LeapPaint "v3" 2018-02-21 "Usability Pass 2"

v3 with a second usability pass, a full day's worth of iteration. I think this one feels pretty good, although I expect we'll still find a few kinks to iron out.

For a full changelog, see commit history between this release and f0c5f7e.

Binary

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1e-pFCbiLNisrlR4zFzjHJu2bxumLJ3jP

Requests & Responses

5. Menu should only be on the left hand (ok for the sinistral crew?)

Done. Since we had commented on it before, I also increased the size of the widget bubbles by 40% to get grasping the bubbles to be more reliable.

6. When pulling a widget off of your hand, a button/bubble should appear to be able to summon the widget back to your hand.

Added. These new "ghost bubbles" don't behave very well if you move to grasp them, so they need at least another pass, but they should work well if you move to tap them.

7. The sound when the menu appears should be less intrusive

Turned down the menu-appearing sound volume.

8. Remove coming soon buttons from stroke throwable menu. Feel fine keeping the undo/redo/thickness widget as a throwable widget even if it doesn’t have additional functionality. Nice to be able to have the functions in the environment rather than only on the hand.

Done.

9. Should we bring back the light pinch distance indicator?
   Tandem fix: Remove back of hand indicator

Done and done. The radius now indicates when the pinch will occur, and will expand and disappear when the pinch is ineligible.

10. Doublecheck that the pinch heuristics at the edges of the FOV make sense, particularly for both rigel and peripheral

Double-checked this in the v3 scene, and currently the FOV heuristic prevents activating pinching when the palm is beyond the field of view of my Vive -- it matches the FOV of the camera (independent of the device, this was tested with a peripheral, which appeared to tracked outside the lateralFOV of the camera). Does this sound like what we want? It mostly feels like it's "not an FOV heuristic"; since it's tied to your view, it's like it's not even there.

11. There’s a good amount of cruft in the save/load menu, but I want to take a better look at this feature and decide whether it’s necessary.

Haven't jumped into this yet. I think it's a shame to remove it if the menu and underlying features work. I feel like a single visual pass and code pass on this to get it using Interaction Engine components could get it to pass muster.

12. Might need a better explanation for the small palette, but we’ll see how the tutorial helps with this.

I have a clear design in my head that would utilize our Plath shader and a small ring on the surface of the button to visually distinguish it, that I think would help here. Creating the shader and hooking up the color from the fingertip would take an hour or two, so it didn't make it in this blitz, but I think we have the tools to clarify this situation without a drastic change.

13. • There should be some stronger visual feedback if you start a pinch inside a menu

OK, I added a first pass visual gizmo for this. Hopefully paint failure should be more clear.

14. Mixing basin no longer works

Fixed!

• 15 (bonus): Update color gem to something more fitting, and reflect the fact that there's only a single drawing hand now (a consequence of "left-hand menu only").

Paint v6 2018-02-16 "Move Tool"

File name AND this release tag refer to the wrong commit hashes :D woops! This build is actually based on commit hash 87884bc. #closeenough

• Wrist band expand/collapse for hand UI powered by a new simple IntObj variant: "Interaction Touch Volume"
• Fixed a bug where outline shaders would receive bad normals (floating point errors) when heavily squashed
• Shrunk hand UI elements a bit to save space
• Added tool buttons that change the tool channel string, associated Tool_ModeActivator scripts that enable and disable via this channel
• Tool buttons enable/disable paint, (none), and move (two-pinch TRS from Galaxies currently, combined with the latest pinch gesture)
• Visual indicators on the hands controlled implicitly by which tool is active

Binary

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_w9_hQJupIYNTRYRUpPTnBqTEk/view

Comments

Painting "feel" is significantly hampered compared to Paint v3. Culprits:

• No ribbon-flight filter (canvas alignment and direction following for painted ribbons)
• Lower stroke resolution in segments-per-meter (this is easily fixed, cost trade-off though)
• Lack of "early" meshing results in visual 'stutter' at the pinch point for the generated mesh
• No stroke thickness significantly impacts the visual clarity of strokes painted along a surface because there aren't any clean edges for strokes (that is, strokes are infinitely thin and sharp; cheaper, but unappealing)

Known Bugs

• There's a vertex color bug that makes the beginning of the back side of strokes erroneously inherit color from strokes drawn later on.

Paint "v3" 2018-02-16 "Usability"

Usability pass for Paint v3.

