Capturing the sporting heroes of our past by extracting 3D movements from legacy video content

Sports are a key part of cultural identity, and it is necessary to preserve them as important intangible Cultural Heritage, especially the human motion techniques specific to individual sports. In this paper we present a method for extracting 3D athlete motion from video broadcast sources, providing an important tool for preserving the heritage represented by these movements. Broadcast videos include camera motion, multiple player interaction, occlusions and noise, presenting significant challenges to solve the reconstruction. The approach requires initial definition of some key-frames and setting of 2D key-points in those frames manually. Thereafter an automatic process estimates the poses and positions of the players in the key-frames, and in the frames between key-frames, taking into account collisions with the environment and human kinematic constraints. Initial results are extremely promising and this data could be used to analyze the sport's evolution over time, or even to generate animations for interactive applications

Computationally efficient deformable 3D object tracking with a monocular RGB camera

182 p.Monocular RGB cameras are present in most scopes and devices, including embedded environments like robots, cars and home automation. Most of these environments have in common a significant presence of human operators with whom the system has to interact. This context provides the motivation to use the captured monocular images to improve the understanding of the operator and the surrounding scene for more accurate results and applications.However, monocular images do not have depth information, which is a crucial element in understanding the 3D scene correctly. Estimating the three-dimensional information of an object in the scene using a single two-dimensional image is already a challenge. The challenge grows if the object is deformable (e.g., a human body or a human face) and there is a need to track its movements and interactions in the scene.Several methods attempt to solve this task, including modern regression methods based on Deep NeuralNetworks. However, despite the great results, most are computationally demanding and therefore unsuitable for several environments. Computational efficiency is a critical feature for computationally constrained setups like embedded or onboard systems present in robotics and automotive applications, among others.This study proposes computationally efficient methodologies to reconstruct and track three-dimensional deformable objects, such as human faces and human bodies, using a single monocular RGB camera. To model the deformability of faces and bodies, it considers two types of deformations: non-rigid deformations for face tracking, and rigid multi-body deformations for body pose tracking. Furthermore, it studies their performance on computationally restricted devices like smartphones and onboard systems used in the automotive industry. The information extracted from such devices gives valuable insight into human behaviour a crucial element in improving human-machine interaction.We tested the proposed approaches in different challenging application fields like onboard driver monitoring systems, human behaviour analysis from monocular videos, and human face tracking on embedded devices

Video Gaming: The Sociology of a Lifeworld

This thesis contributes to contemporary sociological debates about video games and video gaming by building upon the works of game theorists such as Eskelinen and Tronstad (2003), Juul (2001), Taylor (2006) and Thornham (2011) that explore the interactive and participatory nature of the pursuit. The data within, derived from an empirical study involving focus groups, interviews, observation and analyses of games and gaming practices and participant observation amongst communities of video gamers is analysed using theories and theoretical frameworks from film and audience studies, classical sociology (in particular Durkheim) and the sociology of sport. Emanating from the data video gaming is revealed to be an ‘organised sport played in a domestic environment’ in terms of embodied practice, conduct and sentiment. The prioritising of agency over structure in data analysis reveals multiple multisensory social practices that encourage engagement with the medium and create, maintain and develop a vibrant and constantly evolving video game lifeworld. Using the ‘career’ of the video gamer, as a conceptual framework, this thesis brings to the fore the masculinity and masculine social practices central to the video gaming lifeworld, and the multisensory social practices through which heterogeneous video gamers (from occasional lone gamers to fully immersed MMORPG enthusiasts) actively immerse themselves into, build, maintain and develop the video game lifeworld. A lifeworld wherein gamers develop their motivations to play and keep playing video games consequent to rewarding performances and interactions with other participants. Key Words: video games - addiction - ‘passive consumer’ – empirical – multisensory – ‘career’ – social practices – active - lone gamer – MMORPG – lifeworl

