16/04/2012 - Progress: Lack of resources proving to be problematic

The project is still progressing at a good speed however several issues have arisen which have had a negative impact on the project schedule.

When researching the feasibility of undertaking this project - October '11 - in order to identify whether it would be possible to implement the proposed program several good sources of information were identified. One key resource was a series of Kinect development tutorials with an emphasis on educational applications. Several other resources were identified, and based on this information it was decided the project would be feasible. However, at the time of research the Software Development Kit (SDK) for Kinect was in the beta stage and the tutorials used this SDK to develop the apps.

In January this year Microsoft released the full official Kinect SDK. However the programs developed with the beta SDK are not compatible with the latest SDK. This has rendered the resources previously identified obsolete as they have not been updated for the latest SDK.

As the SDK has only been released for a few months there is very little support material available for developing with the Kinect. This was identified as a possible risk to the project and contingency and mitigation plans were put in place if this were to prove to be an issue.

Therefore, development has been slower than expected as each tutorial had to be converted to a working format compatible with the latest SDK in order to understand how it could be applied to this project. Whilst this provided a great opportunity to learn the finer details of developing for the Kinect it has had an adverse effect on the project schedule.

Prototypes of both the speech-based and gesture-based applications have been completed and tested and are working as expected. It is expected that it will be possible to build on these prototypes quite rapidly in order to complete the final programs which should put the project back on schedule. Time lost due to hardware issues has almost been made up and the project currently stands one week behind schedule.

The schedule will be carefully monitored and the possibility of implementing contingency plans in the case the project is at risk of not completing within the given timeframe will be considered at the end of April.