U1. Prevent starting a stroke too close to UI elements -- bounds improved significantly.
U2. Replace "grasping" code that relied on the old PinchDetector with Interaction Engine grasping
U3. Make the unpinch requirement after an unsuccessful pinch smaller
U4. "Either make it visible when a user starts painting inside of a UI bound or make the boundary a region where you only can't 'start' a stroke" -- elected for the latter, so no change here.

Binary
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_w9_hQJupIYNTBvdy1rR2hzLUU/view?usp=sharing

Known Issues
(U5, in-progress) -- the menu can appear on the right hand, but you can't touch bubbles with the left hand. (Grasping should still work.)

Paint 2018-02-02 "Paintbrush"

A modified design for the core painting mechanic. Color and Brush size hand-menus only, no Undo yet.

--

(1) A gesture icon for the app and on the back of the hand, "power hand"-style, that leans in to the safety pinch gesture to get the particularity of the safety pinch in the user's mind as early as possible. Combined with the tutorial, the gesture should feel as obvious as possible, so we can take advantage of the safety pinch's ability to reduce false positives, without confusing the user as to "how to paint."

(2) An inkwell visualization is driven directly by the pinch gesture, so the user's eye is drawn to their index and thumb as they complete the safety pinch, whether they intended to or not. If the inkwell fills up completely, they start painting. Ideally, for a new user, they'll be able to understand what happened if they just experience one accidental pinch. (With the tutorial in play, the inkwell just helps the user be mindful of a pinch as e.g. they rest their hands.)

(3) A physical brush head has been added to give the user a mental model for when they are about to paint and where they will paint. This model has also lead to a fixed-axis style of painting that allows a good deal of control over the shape of the curves the user paints; you can see some of the advantages of this in the video, which weren't possible before. This also gives a very clear model for when to hide the brush: If it's going to occlude with a menu, we can simply hide the brush, and it's clear that painting can't occur (Not-yet-implemented, so you'll see some occluding in the video.)

Currently, this build supports:
(1) Painting
(2) Hand-only color palette
(3) Hand-only brush size slider

Paint "v3" 2018-01-29 "Middle and Ring"

Safety pinch heuristic now focused on the middle knuckle bone and ring knuckle bones.

Use the DevGui to adjust the settings. One subtle variant worth trying out is setting the "index-relative" settings for the Middle and Ring fingers both to -20 to effectively disable them. The heuristic pretty much works just as well while fundamentally being simpler.

The "unpinch" distance has been added as a tuneable setting in the DevGui as well, and has had its unpinch distance default reduced to 2/3rds of its original value.

Build:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_w9_hQJupIYMzQwVEVaZ1ZfeEk/view?usp=sharing

Paint "v3" 2018-01-21 "Middle Safety"

Test release using v3 Paint scene; utilizes a safety pinch heuristic that focuses on the middle knuckle bone's angle relative to the index finger.

The DevGui is populated with some settings as well.

Build:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_w9_hQJupIYMnhvVDk2emgzcTQ/view

Paint "v3" v0.3.1 2018-01-08, "Safety Pinch"

Experimental "safety pinch" feedback on the right hand, and feedback-less implementation on the left hand.

Build:
https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/0B_w9_hQJupIYMldvdzZsRHFGZVU

Paint "v3" v0.3.1 01-12-17, "Pinch Heuristic"

• Added the pinch gesture, with a "smarter" pinch heuristic. Primarily incorporates pinch velocity, as well as hand velocity. and uses FOV and wrist-angle metrics to avoid beginning pinches in expected-low-tracking-quality situations.
  • The pinch gesture now also detects pinch distance as the closest distance between the distal bones of the index and thumb rather than tip distance, which is more robust to over-pinching.
• There's also a raw pinch build attached that uses the old, unchanged pinch detector.
• Fixed a bug where the color mixer instantly jumped to the fingertip color.

Additions that probably don't matter to you:

• Added the DevCommand "Recenter" gesture. If you don't know what this is, don't worry, you'll never find it by accident ;)
• Added the "controller switcher" from the IE examples so that if you connect and move around some Oculus or Vive controllers you can validate hand alignment. (No, you can't suddenly Paint using controllers now.)

Paint "v3" v0.3.1 29-11-17

Paint v3 upgraded to a much more recent LM Core.

This release contains a few changes from older v3 builds:

• Slightly customized gray/white capsule hands instead of LoPoly rigged hands
• Fixed Index Tip Paint color bug when using the cleaning basin
• Dynamic cursor instead of a rigid cursor relative to the palm