Technology Survey - deco3500-2018/TeamTeamyTeam GitHub Wiki
Unity vs. HTML/CSS/JavaScript
Unity was explored as a platform that could assist with text recognition and barcode scanning, however there only seemed to exist free text recognition APIs that recognised fonts, not handwriting. Since we wanted the posts to be handwritten, spending time getting this to fully work wouldn't really add much value to the project. QR scanning was also explored, and while getting Unity to recognise the barcode was simple enough, taking a photo of the post and uploading it to a database would have been a lot of work that we didn't have the time to learn to do. Since no one in our group was experienced with incorporating a database into a website, we decided there would either have to be no database or a dummy database, so we spent a little time exploring the easier version of a twitter feed 'database' in HTML, CSS and JavaScript rather than Unity.
Twitter Feed as Database vs. Hardcoded Posts
Instead of using a database to store posts, it was suggested to us to use a Twitter feed to being able to create posts and display them on our application. This was explored and can be seen in Figures 1 and 2 below.
Figure 1: Twitter feed disguised as posts on DigiLit.
Figure 2: Actual twitter feed with overlaid image removed.
This issue with embedding the Twitter feed was that Twitter only allows embedding of a feed, including all widgets for liking, profile information, sharing etc. This was an issue for our application as the posts were not going to be created by one account, and would have a different interface for likes and profile information than Twitter's UI. Due to this, a different approach was taken by creating the posts as divs in Html so that they could be easily transferred between sections on the screen (Figure 3). This did mean the final prototype would have to be somewhat 'smoke in mirrors', however we felt that this was the best way to approach the prototype. A new interface was also adopted based on user insights.
Figure 3: Hardcoded posts.
A database is no longer required now that the posts are hardcoded as the posts are being moved around on the one index page. Posts first appear in the first column, and when they are approved the post div moves to columns 2 and 3. To give the illusion that the application is working across multiple monitors, the index file is larger than the size of the window, meaning the window can be extended across two monitors to look like the devices are communicating and the posts are moving between the monitors. Testing this set up can be seen in Figure .
