History Assisted View Authoring for 3D Models

3D modelers often wish to showcase their models for sharing or review purposes. This may consist of generating static viewpoints of the model or authoring animated flythroughs. Manually creating such views is often tedious and few automatic methods are designed to interactively assist the modelers with the view authoring process. We present a view authoring assistance system that supports the creation of informative view points, view paths, and view surfaces, allowing modelers to author the interactive navigation experience of a model. The key concept of our implementation is to analyze the model’s workflow history, to infer important regions of the model and representative viewpoints of those areas. An evaluation indicated that the viewpoints generated by our algorithm are comparable to those manually selected by the modeler. In addition, participants of a user study found our system easy to use and effective for authoring viewpoint summaries. Author Keywords 3D model; editing history; viewpoint authorin

HyperBody: An Experimental VR Game Exploring the Cosmotechnics of Game Fandom through a Posthumanist Lens

Interdependencies among ACGN (Anime, Comics, Games, and Novels) communities in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan are growing. However, game studies and fan studies remain distinct disciplines. This cross-disciplinary thesis bridges this gap by investigating "game-fandom" practices in VR production, defined as the fusion of game and fan studies within the ACGN context. Drawing from Yuk Hui's "cosmotechnics" and Karen Barad's posthumanist perspective, this research reconsiders the relationship between cosmology, morality, and technology (Hui 2017). It employs "intra-action" to emphasise the indivisible, dynamic relations among specified objects (Barad 2007). Cultural practices in C-pop idol groups, Chinese BL (Boys' Love) novels, science fiction, and modding communities are analysed, illuminating the ACGN fandom's cultural, technological, and affective dimensions. This work features the creation, description, and evaluation of an experimental VR game, "HyperBody", which integrates the written thesis by reflecting game-fandom's cosmotechnics and intra-actions. The thesis offers two significant contributions: "queer tuning", a theory illuminating new cultural, technological, and affective turns within fandom and computational art, and a "diffractive" approach, forming a methodological framework for posthuman performative contexts. This diffractive framework enables practical contributions such as creating and describing experimental VR productions using the sound engine. It also highlights a thorough evaluation approach reconciling quantitative and qualitative methods in VR production analysis, investigating affective experiences, and exploring how users engage creatively with queer VR gamespaces. These contributions foster interdisciplinary collaboration among VR, game design, architecture, and fandom studies, underscoring the inextricable link among ethics, ontology, and epistemology, culminating in a proposed ethico-onto-epistem-ological framework

The architectural nature of the illustrated books of Iliazd : (Ilia Zdanevich, 1894-1975)

Cette thèse propose l’application de la conception de la promenade architecturale à une sélection de quatre livres qui ont été conçus et produits par Iliazd (Ilia Zdanevitch, 1894-1975, né à Tiflis, en la Géorgie). Les quatre livres sont Pismo (1948), Poésie de mots inconnus (1949), Chevaux de minuit (1956), et Le Courtisan grotesque (1974). Toutes les éditions d’Iliazd avaient des structures soigneusement conçues et aussi des intégrations de textes imprimés et d’éléments gravés, au contraire des designs génériques de ses contemporains, mais chacun de ces quatre livres présentent aussi des variations successives de pliages atypiques. Les structures expérimentales de ces livres demandent considération comme des constructions architecturales, qui a été reconnue par les spécialistes. Les architectoniques complexes des livres exigent un vocabulaire critique du genre suggéré par la promenade architecturale de Le Corbusier, qui a été proposée comme la base pour les structures de ses bâtiments. En effet, la promenade architecturale affirme une chaîne d’événements qui dirige l’explorateur de ses édifices aux pointes de perspective successives, lesquelles présentent des vues internes et externes pendant l’ascension de l’entrée jusqu’au toit. Flora Samuel a écrit une monographie (The Elements of Le Corbusier’s Architectural Promenade, 2010), dans laquelle elle propose cinq étapes pour la promenade. Des modifications de ses étapes sont utilisées par cette étude, altérées pour la transition d’un bâtiment à un livre. Ces étapes, dont certaines sont descriptives et certaines analytiques, tant qu’elles soient présentées comme l’expérience probable d’un spectateur général, sont basées sur ma connaissance personnelle de tous les détails des structures de ces livres. Ces structures complexes, même fascinantes, ne sont pas le but, mais plutôt le soutien habilitant d’une expérience esthétique individuelle. Cette étude affirme que la promenade architecturale illumine l’expérience de la conception unique d’Iliazd du livre illustré, permettant une appréciation sans précédent de leur complexité.This dissertation proposes the application of Le Corbusier’s conception of the architectural promenade to a selection of four distinctive illustrated books conceived and produced by Iliazd (Ilia Zdanevich, 1894-1975, born Tiflis, Georgia). The four books examined in this study are Pismo (1948), Poésie de mots inconnus (1949), Chevaux de minuit (1956), and Le Courtisan grotesque (1974). While all of Iliazd’s editions featured carefully conceived structures and integrations of typeset texts and engraved elements, as opposed to the largely generic designs of his contemporaries, each of these four books in particular presents successive variations of atypical page foldings. The experimental structures of these books allow for their justifiable designation as architectural constructions, as scholars have previously recognized. The complex architectonics of the books demands a critical vocabulary of the kind Le Corbusier’s architectural promenade, which has been broadly proposed as the basis for the structures of his buildings, provides. The architectural promenade in effect asserts a chain of elements which guide the explorer of Le Corbusier’s buildings to successive perspective points, which present views of internal and external spaces during an ascent from entry level to rooftop. Flora Samuel wrote a monograph (The Elements of Le Corbusier’s Architectural Promenade, 2010) in which she proposed five stages for the promenade. Modifications of her stages are used for the present study, altered for the transition from building to book. These stages, some of which are descriptive and some analytical, while presented as the likely experience of a general viewer, are based on my individual understanding of all the details of the structures of these books. The complex structures, while fascinating, are not an end in themselves, but rather the enabling support of an individual aesthetic experience. This study asserts that the architectural promenade illuminates the experience of Iliazd’s unique conception of the illustrated book, enabling a hitherto unparalleled appreciation of their complexity

