Merry Go Round: a physical, virtual, physical… toy

Publicado em: "ACE 2014 : proceedings of the 11th Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology". ISBN 978-1-4503-2945-3We present a mixed-reality interface, in which a carrousel-like platform carries a set of wooden figures from the physical world into a game running inside a tablet, bringing them back to the physical world again by further rotating the platform. The wooden figurines allow young children to manipulate and play with them, working at the same time as characters of a game. Along the interaction, users are confronted with different problem solving situations that they can solve with the help of the wooden characters.FCT – Portuguese Foundation for the Science and the Technology within the Projects: PTDC/CCI-COM/119030/2010, and PEstOE/EEI/UI0319/2014.FEDER through the Operational Competitiveness Factors Programme - COMPET

Smart Computing and Sensing Technologies for Animal Welfare: A Systematic Review

Animals play a profoundly important and intricate role in our lives today. Dogs have been human companions for thousands of years, but they now work closely with us to assist the disabled, and in combat and search and rescue situations. Farm animals are a critical part of the global food supply chain, and there is increasing consumer interest in organically fed and humanely raised livestock, and how it impacts our health and environmental footprint. Wild animals are threatened with extinction by human induced factors, and shrinking and compromised habitat. This review sets the goal to systematically survey the existing literature in smart computing and sensing technologies for domestic, farm and wild animal welfare. We use the notion of \emph{animal welfare} in broad terms, to review the technologies for assessing whether animals are healthy, free of pain and suffering, and also positively stimulated in their environment. Also the notion of \emph{smart computing and sensing} is used in broad terms, to refer to computing and sensing systems that are not isolated but interconnected with communication networks, and capable of remote data collection, processing, exchange and analysis. We review smart technologies for domestic animals, indoor and outdoor animal farming, as well as animals in the wild and zoos. The findings of this review are expected to motivate future research and contribute to data, information and communication management as well as policy for animal welfare

Affective Videogames and Modes of Affective Gaming: Assist Me, Challenge Me, Emote Me

In this paper we describe the fundamentals of affective gaming from a physiological point of view, covering some of the origins of the genre, how affective videogames operate and current conceptual and technological capabilities. We ground this overview of the ongoing research by taking an in-depth look at one of our own early biofeedback-based affective games. Based on our analysis of existing videogames and our own experience with affective videogames, we propose a new approach to game design based on several high-level design heuristics: assist me, challenge me and emote me (ACE), a series of gameplay "tweaks" made possible through affective videogames

Exploiting P2P in the Creation of Game Worlds

Peer-to-peer networks are a promising platform for supporting entirely decentralized, distributed multi-user gaming; however, multi-player games typically require highly predictable performance from the underlying network. This is at odds with the inherently unreliable nature of peer-to-peer environments. Existing approaches to providing peer-to-peer support for multi-player gaming focus on compensating for the unpredictability of the underlying network. We propose that rather than trying to compensate for these factors, they can be exploited together with information about the peer-to-peer network in order to address the problem of maintaining a novel gaming experience in the absence of a central authority. In order to explore our proposition, we model the measurable properties of P2P networks within a distributed multi-player game – NetWorld. We do this in such a way that the heterogeneous and unpredictable nature of the peer-to-peer environment becomes a positive part of the player’s experience

Chaotic worlds: an analysis of World of Warcraft

Virtual worlds provide new forms of collaboration and social interaction. The World of Warcraft (WoW) is one such virtual world. It is the most popular example of what is called a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG). In this paper, we analyze players’ outcomes with WoW using chaos theory. Our paper suggests that players are highly sensitive to initial conditions which are impacted by style of play and the social structure of groups

BrainBasher: a BCI Game

Brain-computer interaction (BCI) is starting to focus on healthy subjects. This research adresses the effects of using this novel input modality to control a simple game, and also looks into the beneficial effects of bringing game elements into BCI experiments. A simple BCI game has been developed and evaluated with fifteen subjects using the Game Experience Questionnaire (GEQ) developed at the Eindhoven Game Experience Lab. Three variations of the game were evaluated for comparison: the original game with BCI input, one with keyboard input, and one with a more clinical look leaving out all extraneous information. The keyboard-controlled game was considered easy and boring, whereas using BCI for input resulted in a more challenging, immersive and richer experience. The design and additional information presented by the game also resulted in higher immersion compared to the clinical design

Sketch-based virtual human modelling and animation

Animated virtual humans created by skilled artists play a remarkable role in today’s public entertainment. However, ordinary users are still treated as audiences due to the lack of appropriate expertise, equipment, and computer skills. We developed a new method and a novel sketching interface, which enable anyone who can draw to “sketch-out” 3D virtual humans and animation. We devised a “Stick FigureFleshing-outSkin Mapping” graphical pipeline, which decomposes the complexity of figure drawing and considerably boosts the modelling and animation efficiency. We developed a gesture-based method for 3D pose reconstruction from 2D stick figure drawings. We investigated a “Creative Model-based Method”, which performs a human perception process to transfer users’ 2D freehand sketches into 3D human bodies of various body sizes, shapes and fat distributions. Our current system supports character animation in various forms including articulated figure animation, 3D mesh model animation, and 2D contour/NPR animation with personalised drawing styles. Moreover, this interface also supports sketch-based crowd animation and 2D storyboarding of 3D multiple character interactions. A preliminary user study was conducted to support the overall system design. Our system has been formally tested by various users on Tablet PC. After minimal training, even a beginner can create vivid virtual humans and animate them within minutes

Developing a depth-based tracking systems for interactive playful environments with animals

© ACM 2015. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in ACM. Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (p. 59). http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2832932.2837007.[EN] Digital games for animals within Animal Computer Interaction are usually single-device oriented, however richer interactions could be delivered by considering multimodal environments and expanding the number of technological elements involved. In these playful ecosystems, animals could be either alone or accompanied by human beings, but in both cases the system should react properly to the interactions of all the players, creating more engaging and natural games. Technologically-mediated playful scenarios for animals will therefore require contextual information about the game participants, such as their location or body posture, in order to suitably adapt the system reactions. This paper presents a depth-based tracking system for cats capable of detecting their location, body posture and field of view. The proposed system could also be extended to locate and detect human gestures and track small robots, becoming a promising component in the creation of intelligent interspecies playful environments.Work supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and funded by the EDRF-FEDER (TIN2014-60077-R). The work of Patricia Pons has been supported by a national grant from the Spanish MECD (FPU13/03831). Alejandro Catalá also received support from a VALi+d fellowship from the GVA (APOSTD/2013/013). 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