Authoring virtual crowds: a survey

Recent advancements in crowd simulation unravel a wide range of functionalities for virtual agents, delivering highly-realistic,natural virtual crowds. Such systems are of particular importance to a variety of applications in fields such as: entertainment(e.g., movies, computer games); architectural and urban planning; and simulations for sports and training. However, providingtheir capabilities to untrained users necessitates the development of authoring frameworks. Authoring virtual crowds is acomplex and multi-level task, varying from assuming control and assisting users to realise their creative intents, to deliveringintuitive and easy to use interfaces, facilitating such control. In this paper, we present a categorisation of the authorable crowdsimulation components, ranging from high-level behaviours and path-planning to local movements, as well as animation andvisualisation. We provide a review of the most relevant methods in each area, emphasising the amount and nature of influencethat the users have over the final result. Moreover, we discuss the currently available authoring tools (e.g., graphical userinterfaces, drag-and-drop), identifying the trends of early and recent work. Finally, we suggest promising directions for futureresearch that mainly stem from the rise of learning-based methods, and the need for a unified authoring framework.This work has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska Curie grant agreement No 860768 (CLIPE project). This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No 739578 and the Government of the Republic of Cyprus through the Deputy Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digital PolicyPeer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Fashion, History, Museums

The last decade has seen the growing popularity and visibility of fashion as a cultural product, including its growing presence in museum exhibitions. This book explores the history of fashion curating and exhibitions, highlighting the continuity of past and present curatorial practices. Comparing and contrasting exhibitions from different museums and decades – from the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 to the Alexander McQueen Savage Beauty show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2011 – it makes connections between museum fashion and the wider fashion industry. By critically analyzing trends in fashion exhibition practice over the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Julia Petrov defines and describes the varied representations of historical fashion within British and North American museum exhibitions

Toward Erobotics: An Investigation of the Relationships Between Stigma, Personality, Sexual Arousal, and Willingness to Engage Erotically with Robots

The rise of erobots (erôs + bots)—artificial erotic agents, such as sex robots—offers new opportunities for intimate experiences with machines. Their advent has also polarized academic and public debates: some denounce their risks, while others defend their benefits. Yet, the scientific study of human–machine erotic interaction and co-evolution remains limited: it lacks comprehensive theoretical models, and its empirical literature is scarce and fragmented. There is a need for a new, unified transdisciplinary field of research focusing on such phenomena, and guiding the development of beneficial technologies. We call this field erobotics. As a theoretical contribution to this new discipline, Chapter 2 defines erobotics and its related concepts, proposes a model of human-erobot interaction and co-evolution, and suggests a path to design beneficial erotic machines. As an empirical contribution to erobotics, this thesis examines some of the sociocultural, individual, and situational factors highlighted by this model. Specifically, it investigates the relationships between perceived stigma, personality traits, sexual arousal, and people’s willingness to engage erotically with robots. Chapter 3 shows that stigma related to erotic technology exists and increases as a function of products’ human-likeness. Chapter 4 shows that the willingness to engage with and perceived appropriateness of using sex robots more closely relate to erotophilia and sexual sensation seeking, rather than technophilia, non-sexual sensation seeking, and Big-Five traits. Chapter 5 shows that sexual arousal increases willingness to have sex with robots. In these three chapters, men were more interested in engaging erotically with robots than women. Together, these findings suggest that erotophilic sensation seekers—especially, men—may become the primary users of erobots, and that sexually aroused individuals may be more willing to engage erotically with such machines: potentially influencing their design and our relationship with them. Ultimately, this thesis founds erobotics and opens future directions for the study of human-machine erotic interaction and co-evolution

PERFECTION, WRETCHED, NORMAL, AND NOWHERE: A REGIONAL GEOGRAPHY OF AMERICAN TELEVISION SETTINGS

Drawing inspiration from numerous place image studies in geography and other social sciences, this dissertation examines the senses of place and regional identity shaped by more than seven hundred American television series that aired from 1947 to 2007. Each state's relative share of these programs is described. The geographic themes, patterns, and images from these programs are analyzed, with an emphasis on identity in five American regions: the Mid-Atlantic, New England, the Midwest, the South, and the West. The dissertation concludes with a comparison of television's senses of place to those described in previous studies of regional identity

Moloch\u27s Children: Monstrous Techno-Capitalism in North American Popular Fiction

Deriving from the Latin monere (to warn), monsters are at their very core warnings against the horrors that lurk in the shadows of our present and the mists of our future – in this case, the horrors of techno-capitalism (i.e., the conjunction of scientific modes of research and capitalist modes of production). This thesis reveals the ideological mechanisms that animate “techno-capitalist” monster narratives through close readings of 7 novels and 3 films from Canada and the United States in both English and French and released between 1979 and 2016. All texts are linked by shared themes, narrative tropes, and a North American origin. Since the corpus emerges from the home of the current techno-capitalist hegemony, it reveals the fears of those who benefit from the system yet are still terrified by its potential. The inclusion of Canadian texts nuances the analysis by taking into account the internal hierarchy of the North American capitalist empire. The thesis is primarily interested in how texts from three different cultures in the corpus construct their plots, characters, and settings to perform similar kinds of ideological work, that is, the work of representing and critiquing capitalist ideology. Special attention is paid to repeated motifs used to reveal and represent the monstrousness of the techno-capitalist system. The study of these motifs is divided into three sections. The first explores techno-capitalist monsters as personifications of the worst excesses of contemporary consumer culture. The second focuses on the fusion of science and capitalism as dramatized through the figure of the mad corporate scientist. The third reads the corpus as a collection of environmental narratives that comment on the techno-capitalist exploitation of nature. The ideological analysis of the corpus favours a socio-economic hermeneutic but also addresses issues of ethnicity and nationality. A Marxist theoretical approach is privileged throughout, with reliance on Baudrillardian concepts such as the code and the hyperreal