Asynchronous Visualization of Spatiotemporal Information for Multiple Moving Targets

In the modern information age, the quantity and complexity of spatiotemporal data is increasing both rapidly and continuously. Sensor systems with multiple feeds that gather multidimensional spatiotemporal data will result in information clusters and overload, as well as a high cognitive load for users of these systems. To meet future safety-critical situations and enhance time-critical decision-making missions in dynamic environments, and to support the easy and effective managing, browsing, and searching of spatiotemporal data in a dynamic environment, we propose an asynchronous, scalable, and comprehensive spatiotemporal data organization, display, and interaction method that allows operators to navigate through spatiotemporal information rather than through the environments being examined, and to maintain all necessary global and local situation awareness. To empirically prove the viability of our approach, we developed the Event-Lens system, which generates asynchronous prioritized images to provide the operator with a manageable, comprehensive view of the information that is collected by multiple sensors. The user study and interaction mode experiments were designed and conducted. The Event-Lens system was discovered to have a consistent advantage in multiple moving-target marking-task performance measures. It was also found that participants’ attentional control, spatial ability, and action video gaming experience affected their overall performance

Female leaders' experiences during COVID-19: Mothering and leading in times of peril

This research began with my tearful reflections as an exasperated mother unsure how to mother and lead in the volatility and fear of a global health crisis. Overwhelmed with the uncertainty of constantly shifting leadership demands, designing new learning systems, and the burden of caring for students and teachers, I spent countless hours planning, collaborating, communicating, acting, and reacting. As intensive leadership consumed my days, I neglected all but the most basic care of my own young children. I toiled in isolation 15 feet away from them, yet unreachable, sequestered behind my home office door. My two daughters were left to fend for themselves in a lonely house, and they suffered. The early abuse and neglect from their biological parents changed their developing brains, so now felt safety is a constant negotiation. Consumed by the fear of failing at work, and failing the teachers, staff, and children for whom I felt responsible, I was completely unaware that I had failed my children during those intense months. I felt forced to choose my job over my girls, a “no choice choice” (Borda, 2021).As I wrestled with both roles, I wondered how other mother/leaders were managing the cataclysmic changes to their mothering and leading roles. I invited 16 other mother/leaders to share their pandemic accounts, and as their stories encountered mine, our collective navigations coalesced to reveal themes about the cultures of mothering and leading that permeated our lives. Using narratives, images, photographs, collages, written, aural, and sensory data, this study interrogated the social norms of intensive mothering (Hays, 1996) and intensive leadership (Baker, 2016) that mother/leaders encountered, reframed, and resisted during the precarity of COVID-19 (Dolman, 2018). This study created a space where the norms that constrain mother/leaders during crises can be assessed critically with the hopes that they can be dislodged and replaced with more matricentric sensitive policies and practices

