I worked at Novility from October 2015 until it went bankrupt in April 2019 as a Kinect/software developer.
Novility was a company that focused on making a hospitality training tool and service in which trainees (with a focus on housekeepers) could learn how to do their work according to hotel procedures and how to work in an ergonomically responsible way. The main point of interaction for the trainees was the training station, a setup of TV, pc and Kinect 2.0 on which the training was done.
My main responsibilities included working in Unity on the ergonomic and posture training in which the user would do an exercise in front of the Kinect and get real-time feedback on what to improve or change. I also partially maintained and added features to the abstraction layer between Kinect and Unity written in C++. Other work included researching emotion recognition technology, making tools for 3D team in Unity, evaluate new 3D camera’s, creating a machine learning data generator and creating proof of concepts.
The most valuable experience for me was to get to work in a growing multicultural and multidisciplinary company in which I was able to witness the growth of collaboration, processes and pipelines. This was my first actual job, so to see this progress was good to have after university.
In terms of development my best milestone was rewriting the ergonomic system from scratch into a node based system in order to almost double the ergonomic content within one release. The old code was bloated and inefficient due to rushing to releases, one exercise could take up as much as 2500 lines of non-reusable code and it took multiple minutes till a single variable change could be tested. In the new system a similar exercise can be made with 125 lines (less if you don’t care about readability), all variables can be live tweaked and other changes have less than half the time between change and test.