Facial aesthetics: babies prefer attractiveness to symmetry

The visual preferences of human infants for faces that varied in their attractiveness and in their symmetry about the midline were explored. The aim was to establish whether infants' visual preference for attractive faces may be mediated by the vertical symmetry of the face. Chimeric faces, made from photographs of attractive and unattractive female faces, were produced by computer graphics. Babies looked longer at normal and at chimeric attractive faces than at normal and at chimeric unattractive faces. There were no developmental differences between the younger and older infants: all preferred to look at the attractive faces. Infants as young as 4 months showed similarity with adults in the 'aesthetic perception' of attractiveness and this preference was not based on the vertical symmetry of the face

Integrating computer generated animation and videography

This thesis developed as a personal exploration in the compositing effects of computer generated imagery, traditional cel animation, and videography. Through trial, great error, and much modification, this collaboration evolved. As a product of transition and progression, it can be said, it echoes the absolute design process. In order to create a visually aesthetic ensemble while incorporating several techniques, each exploration was to support the whole in its depiction. Personal aesthetics and technical limitations determined the inclusion or abstraction of any particular approach, and to what degree, if any, that it would be used, modified or manipulated. Finally, these decisions were based upon the desire to support, strengthen, or emphasize the prerecorded performance

TAE Plus: Transportable Applications Environment Plus tools for building graphic-oriented applications

The Transportable Applications Environment Plus (TAE Plus), developed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, is a portable User Interface Management System (UIMS), which provides an intuitive WYSIWYG WorkBench for prototyping and designing an application's user interface, integrated with tools for efficiently implementing the designed user interface and effective management of the user interface during an application's active domain. During the development of TAE Plus, many design and implementation decisions were based on the state-of-the-art within graphics workstations, windowing system and object-oriented programming languages. Some of the problems and issues experienced during implementation are discussed. A description of the next development steps planned for TAE Plus is also given

Genera Esfera: Interacting with a trackball mapped onto a sphere to explore generative visual worlds

Genera Esfera is an interactive installation that allows the audience to interact and easily become a VJ (visual DJ) in a world of generative visuals. It is an animated and generative graphic environment with a music playlist, a visual spherical world related with and suggested by the music, which reacts and evolves. The installation has been presented at MIRA Live Visual Arts Festival 2015, in Barcelona. Genera Esfera was envisioned, developed and programmed on the basis of two initial ideas: first, to generate our spherical planets we need to work with spherical geometry and program 3D graphics; second, the interaction should be easy to understand, proposing a direct mapping between the visuals and the interface. Our main goal is that participants can focus on exploring the graphic worlds rather than concentrate on understanding the interface. For that purpose we use a trackball to map its position onto sphere rotations. In this paper, we present the interactive installation Genera Esfera, the design guidelines, the mathematics behind the generative visuals and its results.Postprint (published version

Transportable Applications Environment (TAE) Plus: A NASA tool used to develop and manage graphical user interfaces

The Transportable Applications Environment (TAE) Plus was built to support the construction of graphical user interfaces (GUI's) for highly interactive applications, such as real-time processing systems and scientific analysis systems. It is a general purpose portable tool that includes a 'What You See Is What You Get' WorkBench that allows user interface designers to layout and manipulate windows and interaction objects. The WorkBench includes both user entry objects (e.g., radio buttons, menus) and data-driven objects (e.g., dials, gages, stripcharts), which dynamically change based on values of realtime data. Discussed here is what TAE Plus provides, how the implementation has utilized state-of-the-art technologies within graphic workstations, and how it has been used both within and without NASA

Affective graphs: the visual appeal of linked data

The essence and value of Linked Data lies in the ability of humans and machines to query, access and reason upon highly structured and formalised data. Ontology structures provide an unambiguous description of the structure and content of data. While a multitude of software applications and visualization systems have been developed over the past years for Linked Data, there is still a significant gap that exists between applications that consume Linked Data and interfaces that have been designed with significant focus on aesthetics. Though the importance of aesthetics in affecting the usability, effectiveness and acceptability of user interfaces have long been recognised, little or no explicit attention has been paid to the aesthetics of Linked Data applications. In this paper, we introduce a formalised approach to developing aesthetically pleasing semantic web interfaces by following aesthetic principles and guidelines identified from literature. We apply such principles to design and develop a generic approach of using visualizations to support exploration of Linked Data, in an interface that is pleasing to users. This provides users with means to browse ontology structures, enriched with statistics of the underlying data, facilitating exploratory activities and enabling visual query for highly precise information needs. We evaluated our approach in three ways: an initial objective evaluation comparing our approach with other well-known interfaces for the semantic web and two user evaluations with semantic web researchers

Transportable Applications Environment (TAE) Plus: A NASA user interface development and management system

The transportable Applications Environment Plus (TAE Plus), developed at the NASA Goddard Space FLight Center, is a portable, What you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) user interface development and management system. Its primary objective is to provide an integrated software environment that allows interactive prototyping and development of graphical user interfaces, as well as management of the user interface within the operational domain. TAE Plus is being applied to many types of applications, and what TAE Plus provides, how the implementation has utilizes state-of-the-art technologies within graphic workstations, and how it has been used both within and without NASA are discussed