ambitious projects. Especially when the 6 week time-frame is taken into account!
The key to successful outcomes in these projects is in figuring out how to pick up existing libraries and APIs and learn quickly how to apply them to the task at hand. This skill is all too often overlooked in our Software Engineering and Computer Science degrees, where the focus is primarily on carefully controlled lab assignments where students are required to write code from scratch that implements a predetermined outcome. While this helps demonstrate how well students have understood what was taught in lectures, it is distressingly remote from what our students will be asked to do when they graduate and join the workforce.
The brief the students for Hey There, Interact with Me! were given was as follows:
Institutions and locations with public spaces such as transport hubs often have information displays, typically mounted overhead, endeavouring to be helpful by beaming out information to the people down below. But spend any time actually trying to extract meaningful information out of such a set up, and you quickly discover how unhelpful they really are: requiring you to wait until the display decides to show you the information needed, and then taking it away once it's decided you've had enough time to look at it! The issue is the passive nature of the setup and the slavish reliance on a loop of information being shown monotonously, one screen at a time. Case in point, our university's information displays!
For the Hey There, Interact with Me! project, the challenge set is to develop an information display that provides convenient ways for those "down below" to interact with the information being displayed — either through body gestures or else by using their phones. If the latter approach, then a requirement of the project is that this be done without the need for the user to install anything special on their phone.
The four member team assigned the project decided to pursue the by phone, but with no special installation requirements path for implementation and set to work developing a WebSockets based solution that could deliver the desired end result.
The team was particularly engaged with the idea of the developed software being used in transport hubs, where you often find yourself waiting around for your flight/train/bus to arrive. This led the team to decide that their solution should also be capable of letting users interact with the display in engaging ways to help pass the time. Ergo, implementing an on-screen multiplayer version of Bullrush/British Bulldog became one of the goals of the project, which remember was all to be completed in 6 weeks, while they had three other courses to study for!
The team delivered on all this, and at the Smoke and Mirrors Show and Tell event at the end of the semester, the team gave a memorable presentation on the work, and ended by throwing up a QR code and URL on the projector screen, and inviting the audience to join in a game of Bullrush on their phones. Some 20 or so people did just that!
Since then, some additional work has been done on the project. A key technical advancement is that the Interactive Display can now be installed and operated on a Google Chromecast device, some aspects of the code-base were refactored to scale better, and the user interface has been given a bit of a spruce up.
If you are on the Hamilton campus, then head over to the 1st floor of G-block, and you can experience the interactive display for yourself, If not, you can still get a sense for how the project works through our online demo:
For the curious, you can access the Smoke and Mirrors projects that are on offer this year years here.
Enjoy!
David Bainbridge