I recently worked on an expansion for an existing research project, Common Household Injury Prevention Photospheres (or CHIPP for short). The project is a joint initiative between University of Bristol & the University of the West of England, Bristol, and spearheaded by Centre for Academic Child Health with support and hosting from Altuity Solutions Ltd. It’s a great cause, and tool has been built to understand how best to educate people to discover potential hazards in the home environment.
The expansion I was tasked with required taking the existing gamified learning experience, and turning it into something that could be used as a research tool, capable of tracking users and logging how they interact with the photospheres. The log then had to be viewed in a logical format, as coordinates on a sphere don’t mean a whole lot out of context! To solve this I built a specific Log Viewer environment, enabling a user to go through each attempt at finding hazards and track how they explored the scene.
This required a range of software engineering skills that I wasn’t too familiar with, including using PHP, javascript and utilising the photosphere library to understand what can and can’t be logged. I also updated some of the old photospheres using my Ricoh Theta and had to do some fairly noticeable photoshopping to hide the tripod legs. The output can be found here!
