What aspects of realism and faithfulness are relevant to supporting non-verbal communication through 3D mediums

This thesis investigates what aspects of realism and faithfulness are relevant to supporting non-verbal communication through visual mediums. The mediums examined are 2D video, 3D computer graphics and video based 3D reconstruction. The latter is 3D CGI derived from multiple streams of 2D video. People’s ability to identify behaviour of primates through gross non-verbal communication is compared across 2D video and 3D CGI. Findings suggest 3D CGI performs equally well to 2D video for the identification of gross non-verbal behaviour, however user feedback points to a lack of understanding of intent. Secondly, ability to detect truthfulness in humans across 2D video and video based 3D reconstruction mediums is examined. Effort of doing this is measured by studying changes in level of oxygenation to the prefrontal cortex. Discussion links to the literature to propose that tendency to over trust is inversely proportional to the range of non-verbal resources communicated through a medium. It is suggested that perhaps this is because “tells” are hidden. The third study identifies that video based 3D reconstruction can successfully illustrate subtle facial muscle movements on a par with 2D video, but does identify issues with the display of lower facial detail, due to a reconstruction error called droop. It is hoped that the combination of these strands of research will help users, and application developers, make more informed decisions when selecting which type of virtual character to implement for a particular application therefore contributing to the fields of virtual characters and virtual environments/serious gaming, by giving readers a greater understanding of virtual characters ability to convey non-verbal behaviour

Never Before Seen: Spectacle, Staging, and Story in Wildlife Film's Blue-Chip Renaissance

The topic of this dissertation is wildlife film and its representation of animal behaviour. I identify a blue-chip renaissance of wildlife documentary filmmaking in the early twenty-first century featuring conventional natural history subject matter, stunning visuals, unprecedented costs, an extended rhetoric of authenticity, and an emphasis on novel footage of animal behaviour. The blue-chip renaissance is a fertile site for investigating wildlife films as hybrid objects, as these films inhabit a set of major conceptual tensions between nature and culture; entertainment and education; and authenticity and artifice. In a review of extant literature (Chapter 1) I examine how those conceptual boundaries have been permeable and productive for scholars of wildlife film and related topics in multiple disciplines, motivating this dissertations interdisciplinary approach. I argue in Chapter 2 that the blue-chip renaissances visual spectacle is not an entertaining impediment to education, but rather a route to immersion and affective knowing, drawing from the legacy of natural history display. In Chapter 3, I analyze working filmmakers attitudes about staging practices in wildlife documentaries, a controversial topic that influences their professional identity as storytellers and observers of nature. Chapter 4 offers a taxonomy of the representation within the blue-chip renaissance and its authoritative public demonstration of nature, arguing that these films model and simulate a variety of real and theoretical entities and processes. In Chapter 5, I show that the authenticity of the blue-chip renaissances portrayal of nature is predicated on the extensive use of behind-the-scenes making-of documentaries employing observational realism. I conclude by exploring the challenges of locating any definitive cultural impacts of wildlife films, and offer instead directions for further research into wildlife films as experienced science communication

