Knowledge Discovery in Virtual Worlds Usage Data: approaching Web Mining concepts to 3D Virtual Environments

[EN] This paper examines the relationships between Web and Virtual Worlds, and how these relationships can be used to approach concepts of knowledge discovery from Web Mining to 3D environments, such as Virtual Worlds. Also it will explain how to track information of usage data for knowledge discovery and what goals can be planned for this process. Every theoretical concept will be shown with examples, including the usage options to collect, data input to the entire process, relevant information extraction from raw data, techniques to discover knowledge and several considerations to decide and represent what knowledge is useful for the user. Based on these concepts a framework is presented in which, by comparison and approach to Web Usage Mining, may be defined an entire process of Knowledge Discovery and Data Analysis

Virtual worlds in Australian and New Zealand higher education: remembering the past, understanding the present and imagining the future

3D virtual reality, including the current generation of multi-user virtual worlds, has had a long history of use in education and training, and it experienced a surge of renewed interest with the advent of Second Life in 2003. What followed shortly after were several years marked by considerable hype around the use of virtual worlds for teaching, learning and research in higher education. For the moment, uptake of the technology seems to have plateaued, with academics either maintaining the status quo and continuing to use virtual worlds as they have previously done or choosing to opt out altogether. This paper presents a brief review of the use of virtual worlds in the Australian and New Zealand higher education sector in the past and reports on its use in the sector at the present time, based on input from members of the Australian and New Zealand Virtual Worlds Working Group. It then adopts a forward-looking perspective amid the current climate of uncertainty, musing on future directions and offering suggestions for potential new applications in light of recent technological developments and innovations in the area

SISTEM AUGMENTED REALITY UNTUK ANIMASI GAMES MENGGUNANAKAN CAMERA PADA PC

Augmented reality become very popular now days because in addition to exciting, can also be displayed in realtime, A game of real-time using the marker to display an animation games in 3D, Augmented Reality is a technology that puts a virtual image of computer graphics in the real world , or in other words, the merger between the real world with virtual worlds, and is one example of the application field of art and technology that pretty much enjoy doing today. Therefore, this final project in Augmented Reality systems to create animated games using the camera as a medium for reading the input symbol of the animated 3D games. The identification marker is used to identify the Symbols that will translate the goals and objectives. In this final project will be made a software that can identify markers through the image captured by a camera that will be displayed in the form of animated 3D games. The process was conducted on the reading of marker symbols using the camera and then do the pre processing stage of the process of segmentation for comparison with the marker symbol that has become a symbol of the previous reference. When the marker is a symbol image that has similarities with the reference data, then the results of image recognition that is what will be used to display animated 3D Games. Keywords: Real time, Marker, Animation games

Value Iteration Networks on Multiple Levels of Abstraction

Learning-based methods are promising to plan robot motion without performing extensive search, which is needed by many non-learning approaches. Recently, Value Iteration Networks (VINs) received much interest since---in contrast to standard CNN-based architectures---they learn goal-directed behaviors which generalize well to unseen domains. However, VINs are restricted to small and low-dimensional domains, limiting their applicability to real-world planning problems. To address this issue, we propose to extend VINs to representations with multiple levels of abstraction. While the vicinity of the robot is represented in sufficient detail, the representation gets spatially coarser with increasing distance from the robot. The information loss caused by the decreasing resolution is compensated by increasing the number of features representing a cell. We show that our approach is capable of solving significantly larger 2D grid world planning tasks than the original VIN implementation. In contrast to a multiresolution coarse-to-fine VIN implementation which does not employ additional descriptive features, our approach is capable of solving challenging environments, which demonstrates that the proposed method learns to encode useful information in the additional features. As an application for solving real-world planning tasks, we successfully employ our method to plan omnidirectional driving for a search-and-rescue robot in cluttered terrain

The design-by-adaptation approach to universal access: learning from videogame technology

This paper proposes an alternative approach to the design of universally accessible interfaces to that provided by formal design frameworks applied ab initio to the development of new software. This approach, design-byadaptation, involves the transfer of interface technology and/or design principles from one application domain to another, in situations where the recipient domain is similar to the host domain in terms of modelled systems, tasks and users. Using the example of interaction in 3D virtual environments, the paper explores how principles underlying the design of videogame interfaces may be applied to a broad family of visualization and analysis software which handles geographical data (virtual geographic environments, or VGEs). One of the motivations behind the current study is that VGE technology lags some way behind videogame technology in the modelling of 3D environments, and has a less-developed track record in providing the variety of interaction methods needed to undertake varied tasks in 3D virtual worlds by users with varied levels of experience. The current analysis extracted a set of interaction principles from videogames which were used to devise a set of 3D task interfaces that have been implemented in a prototype VGE for formal evaluation