Computer-Assisted Interactive Documentary and Performance Arts in Illimitable Space

This major component of the research described in this thesis is 3D computer graphics, specifically the realistic physics-based softbody simulation and haptic responsive environments. Minor components include advanced human-computer interaction environments, non-linear documentary storytelling, and theatre performance. The journey of this research has been unusual because it requires a researcher with solid knowledge and background in multiple disciplines; who also has to be creative and sensitive in order to combine the possible areas into a new research direction. [...] It focuses on the advanced computer graphics and emerges from experimental cinematic works and theatrical artistic practices. Some development content and installations are completed to prove and evaluate the described concepts and to be convincing. [...] To summarize, the resulting work involves not only artistic creativity, but solving or combining technological hurdles in motion tracking, pattern recognition, force feedback control, etc., with the available documentary footage on film, video, or images, and text via a variety of devices [....] and programming, and installing all the needed interfaces such that it all works in real-time. Thus, the contribution to the knowledge advancement is in solving these interfacing problems and the real-time aspects of the interaction that have uses in film industry, fashion industry, new age interactive theatre, computer games, and web-based technologies and services for entertainment and education. It also includes building up on this experience to integrate Kinect- and haptic-based interaction, artistic scenery rendering, and other forms of control. This research work connects all the research disciplines, seemingly disjoint fields of research, such as computer graphics, documentary film, interactive media, and theatre performance together.Comment: PhD thesis copy; 272 pages, 83 figures, 6 algorithm

Usabilidade na Web e usabilidade na televisão interactiva

Tese de mestrado. Tecnologia Multimédia. 2005. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto, Departamento de Ciências da Comunicação, Artes e Tecnologias da Informação. Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologia

A metaphor for personalized television programming

Abstract. Traditional human-computer interaction settings involve a taskoriented approach where the human interacts with an application to accomplish a particular goal. The emergence of media-rich computer-mediated leisure applications requires a fresh view of the current paradigms and a careful examination of how this change of perspective affects their relevance. This paper proposes a metaphor for accessing personalized television programming and suggests an approach for integrating the metaphor into the design of a television user interface. The proposed metaphor is tested in the design of a personalized advertising service. The results of the empirical research are discussed and the suitability of the metaphor for other television programs is examined. 1. Personalized Television Programming and Metaphors for All Long before consumers could access digital TV applications, researchers predicted a shift in the way television programs were going to be produced, transmitted and consumed. Nicholas Negroponte (1995) said that: ‘TV benefits most from thinking of it in terms of bits. Once in the machine, there is no need to view them in the order they were sent’, implying that some kind of logic —either user choice or from some other source — could be applied on the television content. Then he went on to forecast with accuracy the ability to time-shift broadcast transmissions: ‘All of a sudden television becomes a random access medium, more like a book or newspaper, browsable and changeable, no longer dependent on the time or day, or time required for delivery’. This change of television use patterns requires a new user interface paradigm. The accessibility of a novel information system for a wide group of users can be ensured using a familiar metaphor. ‘Metaphors for All ’ have been studied before in the case of the emerging mobile commerce services (Karvonen 2000). For the purpose of this work, 1 digital television is defined as a device, which features Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) reception, persistent local storage (Hard Disk Drive-HDD) and data processing abilities. This research focuses on the broad