Balancing the power of multimedia information retrieval and usability in designing interactive TV

Steady progress in the field of multimedia information retrieval (MMIR) promises a useful set of tools that could provide new usage scenarios and features to enhance the user experience in today s digital media applications. In the interactive TV domain, the simplicity of interaction is more crucial than in any other digital media domain and ultimately determines the success or otherwise of any new applications. Thus when integrating emerging tools like MMIR into interactive TV, the increase in interface complexity and sophistication resulting from these features can easily reduce its actual usability. In this paper we describe a design strategy we developed as a result of our e®ort in balancing the power of emerging multimedia information retrieval techniques and maintaining the simplicity of the interface in interactive TV. By providing multiple levels of interface sophistication in increasing order as a viewer repeatedly presses the same button on their remote control, we provide a layered interface that can accommodate viewers requiring varying degrees of power and simplicity. A series of screen shots from the system we have actually developed and built illustrates how this is achieved

A survey of real-time crowd rendering

In this survey we review, classify and compare existing approaches for real-time crowd rendering. We first overview character animation techniques, as they are highly tied to crowd rendering performance, and then we analyze the state of the art in crowd rendering. We discuss different representations for level-of-detail (LoD) rendering of animated characters, including polygon-based, point-based, and image-based techniques, and review different criteria for runtime LoD selection. Besides LoD approaches, we review classic acceleration schemes, such as frustum culling and occlusion culling, and describe how they can be adapted to handle crowds of animated characters. We also discuss specific acceleration techniques for crowd rendering, such as primitive pseudo-instancing, palette skinning, and dynamic key-pose caching, which benefit from current graphics hardware. We also address other factors affecting performance and realism of crowds such as lighting, shadowing, clothing and variability. Finally we provide an exhaustive comparison of the most relevant approaches in the field.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Multidimensional computation and visualisation for marine controlled source electromagnetic methods

The controlled source electromagnetic method is improving the search for oil and gas in marine settings and is becoming an integral component of many exploration toolkits. While the level of detail and benefit obtained from recorded electromagnetic data sets is limited to the tools available, interpretation is fundamentally restricted by non-unique and equivalent solutions. I create the tools necessary to rapidly compute and visualise multi-dimensional electromagnetic fields generated for a variety of controlled source electromagnetic surveys. This thesis is divided into two parts: the creation of an electromagnetic software framework and the electromagnetic research applications.The creation of a new electromagnetic software framework is covered in Part I. Steps to create and test a modern electromagnetic data structure, three-dimensional visualisation and interactive graphical user interface from the ground up are presented. Bringing together several computer science disciplines ranging from parallel computing, networking and computer human interaction to three-dimensional visualisation, a package specifically tailored to marine controlled source electromagnetic compuation is formed. The electromagnetic framework is comprised of approximately 100,000 lines of new Java code and several third party libraries, which provides low-level graphical, network and execution cross-platform functionality. The software provides a generic framework to integrate most computational engines and algorithms into the coherent global electromagnetic package enabling the interactive forward modelling, inversion and visualisation of electromagnetic data.Part II is comprised of several research applications utilising the developed electromagnetic software framework. Cloud computing and streamline visualisation are covered. These topics are covered to solve several problems in modern controlled source electromagnetic methods. Large 3D electromagnetic modelling and inversion may require days or even weeks to be performed on a single-threaded personal computers. A massively parallelised electromagnetic forward modelling and inversion methods can dramatically was created to improve computational time. The developed ’macro’ parallelisation method facilitated the reduction in computational time by several orders of magnitude with relatively little additional effort and without modification of the internal electromagnetic algorithm. The air wave is a significant component of marine controlled source electromagnetic surveys however there is controversy and confusion over its defintion. The airwave has been described as a reflected, refracted, direct or diffusing wave, which has lead to confusion over its physical reality

Reversed Multi-Layer Design as an Approach to Designing for Digital Seniors

The personal computer (PC) has been around for more than 35 years by now. Today, we find early adopters of the PC who have been using computers at home for 25 or 30 years and are now themselves in their eighties or nineties. Despite this there is still a lot of research focusing on how to introduce and teach the use of information technology to older people. In this paper we argue that it is time for a shift to designing for digital seniors, i.e., older long-time computer users. Over time this will be the dominating user group and we need to design for continued use of IT rather than guiding older computer novices. The paper also presents the concept Gracefully adaptive user interfaces and provides a case study in the form of a prototype re-design of Facebook aimed at exploring and illustrating how designing for digital seniors can be approached