The Child in Games: From the Meek, to the Mighty, to the Monstrous

Drawing across game studies, childhood studies, and children’s literature studies, this thesis catalogues and critiques the representation of children in contemporary video games. It poses two questions: 1) How are children represented in contemporary video games? 2) In what ways do the representations of children in video games affirm or challenge dominant Western beliefs about the figure of the child? To answer these questions, I combine a large-scale content analysis of over 500 games published between 2009 and 2019 with a series of autoethnographic close readings. My content analysis is designed to provide a quantitative snapshot of the representation of children in games. I use statistical analysis to assemble data points as meaningful constellations. I use the axes of race, gender, and age, as well as genre, age-rating, and publication year, to identify patterns in representation. I distil my findings as a set of seven archetypes: The Blithe Child, The Heroic Child, The Human Becoming, The Child Sacrifice, The Side Kid, The Waif, and The Little Monster. This typology is not intended to work against the granular detail of the information recorded in the dataset, but to draw attention to patterns of coherence and divergence that occur between particular examples, as well as to intersections with representational tropes about children identified in other media. I select four of these seven archetypes to structure my autoethnographic close readings. While content analysis is a useful tool for documenting the presence, absence, and dominant function of child-characters in games, close reading allows for a more intersectional approach that can attend to the nuances of representation across identity markers, creating opportunities to examine internal contradictions, ironies, and the polysemy generated through interpretive gaps. I develop my own close reading method building on the autoethnographic approaches of Carr (2019), Vossen (2020), McArthur (2018), and Jennings (2021), which I call critical ekphrasis. Chapter one argues that the Blithe Child triangulates ‘children’, ‘toys’, and ‘paidia’. It suggests that both childhood and play can be conceptualised as a ‘magic circle’, and that the immateriality of the Blithe Child implies childhood can be a mode of being unconnected to anatomical markers or chronological age. Chapter two explores how the Heroic Child challenges the apparent affinity between video games and traditional hero 2 narratives. It argues that the dependence of the childly protagonist undermines dualistic thinking and instead celebrates cooperation, compromise, and connection. Chapter three compares the Child Sacrifice to the woman-in-the-refrigerator trope, arguing that it functions to justify aggressive, hypermasculine, militarised violence. The final chapter compares the Little Monster and the Waif to examine how the uncanny child raises metareferential questions about autonomy in interactive media and agency in intergenerational relationships. My research project concludes by suggesting that virtual children in simulated worlds point to the active construction and delimitation of ‘the child’ in society and can reveal that much of what is assumed to be natural, obvious, and universal about the figure of ‘the child’ is in fact ideological. It hints at the possibility that just as virtual children are used as rhetorical figures to explain and justify the rules, mechanics, and moral systems of a digital game, so too is the figure of ‘the child’ used to routinise and vindicate the rules, workings, and moral systems of Euro-American culture.AHR

China's iGeneration

Collection of essays on twenty-first century Chinese cinema and moving image culture. This innovative collection of essays on twenty-first century Chinese cinema and moving image culture features contributions from an international community of scholars, critics, and practitioners. Taken together, their perspectives make a compelling case that the past decade has witnessed a radical transformation of conventional notions of cinema. Following China's accession to the WTO in 2001, personal and collective experiences of changing social conditions have added new dimensions to the increasingly diverse Sinophone media landscape, and provided a novel complement to the existing edifice of blockbusters, documentaries, and auteur culture. The numerous 'iGeneration' productions and practices examined in this volume include 3D and IMAX films, experimental documentaries, animation, visual aides-mémoires, and works of pirated pastiche

Discovering the New Place of Learning

The book explores the potential of learning outside the traditional classroom when students gain real-world experiences in a variety of contexts and public spaces such as built, natural and virtual landscapes, museums, heritage sites, science centres and community venues. The authors of the book promote and put the flexible and ‘plastic’ concept of a place of learning into action by including physical geographical location, digital, virtual and textual spaces into the analysis. The book illuminates the importance of innovative educational strategies in connecting formal, non-formal and informal education – experiential learning in museums, heritage places and communities, inquiry-based pedagogy, digital storytelling, environmental online games, narrative geographies, and the use of geospatial technologies

THE MACHINE ANXIETIES OF STEAMPUNK: CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY, NEO-VICTORIAN AESTHETICS, AND FUTURISM

