Web-based visualisation of head pose and facial expressions changes: monitoring human activity using depth data

Despite significant recent advances in the field of head pose estimation and facial expression recognition, raising the cognitive level when analysing human activity presents serious challenges to current concepts. Motivated by the need of generating comprehensible visual representations from different sets of data, we introduce a system capable of monitoring human activity through head pose and facial expression changes, utilising an affordable 3D sensing technology (Microsoft Kinect sensor). An approach build on discriminative random regression forests was selected in order to rapidly and accurately estimate head pose changes in unconstrained environment. In order to complete the secondary process of recognising four universal dominant facial expressions (happiness, anger, sadness and surprise), emotion recognition via facial expressions (ERFE) was adopted. After that, a lightweight data exchange format (JavaScript Object Notation-JSON) is employed, in order to manipulate the data extracted from the two aforementioned settings. Such mechanism can yield a platform for objective and effortless assessment of human activity within the context of serious gaming and human-computer interaction.Comment: 8th Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, (CEEC 2016), University of Essex, UK, 6 page

Towards a Lightweight Approach for Modding Serious Educational Games: Assisting Novice Designers

Serious educational games (SEGs) are a growing segment of the education community’s pedagogical toolbox. Effectively creating such games remains challenging, as teachers and industry trainers are content experts; typically they are not game designers with the theoretical knowledge and practical experience needed to create a quality SEG. Here, a lightweight approach to interactively explore and modify existing SEGs is introduced, a toll that can be broadly adopted by educators for pedagogically sound SEGs. Novice game designers can rapidly explore the educational and traditional elements of a game, with a stress on tracking the SEG learning objectives, as well as allowing for reviewing and altering a variety of graphic and audio game elements

A novel WebVR-Based lightweight framework for virtual visualization of blood vasculum

With the arrival of the Web 2.0 era and the rapid development of virtual reality (VR) technology in recent years, WebVR technology has emerged as the combination of Web 2.0 and VR. Moreover, the concept of “WebVR + medical science”is also proposed to advance medical applications. However, due to the limited storage space and low computing capability of Web browsers, it is difficult to achieve real-time rendering of large-scale medical vascular models on the Web, let alone large-scale vascular animation simulations. The framework proposed in this paper can achieve virtual display of the medical blood vasculum, including lightweight processing of the vasculum and virtual realization of blood flow. This innovative framework presents a simulation algorithm for the virtual blood path based on the Catmull-Rom spline. The mechanisms of progressive compression and online recovery of the lightweight vascular structure are further proposed. The experimental results show that our framework has a shorter browser-side response time than existing methods and achieves efficient real-time simulation

Overcoming engineering challenges of providing an effective user interface to a large scale distributed synthetic environment on the US teragrid: a systems engineering success story

Over recent years’ large-scale distributed synthetic environment enterprises have been evolving in a diverse range of scientific and engineering fields. These computer modelling and simulation systems are increasing in scale and dimension in order to allow scientists and engineers to explore the attributes and emergent properties of a given system design. Within the field of computational science, the grid facilitates very large-scale collaborative simulation enterprises. The grid is similar to distributed interactive simulation/high level architecture (DIS/HLA) in that it supports interconnectivity but differs in the sense that it supports intercommunication of large super computing resources. An important factor in the rapid adoption of the grid has been its role in enabling access to significant supercomputing resources not usually available at a single institution. However, the major challenge for the grid has been the lack of an effective and ubiquitous interface to the huge computational resource (which can comprise over 6000 CPUs distributed across the globe) at any time and from any location. This paper describes a unique user interface built on systems engineering principles and practices to solve the problem of delivering real-time interaction (from lightweight computing devices such as personal digital assistants, commonly known as tablet devices, to high end computing platforms) with simulations delivering high resolution 3D images. The application of our work has far reaching benefits for many sectors including: aerospace, medical informatics, engineering design, distributed simulation, and modelling