The UK's Imagine Cup team on film

Mark Johnston and Kevin McDaniel pay a visit

Imagine Cup Yesterday we had a visit from our main man at Microsoft, the guy himself, Mark Johnston! Mark spent the day with us going over our entry and discussing how we were managing our daily development plan. We talked about our presentation and what we need to put into it. He also kindly reminded us of the hundreds upon thousands of times we're going to have to demonstrate it to people.

We also went over some of the more boring logistical stuff for our trip to India in August. You know, the things like how we need to get Visa applications written, get some passport photos taken, make sure we get the correct inoculations (injections, eeek!) and other such things.

Mark had also brought Microsoft's newly purchased digital video camera and mega expensive tripod, of doom, to get some footage of us during our normal implementation routine. We did a few warm up video sessions so that Mark could make sure that he knew what all the buttons did, and how far you could zoom in (very important for all the close ups that people will want of us, lol). The question was, what could we talk about for the test run? Some bright spark came up with the idea of Online Dating Videos, so we had a good laugh making up some stuff to get those ladies calling us. Hopefully for the public's safety, those video clips will never see the light of day!

So after our practice sessions, we had a quick run through of what questions would be asked and then did our first try. It was pretty much a failure as Tom was mainly cut out of the entire video and James and Andy forgot what to say. In other words; a classic Team Three Pair moment. We then decided to shift round our seating arrangements and have a try at a different line of questioning. This time the videoing went much smoother and was largely agreed to be a success.

Later in the day, we met up with Kevin McDaniel (another cool guy from Microsoft) and had a chat about our system and the technology behind it, along with the techniques we used to get the implementation up and running. We also discussed getting more input from our medical contact at Manchester's Hope Hospital, Dr Paul Dark. He is very keen on helping us out as much as he can and we will probably be going to visit him soon to get him on a couple of the video shoots.

All in all, it was quite a productive day on the design and presentation side of things, as we got a lot of things decided and planned out.

Our next plan is to get some more of the actual code written and implemented and we will be keeping you informed about how that's going, so check back here on The Register on Monday.®