8,016 research outputs found

    Presenting in Virtual Worlds: Towards an Architecture for a 3D Presenter explaining 2D-Presented Information

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    Entertainment, education and training are changing because of multi-party interaction technology. In the past we have seen the introduction of embodied agents and robots that take the role of a museum guide, a news presenter, a teacher, a receptionist, or someone who is trying to sell you insurances, houses or tickets. In all these cases the embodied agent needs to explain and describe. In this paper we contribute the design of a 3D virtual presenter that uses different output channels to present and explain. Speech and animation (posture, pointing and involuntary movements) are among these channels. The behavior is scripted and synchronized with the display of a 2D presentation with associated text and regions that can be pointed at (sheets, drawings, and paintings). In this paper the emphasis is on the interaction between 3D presenter and the 2D presentation

    3D User Interfaces for General-Purpose 3D Animation

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    Draft submission, Appeared as "3D User Interfaces for General-Purpose 3D Animation"Modern 3D animation systems let a growing number of people generate increasingly sophisticated animated movies, frequently for tutorials or multimedia documents. However, although these tasks are inherently three dimensional, these systems' user interfaces are still predominantly two dimensional. This makes it difficult to interactively input complex animated 3D movements. We have developed Virtual Studio, an inexpensive and easy-to-use 3D animation environment in which animators can perform all interaction directly in three dimensions. Animators can use 3D devices to specify complex 3D motions. Virtual tools are visible mediators that provide interaction metaphors to control application objects. An underlying constraint solver lets animators tightly couple application and interface objects. Users define animation by recording the effect of their manipulations on models. Virtual Studio applies data-reduction techniques to generate editable representations of each animated element that is manipulated.71-78Pubblicat

    A Foundation for Emotional Expressivity

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    To express emotions to others in mobile text messaging in our view require designs that can both capture some of the ambiguity and subtleness that characterizes emotional interaction and keep the media specific qualities. Through the use of a body movement analysis and a dimensional model of emotion experiences, we arrived at a design for a mobile messaging service, eMoto. The service makes use of the sub-symbolic expressions; colors, shapes and animations, for expressing emotions in an open-ended way. Here we present the design process and a user study of those expressions, where the results show that the use of these sub-symbolic expressions can work as a foundation to use as a creative tool, but still allowing for the communication to be situated. The inspiration taken from body movements proved to be very useful as a design input. It was also reflected in the way our subjects described the expressions

    Model-based engineering of animated interactive systems for the interactive television environment

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    Les interfaces graphiques Ă©taient la plupart du temps statiques, et reprĂ©sentaient une succession d'Ă©tats logiciels les uns aprĂšs les autres. Cependant, les transitions animĂ©es entre ces Ă©tats statiques font partie intĂ©grante des interfaces utilisateurs modernes, et leurs processus de design et d'implĂ©mentations constituent un dĂ©fi pour les designers et les dĂ©veloppeurs. Cette thĂšse propose un processus de conception de systĂšmes interactifs centrĂ© sur les animations, ainsi qu'une architecture pour la dĂ©finition et l'implĂ©mentation d'animations au sein des interfaces graphiques. L'architecture met en avant une approche Ă  deux niveaux pour dĂ©finir une vue haut niveau d'une animation (avec un intĂ©rĂȘt particulier pour les objets animĂ©s, leurs propriĂ©tĂ©s Ă  ĂȘtre animĂ© et la composition d'animations) ainsi qu'une vue bas niveau traitant des aspects dĂ©taillĂ©s des animations tels que les timings et les optimisations. Concernant les spĂ©cifications formelles de ces deux niveaux, nous utilisons une approche qui facilite les rĂ©seaux de Petri orientĂ©s objets pour la conception, l'implĂ©mentation et la validation d'interfaces utilisateurs animĂ©es en fournissant une description complĂšte et non-ambiguĂ« de l'ensemble de l'interface utilisateur, y compris les animations. Enfin, nous dĂ©crivons la mise en pratique du processus prĂ©sentĂ©, illustrĂ© par un cas d'Ă©tude d'un prototype haute-fidĂ©litĂ© d'une interface utilisateur, pour le domaine de la tĂ©lĂ©vision interactive. Ce processus conduira Ă  une spĂ©cification formelle et dĂ©taillĂ©e du systĂšme interactif, et incluera des animations utilisant des rĂ©seaux de Petri orientĂ©s objet (conçus avec l'outil PetShop CASE).Graphical User Interfaces used to be mostly static, representing one software state after the other. However, animated transitions between these static states are an integral part in modern user interfaces and processes for both their design and implementation remain a challenge for designers and developers. This thesis proposes a process for designing interactive systems focusing on animations, along with an architecture for the definition and implementation of animation in user interfaces. The architecture proposes a two levels approach for defining a high-level view of an animation (focusing on animated objects, their properties to be animated and on the composition of animations) and a low-level one dealing with detailed aspects of animations such as timing and optimization. For the formal specification of these two levels, we are using an approach facilitating object-oriented Petri nets to support the design, implementation and validation of animated user interfaces by providing a complete and unambiguous description of the entire user interface including animations. Finally, we describe the application of the presented process exemplified by a case study for a high-fidelity prototype of a user interface for the interactive Television domain. This process will lead to a detailed formal specification of the interactive system, including animations using object-oriented Petri nets (designed with the PetShop CASE tool)