The cognitive mapping of virtual space

Not availabl

Feral Ecologies: A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Media

This dissertation wonders what non-human animals can illuminate about media in the visible contact zones where they meet. It treats these zones as rich field sites from which to excavate neglected material-discursive-semiotic relationships between animals and media. What these encounters demonstrate is that animals are historically and theoretically implicated in the imagination and materialization of media and their attendant processes of communication. Chapter 1 addresses how animals have been excluded from the cultural production of knowledge as a result of an anthropocentric perspective that renders them invisible or reduces them to ciphers for human meanings. It combines ethology and cinematic realism to craft a reparative, non-anthropocentric way of looking that is able to accommodate the plenitude of animals and their traces, and grant them the ontological heft required to exert productive traction in the visual field. Chapter 2 identifies an octopuss encounter with a digital camera and its chance cinematic inscription as part of a larger phenomenon of accidental animal videos. Because non-humans are the catalysts for their production, these videos offer welcome realist counterpoints to traditional wildlife imagery, and affirm cinemas ability to intercede non-anthropocentrically between humans and the world. Realism is essential to cinematic communication, and that realism is ultimately an achievement of non-human intervention. Chapter 3 investigates how an Internet hoax about a non-human ape playing with an iPad in a zoo led to the development of Apps for Apes, a real life enrichment project that pairs captive orangutans with iPads. It contextualizes and criticizes this projects discursive underpinnings but argues that the contingencies that transpire at the touchscreen interface shift our understanding of communication away from sharing minds and toward respecting immanence and accommodating difference. Finally, Chapter 4 examines a publicity stunt wherein a digital data-carrying homing pigeon races against the Internet to meet a computer. Rather than a competition, this is a continuation of a longstanding collaboration between the carrier pigeon and the infrastructure of modern communications. The carrier pigeon is not external but rather endemic to our understanding of communication as a material process that requires movement and coordination to make connections

Presence 2005: the eighth annual international workshop on presence, 21-23 September, 2005 University College London (Conference proceedings)

OVERVIEW (taken from the CALL FOR PAPERS) Academics and practitioners with an interest in the concept of (tele)presence are invited to submit their work for presentation at PRESENCE 2005 at University College London in London, England, September 21-23, 2005. The eighth in a series of highly successful international workshops, PRESENCE 2005 will provide an open discussion forum to share ideas regarding concepts and theories, measurement techniques, technology, and applications related to presence, the psychological state or subjective perception in which a person fails to accurately and completely acknowledge the role of technology in an experience, including the sense of 'being there' experienced by users of advanced media such as virtual reality. The concept of presence in virtual environments has been around for at least 15 years, and the earlier idea of telepresence at least since Minsky's seminal paper in 1980. Recently there has been a burst of funded research activity in this area for the first time with the European FET Presence Research initiative. What do we really know about presence and its determinants? How can presence be successfully delivered with today's technology? This conference invites papers that are based on empirical results from studies of presence and related issues and/or which contribute to the technology for the delivery of presence. Papers that make substantial advances in theoretical understanding of presence are also welcome. The interest is not solely in virtual environments but in mixed reality environments. Submissions will be reviewed more rigorously than in previous conferences. High quality papers are therefore sought which make substantial contributions to the field. Approximately 20 papers will be selected for two successive special issues for the journal Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments. PRESENCE 2005 takes place in London and is hosted by University College London. The conference is organized by ISPR, the International Society for Presence Research and is supported by the European Commission's FET Presence Research Initiative through the Presencia and IST OMNIPRES projects and by University College London

The benefits of fiction-engagement for empathic abilities : a multidimensional approach

The processes involved in empathy, the ability to appreciate others’ inner experiences and respond appropriately to them, are central to the formation and maintenance of successful interpersonal relationships and communities (e.g., Castano, 2012). These skills typically emerge in childhood but can also be developed in adults (Teding van Berkhout & Malouff, 2016). Engagement with fiction may enhance adults’ empathic skills because readers mentally simulate the social experiences depicted in stories (Oatley, 1999). Several studies have identified positive relationships between exposure to fiction and empathic abilities (Mumper & Gerrig, 2017), whereas causal findings are more mixed (see Dodell-Feder & Tamir, 2018), and this may reflect heterogeneity across both fiction stimuli and empathy measures. The present research took a multidimensional approach to nvestigating the nature of relationships between fiction and empathic abilities. Study 1 examined correlations between self-report empathic abilities and fiction habits. Participants (N = 404) completed a multidimensional task measure of fiction media-exposure and answered questions about fiction-engagement and empathic tendencies. Results revealed divergent associations between narrative modes and empathic abilities, and fiction media-exposure positively predicted the tendencies to become absorbed in narratives and to behave altruistically. Study 2 (N = 308) assessed the relationship between fiction-exposure and performance on a behavioural measure of empathic accuracy (the ability to accurately interpret mental state content) when using mentalising or experience-sharing inferencing processes. Results showed that the two strategies entailed similar levels of error but in opposite directions. Empathic accuracy varied as a function of target and valence and was positively predicted by lifetime fiction-exposure. Study 3 investigated the causal impact of immersion. An initial pilot study, a text pretest, two manipulation pilots, and an experiment (total N = 224), were conducted. Ultimately, immersion levels, measured across three dimensions, were not successfully manipulated. Immersion dimensions correlated with self-report and behavioural empathic ability measures, and an exploratory analysis revealed an effect of reading on empathic accuracy for story characters’ mental states. Collectively, the studies provide support for the hypothesis that fiction-exposure and empathic abilities are associated, but limited evidence of causation. ethodological limitations, other influential variables, and research implications are discussed. The assumption that fiction and empathy are beneficial is critiqued, and future research avenues suggested