This dissertation examines the steampunk movement as a significant contemporary expression of the human condition. Although its aesthetic inspiration comes from the Victorian past, as re-tooled, re-imagined, and re-energized for the twenty-first century, steampunk’s underlying interest is in a speculative view of the future and a concern for the contemporary individual’s struggle to retain autonomy in a de-centered, deterritorialized world. As such the steampunk movement participates in, and contributes to, an important ongoing philosophical and aesthetic dialog. The project examines the motivations for steampunk’s visual inspiration in the Victorian. Technological and scientific advancements in that period greatly impacted societal traditions and the role of the individual within it. Economic, social, and political changes revolutionized daily life and the individual faced a new self-consciousness as she confronted, and adapted to, these significant changes. Today, similar technological advancements force new tensions between the individual and the world around her. Astounding developments in computing and artificial intelligence, and the concept of the cyborg and other hybrid beings challenge the contemporary individual’s sense of self. By looking to the past, steampunk seeks to recuperate the Victorian individual’s successful navigation of technological change. She does so in order to facilitate our own navigation of current waters. vii The project traces the movement’s modest roots as a literary sub-genre of science fiction, explores its sources in the Victorian, and describes the movement’s rapid evolution to global phenomenon. Today steampunk is fully integrated into contemporary culture as an aesthetic observed in visual, decorative, and fashion arts, comic books, movies, and television. The project explores the current landscape of art and philosophy in order to position the steampunk movement within the larger scope of the contemporary scene. A triad of prevailing philosophical trends—postmodernism, transhumanism, and posthumanism, help to reveal steampunk’s involvement in the contemporary philosophical and aesthetic dialog.https://digitalmaine.com/academic/1015/thumbnail.jp

The boxer’s point of view: an ethnography of cultural production and athletic development among amateur and professional boxers in England

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of LutonSince the late nineteenth century boxing in England has been socially organised into two ideologically distinctive versions - amateur and professional boxing – that to this day are practiced in spatially segregated social universes. Nonetheless, both amateur and professional boxing-practitioners understandings and lived experiences in and through boxing are necessarily grounded in the wider social and cultural contexts through which they interpret meaning and construct worldviews and identity. Thus despite the institutional, ideological and spatial boundaries demarcating either code, on a rather more subtle yet incredibly powerful cultural level, amateur and professional boxing are both symbolically and practically deeply intertwined. Over a five year period, I conducted ‘insider’ ethnographic research among distinct cohorts of amateur and professional boxers based in Luton and London to investigate the lived experiences and socially constructed worldviews, values and identities developed by practitioners immersed in either code. The overriding aim of this research was to critically evaluate the limits and possibilities of boxing-practitioners association with and development through ‘boxing’ henceforth. The findings of this ethnography reveal that it was common for the amateur and professional boxing-practitioners studied to cultivate empowering identities through intersubjective and socially validating instances of purposefulness, expressivity, creativity, fellowship and aspiration. These lived dimensions were grounded in sensuous, symbolic and emotional attachments respective to the social organization defining the social practice of either code of boxing. Equally, the research reveals that under the veneer of collective passion for and consequent fellowship experienced through boxing, an undercurrent yet ever-present sense of dubiety, tension and intra-personal conflict was in evidence among both the amateur and professional boxing-practitioners studied. It is suggested, therefore, that as a consequence of an array of both micro and macro post-industrial societal reconfigurations defining the structural principles of amateurism and professionalism in the practice of ‘boxing’, contemporary boxers are increasingly predisposed to developing athletic identities predisposed towards patterns of meaning production “…dominated by market-mediated consumer choice and the power of individualism” (Jarvie 2006 p. 327). Thus through complex, historically dynamic and seemingly paradoxical social processes of cultural (re)production and transformation - dialectically fusing individualistic aspirations geared towards self-interested gain, acts of group and subcultural fellowship and social resistance to measures of institutionalised control - it is argued that the role of boxing as an agent for humanistic personal and social development in the contemporary late-modern era of structural reconfiguration is progressively rendered impotent

China's iGeneration

Collection of essays on twenty-first century Chinese cinema and moving image culture. This innovative collection of essays on twenty-first century Chinese cinema and moving image culture features contributions from an international community of scholars, critics, and practitioners. Taken together, their perspectives make a compelling case that the past decade has witnessed a radical transformation of conventional notions of cinema. Following China's accession to the WTO in 2001, personal and collective experiences of changing social conditions have added new dimensions to the increasingly diverse Sinophone media landscape, and provided a novel complement to the existing edifice of blockbusters, documentaries, and auteur culture. The numerous 'iGeneration' productions and practices examined in this volume include 3D and IMAX films, experimental documentaries, animation, visual aides-mémoires, and works of pirated pastiche