    VisIVOWeb: A WWW Environment for Large-Scale Astrophysical Visualization

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    This article presents a newly developed Web portal called VisIVOWeb that aims to provide the astrophysical community with powerful visualization tools for large-scale data sets in the context of Web 2.0. VisIVOWeb can effectively handle modern numerical simulations and real-world observations. Our open-source software is based on established visualization toolkits offering high-quality rendering algorithms. The underlying data management is discussed with the supported visualization interfaces and movie-making functionality. We introduce VisIVOWeb Network, a robust network of customized Web portals for visual discovery, and VisIVOWeb Connect, a lightweight and efficient solution for seamlessly connecting to existing astrophysical archives. A significant effort has been devoted for ensuring interoperability with existing tools by adhering to IVOA standards. We conclude with a summary of our work and a discussion on future developments

    Component Substitution through Dynamic Reconfigurations

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    Component substitution has numerous practical applications and constitutes an active research topic. This paper proposes to enrich an existing component-based framework--a model with dynamic reconfigurations making the system evolve--with a new reconfiguration operation which "substitutes" components by other components, and to study its impact on sequences of dynamic reconfigurations. Firstly, we define substitutability constraints which ensure the component encapsulation while performing reconfigurations by component substitutions. Then, we integrate them into a substitutability-based simulation to take these substituting reconfigurations into account on sequences of dynamic reconfigurations. Thirdly, as this new relation being in general undecidable for infinite-state systems, we propose a semi-algorithm to check it on the fly. Finally, we report on experimentations using the B tools to show the feasibility of the developed approach, and to illustrate the paper's proposals on an example of the HTTP server.Comment: In Proceedings FESCA 2014, arXiv:1404.043

    RRL: A Rich Representation Language for the Description of Agent Behaviour in NECA

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    In this paper, we describe the Rich Representation Language (RRL) which is used in the NECA system. The NECA system generates interactions between two or more animated characters. The RRL is a formal framework for representing the information that is exchanged at the interfaces between the various NECA system modules

    Visualizing 2D Flows with Animated Arrow Plots

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    Flow fields are often represented by a set of static arrows to illustrate scientific vulgarization, documentary film, meteorology, etc. This simple schematic representation lets an observer intuitively interpret the main properties of a flow: its orientation and velocity magnitude. We propose to generate dynamic versions of such representations for 2D unsteady flow fields. Our algorithm smoothly animates arrows along the flow while controlling their density in the domain over time. Several strategies have been combined to lower the unavoidable popping artifacts arising when arrows appear and disappear and to achieve visually pleasing animations. Disturbing arrow rotations in low velocity regions are also handled by continuously morphing arrow glyphs to semi-transparent discs. To substantiate our method, we provide results for synthetic and real velocity field datasets

    Effective Control of Human Motion Animation

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    In this paper, we describe TAKE_ONE, a parallel method of specifying human motion animation by a controlled mixture of values from three kinds of simulation: kinematic, dynamic, and constraint. In addition, tools to assist an animator to define qualities such as realism, individuality and expressiveness are developed. The issues in comprehensive animation methods are explosion of complexity, difficulty in determining values of input parameters, and lack of ease in fine-tuning an animation. We discuss the advantages and issues involved in structuring the specification of an animation. We provide a structured method to use or to convert to, a parameterized motion definition. We introduce a method of specification to allow the development of the essential and minimal definitional qualities of an action. The result is that a reduction in run-time complexity and user-specification is effected and groundwork for an action database is done. We develop techniques to refine kinematic animation specification so that it is more representative of actual positional goals and so that it is compatible with the use of the other methods. We provide a structure to systematically merge animations from the three methods, through user or program control, and provide an interface to an iterative method of definition and fine-tuning. Examples are provided to show the power of the TAKE_ONE method, including: an object placement example whose implementation is explained in detail, a wheel-turning task, and finally, a classical ballet pirouette which will serve as a goal example for our completed work
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