Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

SHORT FILM ADVERTISING CREATIVE STRATEGY IN POSTMODERN ERA WITHIN SOFTWARE VIDEO EDITING

The evolution of integrated communication has given many opportunities for advertisers to market their products through internet, one of which is to make advertisements prepared in the form of short film advertising. Autodesk® Inc as one of the foremost producers of video editing software in America uses short film advertising entitled “Fix It In Post” as the form of its marketing communication media. The short film advertising “Fix It In Post” uses iconic signs in communicating its products through USP - Unique Selling Proposition creative strategy. The objective of this research is to find signs visualized as a description of the sophistication of software video editing, and to impart brand image to Autodesk® Smoke® as a sophisticated brand software video editing. Based on the result of research a Semiotics of of the Cinema Christian Metz analysis, it was found out that there were signs visualized to describe the sophistication of software video editing namely various features used by the video editor. Each feature of software describing such sophistication is represented in a series of scene forming a sequence, so that it can convey a brand image to the Autodesk® Smoke® as a sophisticated brand software video editing.

unfolding Thailand: Tourism Promoted by 3D Motion Graphics

Unfolding Thailand is a project that aims to bring a new approach in introducing the country as well as promoting the tourism. My specific scope of this project is to create a visual representation of popular destinations from the northern, central, and southern areas through the use of 3D motion graphics. These three of the six regions in Thailand are chosen because they vary in geography, have a very distinctive characteristic and most importantly, they are the most popular vacation destinations for locals and tourists alike

An Actor-Centric Approach to Facial Animation Control by Neural Networks For Non-Player Characters in Video Games

Game developers increasingly consider the degree to which character animation emulates facial expressions found in cinema. Employing animators and actors to produce cinematic facial animation by mixing motion capture and hand-crafted animation is labor intensive and therefore expensive. Emotion corpora and neural network controllers have shown promise toward developing autonomous animation that does not rely on motion capture. Previous research and practice in disciplines of Computer Science, Psychology and the Performing Arts have provided frameworks on which to build a workflow toward creating an emotion AI system that can animate the facial mesh of a 3d non-player character deploying a combination of related theories and methods. However, past investigations and their resulting production methods largely ignore the emotion generation systems that have evolved in the performing arts for more than a century. We find very little research that embraces the intellectual process of trained actors as complex collaborators from which to understand and model the training of a neural network for character animation. This investigation demonstrates a workflow design that integrates knowledge from the performing arts and the affective branches of the social and biological sciences. Our workflow begins at the stage of developing and annotating a fictional scenario with actors, to producing a video emotion corpus, to designing training and validating a neural network, to analyzing the emotion data annotation of the corpus and neural network, and finally to determining resemblant behavior of its autonomous animation control of a 3d character facial mesh. The resulting workflow includes a method for the development of a neural network architecture whose initial efficacy as a facial emotion expression simulator has been tested and validated as substantially resemblant to the character behavior developed by a human actor

Virtual Tour for IT and IS Building

Virtual campus tours enable users to experience the sights and panorama of a university campus without going through the real environment. Virtual tours are simply electronic presentations developed by colleges to promote their institutions. There arethree types of tours, namely Classic Virtual Tour, Virtual Reality Tour and the New Breed of Virtual Tour. There are a few problems that are currently faced by users. Dueto unavailability of virtual tour, user needs to visitthe building in order to know the location of each of the labs available there. This will be time consuming and uses a lot of energy because not everybody is capable of touring the building on their feet. In addition, users might get confused with the building layout and they need a guide which to refer to help them to search for the right room. To overcome the problems, Virtual Tour for IT and IS building was developed in order to enable the students, staffs and the public to view the building as through they are walking through the real world. Thus the main objective of this project is to develop a virtual tour of IT and IS Building that could be used by the campus community to navigate themselves through the buildings. In conclusion, the Virtual Tour for IT and IS Building could assist the user to understand more about the building and to search for particular labs. I

Wearable performance

This is the post-print version of the article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2009 Taylor & FrancisWearable computing devices worn on the body provide the potential for digital interaction in the world. A new stage of computing technology at the beginning of the 21st Century links the personal and the pervasive through mobile wearables. The convergence between the miniaturisation of microchips (nanotechnology), intelligent textile or interfacial materials production, advances in biotechnology and the growth of wireless, ubiquitous computing emphasises not only mobility but integration into clothing or the human body. In artistic contexts one expects such integrated wearable devices to have the two-way function of interface instruments (e.g. sensor data acquisition and exchange) worn for particular purposes, either for communication with the environment or various aesthetic and compositional expressions. 'Wearable performance' briefly surveys the context for wearables in the performance arts and distinguishes display and performative/interfacial garments. It then focuses on the authors' experiments with 'design in motion' and digital performance, examining prototyping at the DAP-Lab which involves transdisciplinary convergences between fashion and dance, interactive system architecture, electronic textiles, wearable technologies and digital animation. The concept of an 'evolving' garment design that is materialised (mobilised) in live performance between partners originates from DAP Lab's work with telepresence and distributed media addressing the 'connective tissues' and 'wearabilities' of projected bodies through a study of shared embodiment and perception/proprioception in the wearer (tactile sensory processing). Such notions of wearability are applied both to the immediate sensory processing on the performer's body and to the processing of the responsive, animate environment. Wearable computing devices worn on the body provide the potential for digital interaction in the world. A new stage of computing technology at the beginning of the 21st Century links the personal and the pervasive through mobile wearables. The convergence between the miniaturisation of microchips (nanotechnology), intelligent textile or interfacial materials production, advances in biotechnology and the growth of wireless, ubiquitous computing emphasises not only mobility but integration into clothing or the human body. In artistic contexts one expects such integrated wearable devices to have the two-way function of interface instruments (e.g. sensor data acquisition and exchange) worn for particular purposes, either for communication with the environment or various aesthetic and compositional expressions. 'Wearable performance' briefly surveys the context for wearables in the performance arts and distinguishes display and performative/interfacial garments. It then focuses on the authors' experiments with 'design in motion' and digital performance, examining prototyping at the DAP-Lab which involves transdisciplinary convergences between fashion and dance, interactive system architecture, electronic textiles, wearable technologies and digital animation. The concept of an 'evolving' garment design that is materialised (mobilised) in live performance between partners originates from DAP Lab's work with telepresence and distributed media addressing the 'connective tissues' and 'wearabilities' of projected bodies through a study of shared embodiment and perception/proprioception in the wearer (tactile sensory processing). Such notions of wearability are applied both to the immediate sensory processing on the performer's body and to the processing of the responsive, animate environment