Author Archives: Jo Redwood

About Jo Redwood

Student at the University of Plymouth, studying digital art and technology.

DAT304 – SWOT Analysis

Strengths

  • Fun
  • Good gift
  • Secondary application as an indoor weather station
  • Community driven
  • Open platform that allows modification and use of data

Weaknesses

  • Not directly useful
  • Annoying
  • Concept needs to be explained, people might not understand it
  • Need to be robust and have a high quality finish

Opportunities

  • First to market
  • Retrofittable/portable microclimate monitoring for a number of applications
  • Expansion

Threats

  • Patents
  • Could be copied
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DAT304 – Resource Database

Taking advantage of available advice and support is crucial to the success of start-up companies. Here is a list of organisations that can help.

Plymouth Advice and Information

Local advice can be very useful, it puts you in contact with a network of people in the region also facing the same regional challenges and using the same local resources. The University of Plymouth has the formation zone and opens the possibility of find people with the necessary advanced skills for different parts of developing the business.

Outset Plymouth
Plymouth City Council
Plymouth Business Constellation
University of Plymouth Formation Zone

National Advice and Information

The basics of business are universal, large national organisations and government websites offer a great deal of useful information.

Shell LiveWIRE
Young Entrepreneur
Gov.uk

Investment groups

Various investment organisations exist to support start-ups, some of them local, both allowing them to support financially and with local contacts.

Southwest Business Finance
Southwest Investment Group
Fredericks Foundation
Creative England

Banks

Barclays
HSBC
Lloyds
NatWest
Santander
RBS

Technical

Arduino Forum

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DAT301 – Kinect

Microsoft’s Kinect offers exciting opportunities for digital artists, it has made previously expensive technology such as motion capture and 3D scanning accessible, paving the way for creative implementations.

After being demonstrated both the motion capture and 3D scanning aspects of the device and various pieces of software available to enable and utilise this we were eager to see what we could come up with.

After borrowing one of the Kinects the first thing we tried was using the new Kinect support for the sandbox game Garry’s Mod which had been added the previous day. With it we were able to control a character in the game in real time and with the character interact with objects within the game. Using the projector in the ‘Dat Cave’ made it easy for the person standing in front of the Kinect to see how their movements were appearing. As well as trying different movements we experimented with kicking and pushing objects.

After experimenting with direct representation based mainly on the motion capture aspect of the Kinect we later experimented with Processing.

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DAT301 – Kinect

Microsoft’s Kinect offers exciting opportunities for digital artists, it has made previously expensive technology such as motion capture and 3D scanning accessible, paving the way for creative implementations.

After being demonstrated both the motion capture and 3D scanning aspects of the device and various pieces of software available to enable and utilise this we were eager to see what we could come up with.

After borrowing one of the Kinects the first thing we tried was using the new Kinect support for the sandbox game Garry’s Mod which had been added the previous day. With it we were able to control a character in the game in real time and with the character interact with objects within the game. Using the projector in the ‘Dat Cave’ made it easy for the person standing in front of the Kinect to see how their movements were appearing. As well as trying different movements we experimented with kicking and pushing objects.

After experimenting with direct representation based mainly on the motion capture aspect of the Kinect we later experimented with Processing.

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