Moveable worlds/digital scenographies

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ Intellect Ltd 2010.The mixed reality choreographic installation UKIYO explored in this article reflects an interest in scenographic practices that connect physical space to virtual worlds and explore how performers can move between material and immaterial spaces. The spatial design for UKIYO is inspired by Japanese hanamichi and western fashion runways, emphasizing the research production company's commitment to various creative crossovers between movement languages, innovative wearable design for interactive performance, acoustic and electronic sound processing and digital image objects that have a plastic as well as an immaterial/virtual dimension. The work integrates various forms of making art in order to visualize things that are not in themselves visual, or which connect visual and kinaesthetic/tactile/auditory experiences. The ‘Moveable Worlds’ in this essay are also reflections of the narrative spaces, subtexts and auditory relationships in the mutating matrix of an installation-space inviting the audience to move around and follow its sensorial experiences, drawn near to the bodies of the dancers.Brunel University, the British Council, and the Japan Foundation

The disappearing screen: scenarios for audible interfaces

The world of ubiquitous computing, which by definition includes mobile devices of every kind, leads us to an era of small computer devices, usable in everyday situations. Computers are becoming smaller and operate discreetly in the background. This paper deals with the disappearance of the screen that is described and specified according to Lev Manovich. In doing research on radio frequency identification, this paper shows one possible way to interact with ubiquitous computers—primarily exploring suitability and scenarios for audible interfaces. The paper describes a research project of the University of Arts Berlin and the University of St. Gallen and proposes future research question

Getting Dressed and Being Dressed: A Constructed Autobiography of Identity

This written and visual capstone project examines how feminist theories surrounding the construction of a gendered subject are related and situational to the narrative of a lived body experience within a layered context of clothing. It opens up a discussion concerning the negotiated space between an individually-empowered, subject-in-process and the boundaries of social expectations outlining gender and cultural identities. The thesis introduces the concept of using an automediality framework to connect the material culture of clothing to still and motion imagery with text as a way to encapsulate and illustrate the fluid nature of becoming. It concludes by suggesting that there is space in the ever-shifting argument between the intangibility of theory and the daily practice of getting and being dressed to create new methods of writing feminist theory using a multi-dimensional autobiographical practice. The practical components of the thesis are divided into three phases. The first phase consists of designing and constructing various articles of clothing I wear and embed into my closet as an autobiographic archive of my self. The second phase is a complex series of visual pieces and artifacts that are divided into five sub-categories: Theory in Practice - Maps, Moments of Being - Wearings, Fragments of Self - Video, What She Said - Citations, and Material Culture – Archive.[1] Each embraces the multi-dimensional nature of automediality. Photography, illustration, video, text, design, and digital collaging are all mediums used in the construction of the pieces. The third phase consists of designing the disparate artifacts into a digital framework that is based on the conceptual idea and fluid structure of a creative notebook. Because the narrative within an autobiographic process is continuous, The Notebooks are an evolving digital work-in-progress space that documents the thinking, designing, and making that happens in pursuit of solving the overlapping creative challenges between theory and practice. KEYWORDS: autobiography & automediality, memory, affect, gender, age, identity, becoming, clothing [1] Click and scroll on the hyperlinks in the abstract’s text to explore all five subcategories housing the different pieces and artifacts

The Space Between: Performance, the Body and Scholarship

The thesis is concerned with the interrelationships between the body, making sense of experience through performance, and the conceptual and scholarly understanding that people construct around experience. The lens through which these interrelationships are explored is phenomenology, both in terms of phenomenological theory per se and, more specifically, with theories related to performance and pedagogical process. The research question explores the relationship between the body, space/place and digital media through four cycles of participatory action research in which practice and theory are interrelated. The experience of (the body) in space and place is captured and re-created with digital media in the live performance space drawing attention to spatial and temporal anomalies that both de-stabilise and re-affirm what is it to be ‘now’ and ‘here.’ Ideas shift from the determined to the disintegrated, and the body moves between a critical engagement with experience and a pre-reflective and heightened consciousness of ‘being’ in performance – as maker, performer and viewer, and as learner, teacher and researcher. Answers to questions are replaced by gaps and spaces between – in which the known, the not known, and the imagined unfold and become exposed. Experiments shift from the body immersed in and subsumed by technology to the body, live (not mediatised) in performance, and again to the live as mediatised, exposing the phenomena that we encounter. Performance emerges as the body touched, sensed and multi-faceted in an in-between space of inter-relationships, inter-subjectivities and inter-medialities. The body is both fullness and void, coexistent and isolated – in suspense as it hovers and ‘is’ of all worlds. Investigations are devised and delivered, with students as co-researchers, through a teaching and learning model that guides and exposes, disrupts and transforms – creating a pedagogy of instability and discovery in order to reveal new and innovative performance