Embodiment in 3D virtual retail environments: exploring perceptions of the virtual shopping experience

The customer can now easily create, and customize, their own personal three dimensional (3D) virtual bodies in a variety of virtual environments; could you, by becoming a virtual body, actually enhance your online shopping and buying experiences or, would this potentially inhibit the pure visceral pleasure of retail therapy? "Second Life allows you to be a celebrity in your own lunchtime, .…you can design the body you've always wanted, and indulge your fashionista fetish for very little money. You can be the most attractive, best-dressed version of yourself you can imagine." This paper investigates online shopping in Second Life, through the experience of being avatars. We will discuss the possibilities of using avatars as brand new consumer identities for personalised and customised fashion shopping within the 3D multi user virtual environment, and question the influences and effects of these developments on the traditional high street shopping trip. The hyper un-realistic and non-sensory interface of online shopping for clothes has been hotly debated over the last decade; through the media, the industry and most importantly by the buying public. The customer’s inability to try on and experience the product has been the main inhibitor to shopping on-line, and the high levels of product returns in home shopping dramatically reflect this reality. Faster broadband connections and improved 2D web sites are making clothes shopping on the web more accessible, and for important customer groups, such as young professional females, and plus-size teenagers, virtual 3D technologies offer freedom of choice in any location. Retailers are now confidently providing different shopping experiences by combining 2D and 3D interactive visualisation technologies with advanced marketing techniques, to create virtual retail environments that attempt to actualise the true essence of shopping; by browsing, socialising, trying-on before buying and, in a new twist, leaving the store proudly wearing the item just purchased. American Apparel, Bershka, L’Oreal, Calvin Klein, Reebok, Sears, Nike and Adidas are pioneering virtual mega stores, and all offer newly innovative, and alternative shopping experiences inside 3D multi user virtual environments. An experiential and exploratory approach will be used to investigate fashion brands, and their virtual 3D stores in Second Life. As 3D avatars, we will record a range of customer perceptions and attempt to map their shopping patterns in this massively popular virtual world. The qualitative data gathered will inform discussions about the value of the virtual shopping experience for the customer and the retailer. Conclusions will also question the possibility of using avatars in a virtual shopping environment to acquire accurate body specifications for better fit and the collection of personal details for use in the future development of alternative shopping experiences

Walking and Worlding : Trails as Storylines in Video Games

Video games have grown into a major industry, ranging across a variety of genres that appeal to many kinds of users. No longer a niche phenomenon, video games are part of mainstream popular culture. During the COVID lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, more people than ever turned to video games for entertainment and social interactions.¹ Confined to their homes by lockdowns and restrictions, many embraced video game worlds as complements to, not replacements for, the world outside their homes. Games are not only a way to pass the time, but also a truly meaningful activity to many.publishedVersio

3D Simulation-based Analysis of Individual and Group Dynamic Behaviour in Video Surveillance

The visual behaviour analysis of individual and group dynamics is a subject of extensive research in both academia and industry. However, despite the recent technological advancements, the problem remains difficult. Most of the approaches concentrate on direct extraction and classification of graphical features from the video feed, analysing the behaviour directly from the source. The major obstacle, which impacts the real-time performance, is the necessity of combining processing of enormous volume of video data with complex symbolic data analysis. In this paper, we present the results of the experimental validation of a new method for dynamic behaviour analysis in visual analytics framework, which has as a core an agent-based, event-driven simulator. Our method utilizes only limited data extracted from the live video to analyse the activities monitored by surveillance cameras. Through combining the ontology of the visual scene, which accounts for the logical features of the observed world, with the patterns of dynamic behaviour, approximating the visual dynamics of the world, the framework allows recognizing the behaviour patterns on the basis of logical events rather than on physical appearance. This approach has several advantages. Firstly, the simulation reduces the complexity of data processing by eliminating the need of precise graphic data. Secondly, the granularity and precision of the analysed behaviour patterns can be controlled by parameters of the simulation itself. The experiments prove in a convincing manner that the simulation generates rich enough data to analyse the dynamic behaviour in real time with sufficient precision, completely adequate for many applications of video surveillance

From Ingsoc to Skynet it is not only science fiction: From novels and science fiction to quasi-reality

The contribution will provide an overview on the following side effects of tangible and intangible impact of cyber technologies with specific focus on the oversupply of information (info-obesity), resulting in its devaluation and loss of trust to professional media; monopolization in the field of communication, information and digital technologies (mainstream communication, freedom of speech); the transformation of the Internet from a space for the free exchange of ideas into a tool for supervision and management (the betrayal of IT revolution) , with Internet companies turning into digital giants, moving from digital platforms to digital ecosystems and annexing not only cyberspace, but also real sector industries (monopoly and dominant position); the massive decrease in the level of critical thinking and the emergence of waves of information epidemics of national and global levels (mainstream communication, limited contraposition, fake fake-news); post-truth in its heyday, with public perception shaped more by means of addressing feelings and personal opinion rather than actual facts, with fakes, clickbaits, hypes and other tools introduced to form post-reality in the political and media culture; changing the system of values – with the new normal (semantic shifts, etc), new ethics putting personal free will and freedom of choice under question; traditional cultural regulators of social relations (covid 19 example) and processes being displaced by automated social algorithms (increasing role of algorithms and ML); blurring the borders between the real and the digital world, wide spread of simplified virtual mock-ups and simulacra; mass collection of data for managing people's behaviour (evaporation of privacy, data protection), formation of an appropriate economic imperative to direct the development for business, society and states; increasing the level of conflict in society (between individuals and groups – haters, discrimination) and between states (XXI Century warfare, soft concerns)

Pixels, bits and urban space. Observing the intersection of the space of information with actual physical space in augmented reality smartphone applications and peripheral vision displays

Today the urban environment can be seen as a mix of technically mediated elements and actual physical locations — the city is techno–synthetically composed. The method of observing the production of space, as asserted by Lefebvre, must take into account physical and non–physical spaces, produced out of the coexistence of everyday life and activities with the space of information. This paper explores the merging of bits and bytes with the urban environment and uses augmented reality applications for the smartphone and peripheral vision displays as case studies to illustrate how the method of visually layering digital graphics on to the image of actual space produces a new kind of spatial commodification