Hello, everybody! Here we are once again, one week later. Over the course of this week we kept digging away and thinking about our project, although not much progress was made. We remain on the process of choosing the components necessary for our prototype. However, despite not much evolution in both the software and hardware departments, the week still proved itself fruitful, as we interviewed one of the oldest diving schools in Europe, who were kind enough to welcome us and answer our questions!
As mentioned before, we had the pleasure to sit down and talk to the executive board of one the oldest diving schools in all of Europe - the school is over 70 years old and were responsible for filming some of the earliest underwater films ever! All this while training and continuing to train thousands of divers and hosting international conventions and symposiums on the matter! We guess these facts are enough to explain our desire to have met them ;).
Having already had meetings with experts in both underwater autonomous systems and transmission of digital data, we were still missing feedback from one of the most important pieces of the puzzle - the solution beneficiaries themselves, the divers, who were equally thrilled to have met us.
First of all, we made a short summary of our project, which immediately made the school’s personnel immediately interested in our idea. We then followed up with a question about the already existent methods of underwater communication between divers. Just like we researched and wrote in our project proposal, the school said they used hand signals to talk to each other - very simple commands, mostly for going up and down - which gave us a little bit more security because it increased the legitimacy of our solution.
Then, we started discussing about the validity of our concrete ideas in greater detail. The school was pleased with our plan to have one transmitter and several receivers strapped all around the user’s head, instead of having the device strapped to the diver’s wrist like we initially thought, coming to the same conclusions as we had when we interviewed a researcher in autonomous underwater vehicles back in the beginning of the semester.
Moving on, we talked about how, although our initial idea was to have real-time communication on the prototype, that that hypothesis was simply not feasible enough for now, and asked about the possibility of having pre-recorder messages - more specifically, we asked if it would be enough to improve the current communication methods available. Their response was positive, given its clear advantages over hand signals as a method of communication, and an initial mishearing of what we actually said made them question the medium we would use to send the messages, which then lead to us discussing the possibility of transmitting video messages, given the school’s historic presence in underwater filming. Even though that possibility is off our objective, it still left our minds brewing with ideas.
Having finished our main points of discussion, the school still provided us with additional feedback. The first concern they showed was about the ability of properly sealing the prototype and protecting it from water at deep sea level. Unfortunately, we had to tame their expectations by informing the group that making the device waterproof was not a priority at the moment - we had come to that conclusion previously. Another possible problem was, in their eyes, the transparency (or lack thereof) of the water, which poses a significant obstruction to the passage of light. We are very much aware of this problem and will actively look for ways to bypass it.
Even though we didn’t progress as much as we intended to over the course of this 3rd week of work, the interview managed to make it all worthwhile - it was probably the most important interview we made so far. For us, it simbolizes a bright green light giving us the signal that we are going in the right direction, which is making a prototype that is useful for those who need it. After this meeting, the big conclusions that we came to were: UOWC is a big improvement in underwater communication; pre-recorded messages are perfectly fine; having the device strapped to the divers’ head is very feasible.
This interview was conducted by team members Ricardo Rodrigues, Afonso Frazão, André Salvaterra and Rodrigo Quina.