2012-09-15

WorkOut Poker Episode 2: Bet Sizing

Continuing on with first steps towards an ExerciseUI, this episode makes some improvements to existing gestures and adds gestures for bet sizing.

Some of the existing gestures needed a bit of fine tuning so that they would trigger more reliably and not trigger at unwanted times. The gesture for fold changed into three raises of the knees in either a left-right-left or right-left-right pattern. This is to allow some variation in the marching step used to fold. The previous left-right pattern just didn't quite feel right when playing.

In the last episode the Kinect would stop updating in FAAST. This was edited out of the video, but having to restart FAAST every seven or eight hands was tiresome. To anybody else having this problem, the answer is to run FAAST in administrator mode and to plug the Kinect into a USB that connects directly to the motherboard. Usually these will be on the back of the computer. It seems that the Kinect does not play nicely when going through intermediary USB hubs.

There are four betsizing actions for 33%, 50%, 75% and 100% of the pot. It was ticky getting the 50% and 75% actions to distinguish from each other. Doing cross hand above the shoulders move would trigger both the 50% and 75% pot size bets. I did manage to get something workable, though some care must be taken such as; squarely facing the Kinect camera, pausing after raising hands and pausing after hands are crossed. I hope to make this even more robust in future.

The increased stability meant I got in a 50min poker session. I ended this voluntarily - the software was rock solid this time. The activity level is still very low but it does beat sitting around. The next episode will experiment with multi-tabling to see if that improves the activity level to something more resembling a workout.

Episode List
Episode One: Basic Functionality
Episode Two: Bet Sizing
Episode Three: HUD

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