Enabling Self-aware Smart Buildings by Augmented Reality

Conventional HVAC control systems are usually incognizant of the physical structures and materials of buildings. These systems merely follow pre-set HVAC control logic based on abstract building thermal response models, which are rough approximations to true physical models, ignoring dynamic spatial variations in built environments. To enable more accurate and responsive HVAC control, this paper introduces the notion of "self-aware" smart buildings, such that buildings are able to explicitly construct physical models of themselves (e.g., incorporating building structures and materials, and thermal flow dynamics). The question is how to enable self-aware buildings that automatically acquire dynamic knowledge of themselves. This paper presents a novel approach using "augmented reality". The extensive user-environment interactions in augmented reality not only can provide intuitive user interfaces for building systems, but also can capture the physical structures and possibly materials of buildings accurately to enable real-time building simulation and control. This paper presents a building system prototype incorporating augmented reality, and discusses its applications.Comment: This paper appears in ACM International Conference on Future Energy Systems (e-Energy), 201

Virtual Borders: Accurate Definition of a Mobile Robot's Workspace Using Augmented Reality

We address the problem of interactively controlling the workspace of a mobile robot to ensure a human-aware navigation. This is especially of relevance for non-expert users living in human-robot shared spaces, e.g. home environments, since they want to keep the control of their mobile robots, such as vacuum cleaning or companion robots. Therefore, we introduce virtual borders that are respected by a robot while performing its tasks. For this purpose, we employ a RGB-D Google Tango tablet as human-robot interface in combination with an augmented reality application to flexibly define virtual borders. We evaluated our system with 15 non-expert users concerning accuracy, teaching time and correctness and compared the results with other baseline methods based on visual markers and a laser pointer. The experimental results show that our method features an equally high accuracy while reducing the teaching time significantly compared to the baseline methods. This holds for different border lengths, shapes and variations in the teaching process. Finally, we demonstrated the correctness of the approach, i.e. the mobile robot changes its navigational behavior according to the user-defined virtual borders.Comment: Accepted on 2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), supplementary video: https://youtu.be/oQO8sQ0JBR

The arts of action

The theory and culture of the arts has largely focused on the arts of objects, and neglected the arts of action – the “process arts”. In the process arts, artists create artifacts to engender activity in their audience, for the sake of the audience’s aesthetic appreciation of their own activity. This includes appreciating their own deliberations, choices, reactions, and movements. The process arts include games, urban planning, improvised social dance, cooking, and social food rituals. In the traditional object arts, the central aesthetic properties occur in the artistic artifact itself. It is the painting that is beautiful; the novel that is dramatic. In the process arts, the aesthetic properties occur in the activity of the appreciator. It is the game player’s own decisions that are elegant, the rock climber’s own movement that is graceful, and the tango dancers’ rapport that is beautiful. The artifact’s role is to call forth and shape that activity, guiding it along aesthetic lines. I offer a theory of the process arts. Crucially, we must distinguish between the designed artifact and the prescribed focus of aesthetic appreciation. In the object arts, these are one and the same. The designed artifact is the painting, which is also the prescribed focus of appreciation. In the process arts, they are different. The designed artifact is the game, but the appreciator is prescribed to appreciate their own activity in playing the game. Next, I address the complex question of who the artist really is in a piece of process art — the designer or the active appreciator? Finally, I diagnose the lowly status of the process arts

H Space: Interactive Augmented Reality Art

open accessThis artwork exploits recent research into augmented reality systems, such as the HoloLens, for building creative interaction in augmented reality. The work is being conducted in the context of interactive art experiences. The first version of the audience experience of the artwork, “H Space”, was informally tested in the SIGGRAPH 2018 Art Gallery context. Experiences with a later, improved, version was evaluated at Tsinghua University. The latest distributed version will be shown in Sydney. The paper describes the concept, the background in both the art and the technological domain and points to some of the key computer human interaction art research issues that the work highlights

The telematic dress: Evolving garments and distributed proprioception in streaming media and fashion performance