The Public School Washroom as Heterotopia: Gendered Spatiality and Subjectification

This dissertation investigates how secondary school students understand their own gendered subjectivity and the discursive and material processes that contribute to it through visual artifacts (photovoice projects) the students created of school washroom spaces. Drawing primarily on Foucault’s analytics of disciplinary space and the heterotopia (Foucault & Miskowiec, 1986), I view the washroom space as producing and perpetuating gendered power relations that invert, suspect, or neutralize those existing in exterior spaces. Deploying both a Foucauldian and Butlerian analytics, these visual student responses are framed as confessional, queering or (de)subjugating (Stryker, 2006) and cartographic products, and hence, understood in terms of the insights they provide into the complex practices of self-constitution and gender subjectivities. Furthermore, through Britzman’s (1998) queer reading practice and critical readings of voice, the analysis of these queer and cartographic products hopes to offer further insight into how these washroom spaces as sex-segregated and unsupervised are lived and understood by students as highly regulated and inciting self-policing strategies upon all gendered bodies. Through Foucault’s other frameworks of power/knowledge and technologies of self and power, combined with Butler’s work on gender performativity, the abject and gender as bodily matters, I am concerned with how gendered subjects not only are produced in schools, but also how they are capable of resistances to gendered norms through practices of the self, in the interest of pursuing democratic gendered relations that have implications for burgeoning transgender accommodation policies and more nuanced anti-gender violence policies in school boards and Ministries of Education

Archival Body/Archival Space: Queer Remains of the Chicano Art Movement, Los Angeles, 1969-2009

This dissertation proposes an interdisciplinary queer archive methodology I term "archival body/archival space," which recovers, interprets, and assesses the alternative archives and preservation practices of homosexual men in the Chicano Art Movement, the cultural arm of the Mexican American civil rights struggle in the U.S. Without access to systemic modes of preservation, these men generated other archival practices to resist their erasure, omission, and obscurity. The study conducts a series of archive excavations mining "archival bodies" of homosexual artists from buried and unseen "archival spaces," such as: domestic interiors, home furnishings, barrio neighborhoods, and museum installations. This allows us to reconstruct the artist archive and, thus, challenge how we see, know, and comprehend "Chicano art" as an aesthetic and cultural category. As such, I evidence the critical role of sexual difference within this visual vocabulary and illuminate networks of homosexual Chicano artists taking place in gay bars, alternative art spaces, salons, and barrios throughout East Los Angeles. My queer archive study model consists of five interpretative strategies: sexual agency of Chicano art, queer archival afterlife, containers of desire, archival chiaroscuro, and archive elicitation. I posit that by speaking through these artifact formations, the "archival body" performs the allegorical bones and flesh of the artist, an artifactual surrogacy articulated through things. My methodological innovation has direct bearing on how sexual difference shapes the material record and the places from which these "queer remains" are kept, sheltered, and displayed. These heritage purveyors questioned what constitutes an archive and a record, challenging the biased assumption that sexuality was insignificant to the Chicano Art Movement and leaving no material trace. The structure of my dissertation presents five archive recovery projects, including: Robert "Cyclona" Legorreta, Joey Terrill, Mundo Meza, Teddy Sandoval, and VIVA: Lesbian and Gay Latino Artists of Los Angeles. The restoration of these artists also reveals the profound symbiosis between this circle of artists, Chicano avant-gardism, and the burgeoning gay and lesbian liberation movement in Los Angeles. My findings rupture the persistent heterosexual vision of this period and reveals a parallel visual lineage, one which dared to picture sexual difference in the epicenter of Chicano art production

Perceptually relevant browsing environments for large texture databases

This thesis describes the development of a large database of texture stimuli, the production of a similarity matrix re ecting human judgements of similarity about the database, and the development of three browsing models that exploit structure in the perceptual information for navigation. Rigorous psychophysical comparison experiments are carried out and the SOM (Self Organising Map) found to be the fastest of the three browsing models under examination. We investigate scalable methods of augmenting a similarity matrix using the SOM browsing environment to introduce previously unknown textures. Further psychophysical experiments reveal our method produces a data organisation that is as fast to navigate as that derived from the perceptual grouping experiments.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC

Reconstruction 3D de la forme d'aiguilles chirurgicales en utilisant la réflectométrie fréquentielle dans des fibres optiques

L’objectif principal de ce projet de recherche est d’effectuer de la reconstruction de forme d’aiguilles chirurgicales en insérant des fibres optiques à l’intérieur. En mesurant les contraintes le long des fibres optiques, on peut facilement obtenir la courbure des fibres. Trois fibres sont donc utilisées, collées dans une géométrie triangulaire de manière à ce que la différence entre leur courbure fournisse l’information nécessaire, avec une résolution plus élevée, pour orienter cette courbure dans un espace tridimensionnel. Puisque la méthode utilisée se base uniquement sur l’utilisation de fibres optiques, on peut extrapoler les possibles applications à des cathéters, des côlonoscopes, ou n’importe quels instruments chirurgicaux minimalement invasifs dont la position dans le corps est importante à connaitre pour maximiser les chances de succès de l’intervention chirurgicale ou éviter des perforations à l’intérieur du corps. Jusqu’à présent, l’approche la plus répandue pour ce genre d’applications est l’utilisation de réseaux de Bragg (« fibre Bragg grating » : FBG) pour mesurer la tension dans la fibre. La meilleure précision recensée dans la littérature avec cette approche est d’environ 0.28mm, qui correspond à l’erreur moyenne de la position du bout de l’aiguille. Pour obtenir cette précision, deux senseurs sont utilisés et chaque senseur comporte trois réseaux de Bragg, soit un dans chacune des trois fibres utilisées (donc un total de six FBGs). Plusieurs études ont été effectuées sur des dispositifs semblables, comportant plus ou moins de FBGs séparés de distances différentes. La plupart de ces études recensent des précisions sur la reconstruction de forme de l’ordre de quelques millimètres. Cela étant dit, cette approche pour mesurer la tension dans les fibres est discrète ; l’information sur la tension est donc obtenue uniquement aux endroits où les réseaux de Bragg sont inscrits et des approximations sont nécessaires pour reconstruire la forme complète de l’aiguille. Ce projet de recherche suggère donc l’utilisation d’une approche sensorielle peu étudiée jusqu’à présent pour ce type d’applications. Cette approche, contrairement aux FBGs, est pleinement distribuée. Notre hypothèse de départ est donc qu’en effectuant des mesures de contraintes de manières distribuées, une meilleure précision peut être obtenue sur la reconstruction de la forme d’instruments chirurgicaux minimalement invasifs puisqu’elle n’implique plus l’utilisation d’approximations.----------Abstract The main objective of the research project is to track the shape of minimally invasive surgical tools (mainly needles) by inserting optical fibers into them. By measuring the strain along the fibers, we can easily relate it to the curvature of the fibers. Using three fibers glued together in a triangular geometry, the difference in the measured curvature of each fiber allows one to orientate the curvature in a 3D frame. Since the approach for shape tracking is strictly based on the insertion of optical fibers inside the restricted space available in minimally invasive surgical tools, it can be used with many types of surgical tools such as catheter needles, colonoscopes, or any other remotely controlled instrument. The knowledge of the position of the device inside the human body is of paramount importance to maximise the success of the intervention. Up to now, the most studied approach for shape tracking using optical fibers is based on fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs), which are useful devices to measure the strain in fibers. To the best of our knowledge, the best precision reached in the literature based on FBGs is ~0.28mm, corresponding to the accuracy in the predicted needle tip position. To reach this precision, two sensors were used, each one containing a set of three fibres with 3 FBGs (one in each fiber) for a total of 6 FBGs. More studies have been made using similar devices, with more or less number of FBG sensors separated by different distances. Most of these studies achieve an accuracy in the order of few millimeters. However, this approach to measure strain along the fibers is completely discrete since the strain is only known at the positions where the FBGs are located. Approximations are thus necessary to extrapolate the strains to recover the whole shape of the needle. This project suggests a truly distributed approach, different to the discrete FBGs technique, which has received little attention up to now for this type of applications. Our first hypothesis is that the precision of the shape tracking can be enhanced by using truly distributed strain sensing (instead of discrete sensing) since approximations are not needed to obtain the shape of the entire needle. This approach is based on optical frequency domain reflectometry (OFDR), which is an interferometric method frequently used to measure the attenuation along fibers. Indeed, OFDR is based on Rayleigh scattering, which is caused by a random distribution of refractive index on a microscopic scale in the fiber core