Update

After the very long day that was Saturday, we had Sunday off to recover.

Monday was mostly spent doing the final setup of the tables at both Vassant Valley and the Radico centre. We found some issues with running the projectors in the (~40 degree) Indian heat. When run in a room without air conditioning the projectors would shortly switch themselves off. So we needed aircon.

In Vassant Valley this meant moving the table to another room down the hall. In Radico centre the aircon just had to be turned on, which I am told then caused a certain amount of smoke and flames! Thankfully nobody was hurt and there was no damage.

Along with the heat problem, we also found that we had issues with the amount of natural sunlight getting to the table in Vassant Valley. Once the windows were blocked things were fine though.

Tuesday and Wednesday have been spent having groups of children using both tables. We seem to manage about 5-6 groups per table per day, so they are taking lots of punishment. Things seem to be holding up well though, with no hardware failures yet.

This amount of use has shown a couple of issues that we will have to deal with though. The projectors emit a very bright infrared light that shows up as a small blob in CCV. So its as though someone's finger is there all the time. The slightest pressure anywhere on the table top can cause a false touch detection above this point. We have temporarily blocked it with a piece of compliant surface stuck to the underside of the tabletop at exactly the spot, which seems to work well at eliminating it, even if it is a bit of a hack.

Secondly, we are having some problems with the system freezing up. At certain points the Flash program just stops displaying updates. It is still registering touches and reacting to them, the users just can't see them. Moving the program out of and back into fullscreen fixes it, but it's not exactly a viable long term solution. So, there's some definite debugging to be done.

As for the children themselves, the ones I've dealt with (all at Vassant Valley) really seem to like the system. They have also made some excellent suggestions and comments on the system and some seem to be interested in finding out more about the overall project. So, this is excellent from our point of view. Although we will have to wait until we are back home to analyse the usage data we've gathered and see what conclusions we can draw.