Centered around several short films from streaming performances created in 2005, this paper explores new ideas for movement technologies and garment design in an arts and digital research context. The "telematic dress" project, developed at the DAP Lab in Nottingham, involves transdisciplinary intersections between fashion and live performance, interactive system architecture, electronic textiles, wearable technologies, choreography, and anthropology. The concept on an evolving garment design that is materialized (moved) in live performance originates from DAP Lab's experimentation with telematics and distributed media (http://art.ntu.ac. uk/performance_research/birringer/dap.htm] addressing "connective tissues" through a study of perception/proprioception in the wearer (tactile sensory processing) and the dancer/designer/viewer relationship. This study is conducted as cross-cultural communication with online performance partners in Europe, the US, Brazil and Japan. The inter-active space is predicated on transcultural questions: how does the movement with an evolving design and wearable interactive sensors travel, how does movement - and capturing of movement - allow the design to emerge toward a garment statement, and how are bodies-in-relation-to sensory fabrics affected by the multidimensional kinesthetics of a media-rich, responsive environment

Smart Photos

Recent technological leaps have been a great catalyst for changing how people interact with the world around us. Specifically, the field of Augmented Reality has led to many software and hardware advances that have formed a digital intermediary between humans and their environment. As of now, Augmented Reality is available to the select few with the means of obtaining Google Glass, Oculus Rifts, and other relatively expensive platforms. Be that as it may, the tech industry\u27s current goal has been integration of this technology into the public\u27s smartphones and everyday devices. One inhibitor of this goal is the difficulty of finding an Augmented Reality application whose usage could satisfy an everyday need or attraction. Augmented reality presents our world in a unique perspective that can be found nowhere else in the natural world. However, visual impact is weak without substance or meaning. The best technology is invisible, and what makes a good product is its ability to fill a void in a person\u27s life. The most important researchers in this field are those who have been augmenting the tasks that most would consider mundane, such as overlaying nutritional information directly onto a meal [4]. In the same vein, we hope to incorporate Augmented Reality into everyday life by unlocking the full potential of a technology often believed to have already have reached its peak. The humble photograph, a classic invention and unwavering enhancement to the human experience, captures moments in space and time and compresses them into a single permanent state. These two-dimensional assortments of pixels give us a physical representation of the memories we form in specific periods of our lives. We believe this representation can be further enhanced in what we like to call a Smart Photo. The idea behind a Smart Photo is to unlock the full potential in the way that people can interact with photographs. This same notion is explored in the field of Virtual Reality with inventions such as 3D movies, which provide a special appeal that ordinary 2D films cannot. The 3D technology places the viewer inside the film\u27s environment. We intend to marry this seemingly mutually exclusive dichotomy by processing 2D photos alongside their 3D counterparts

Interactive Tango Milonga: An Interactive Dance System for Argentine Tango Social Dance

abstract: When dancers are granted agency over music, as in interactive dance systems, the actors are most often concerned with the problem of creating a staged performance for an audience. However, as is reflected by the above quote, the practice of Argentine tango social dance is most concerned with participants internal experience and their relationship to the broader tango community. In this dissertation I explore creative approaches to enrich the sense of connection, that is, the experience of oneness with a partner and complete immersion in music and dance for Argentine tango dancers by providing agency over musical activities through the use of interactive technology. Specifically, I create an interactive dance system that allows tango dancers to affect and create music via their movements in the context of social dance. The motivations for this work are multifold: 1) to intensify embodied experience of the interplay between dance and music, individual and partner, couple and community, 2) to create shared experience of the conventions of tango dance, and 3) to innovate Argentine tango social dance practice for the purposes of education and increasing musicality in dancers.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Music 201

Using software visualization technology to help genetic algorithm designers

This work is part of a three year PhD project to examine how Software Visualization(SV) can be applied to support the design and construction of Genetic Algorithms (GAs). A user survey carried out at the start of this project identified a set of key system features required by GA users. A visualization system embodying these features was then designed and a prototype built. This paper describes what genetic algorithms are and how they can be applied. It then reviews some of the survey results and their impact on the design of the visualization system. The paper concludes with an exploration of how the resulting prototype may be evaluated