Design and semantics of form and movement (DeSForM 2006)

Design and Semantics of Form and Movement (DeSForM) grew from applied research exploring emerging design methods and practices to support new generation product and interface design. The products and interfaces are concerned with: the context of ubiquitous computing and ambient technologies and the need for greater empathy in the pre-programmed behaviour of the ‘machines’ that populate our lives. Such explorative research in the CfDR has been led by Young, supported by Kyffin, Visiting Professor from Philips Design and sponsored by Philips Design over a period of four years (research funding £87k). DeSForM1 was the first of a series of three conferences that enable the presentation and debate of international work within this field: • 1st European conference on Design and Semantics of Form and Movement (DeSForM1), Baltic, Gateshead, 2005, Feijs L., Kyffin S. & Young R.A. eds. • 2nd European conference on Design and Semantics of Form and Movement (DeSForM2), Evoluon, Eindhoven, 2006, Feijs L., Kyffin S. & Young R.A. eds. • 3rd European conference on Design and Semantics of Form and Movement (DeSForM3), New Design School Building, Newcastle, 2007, Feijs L., Kyffin S. & Young R.A. eds. Philips sponsorship of practice-based enquiry led to research by three teams of research students over three years and on-going sponsorship of research through the Northumbria University Design and Innovation Laboratory (nuDIL). Young has been invited on the steering panel of the UK Thinking Digital Conference concerning the latest developments in digital and media technologies. Informed by this research is the work of PhD student Yukie Nakano who examines new technologies in relation to eco-design textiles

Factors influencing reading difficulties of advanced learners of English as a Foreign Language when reading authentic texts

A thesis submitted to the University of Luton in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyThis thesis investigates factors influencing the reading difficulties of advanced learners of English as a foreign language. It proposes a new approach to reading research and pedagogy in which neuroscientific insights on human verbal and non-verbal cognition are incorporated into the theoretical conceptualisation. This thesis explores the neurosdentific literature for the purpose of identifying basic principles governing human perception, emotion and cognition. The mechanisms of learning and memory are also studied. It examines how the verbal systems of the brain interact with the non-verbal systems. Making use of neural perspectives, a critical review of historical and of current reading models is conducted. Attempts are made to provide alternative interpretations for the phenomena recognised in empirical studies based on observations of reading behaviours, on computer-based studies and on the introspective data of experts and of learners. This thesis reports two experiments which were designed to investigate the Ll and L2 reading processes through Think Aloud, Immediate Retrospection, Questionnaires and Interviews. The results indicate that advanced learners, despite their established reading ability in their native languages, often rely heavily on cognitive and studial styles of L2 reading which inhibit fluent and effective reading. Neural accounts are offered which suggest that the ineffective reading styles are due to weakness in the degree of neural developments. This thesis evaluates the reading sections of current and typical coursebooks according to neural-based criteria and concludes that learners are not being given the opportunities to develop the neural networks required in fluent and enjoyable reading. Finally suggestions are made for future reading research and pedagogy