DMC Ping Pong App Upgrade 2.0

Anyone who has visited DMC's Chicago office knows that we love a good game of ping pong. We have an internally-developed DMC Ping Pong App to keep track of final scores from each game and generate rankings to show just how awesome (or not awesome) each employee is. During FedEx Day 2014, Jordan and Sudeep set up a .NET library for interfacing to a GoPro camera via Wi-Fi that allowed control of primary camera functions. The GoPro .NET library was then used to implement a .NET console app that established general "highlight cam" behaviors.

For FedEx Day 2015, Devon and I took the Ping Pong App one step further. First, we mounted a GoPro camera on the wall to continuously record games with a complete wide angle view of the entire area of play. We then added a "Capture Highlight" button to the game screen that downloads the last few minutes of video footage to a network storage location when pressed, making it available to view a replay of the highlight. We also created a new "View Video Highlights" screen, accessible from the player stats screen, that lists recent video highlights and allows the user to select a video to start playing in the adjacent video player. In the future, the app will use a filter to only show videos involving the selected player. HTML5 made it incredibly easy to directly embed a very nice video player into the web app for full-screen playback.

Since Devon and I were relatively unfamiliar with the coding platforms involved in modifying the web app, we needed to learn a lot of new concepts and quickly apply them as a paired programming team. We used Google to learn the basics and relied on Jordan and Sudeep's knowledge and willingness to help out for the more in-depth details.

We wrapped up the day with several rounds of ping pong (for testing purposes, of course).

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