Motion in place: a case study of archaeological reconstruction using motion capture

Human movement constitutes a fundamental part of the archaeological process, and of any interpretationof a site’s usage; yet there has to date been little or no consideration of how movement observed (incontemporary situations) and inferred (in archaeological reconstruction) can be documented. This paper reports on the Motion in Place Platform project, which seeks to use motion capture hardware and data totest human responses to Virtual Reality (VR) environments and their real-world equivalents using round houses of the Southern British Iron Age which have been both modelled in 3D and reconstructed in the present day as a case study. This allows us to frame questions about the assumptions which are implicitlyhardwired into VR presentations of archaeology and cultural heritage in new ways. In the future, this will lead to new insights into how VR models can be constructed, used and transmitted

Syed Hassan v. City of New York

USDC for the District of New Jerse

Bringing Authoring Tools for Intelligent Tutoring Systems and Serious Games Closer Together: Integrating GIFT with the Unity Game Engine

In an effort to bring intelligent tutoring system (ITS) authoring tools closer to content authoring tools, the authors are working to integrate GIFT with the Unity game engine and editor. The paper begins by describing challenges faced by modern intelligent tutors and the motivation behind the integration effort, with special consideration given to how this work will better meet the needs of future serious games. The next three sections expand on these major hurdles more thoroughly, followed by proposed design enhancements that would allow GIFT to overcome these issues. Finally, an overview is given of the authors’ current progress towards implementing the proposed design. The key contribution of this work is an abstraction of the interface between intelligent tutoring systems and serious games, thus enabling ITS authors to implement more complex training behaviors

Data Narratives: Aesthetic Activation of Urban Space Through Augmented Reality

This chapter discusses Data Narratives, a commissioned augmented reality artwork resulting from a period as artist in residence with Dublin City Dashboard. Data Narratives focused on working with city data to create hybrid artistic representations of Dublin’s ongoing housing affordability crisis, acting both as activist artistic engagement with the socio-political-economic space of the city and aesthetic activation of urban space through augmented reality. As data describes and defines so much of our digital every day, the project and residency programme asked how it could be leveraged as a medium for artistic creation and how could art supply new insights into these data and the life worlds they describe? Additionally, the project explored collaborative methodologies working in AR, increasingly important for artists producing complex AR works with the latest generation AR toolkits. The chapter gives an account of this project detailing its ambition to utilize AR art to build AR prototypes that over-layered city neighbourhoods with a series of cell phone-based data-driven AR narratives. Contextual location-based narratives visualize and engage complex issues. The process of building an artistic AR layer built on civic data is detailed, and the paper discusses its provision of a contextual layer that promoted reflection, informed debate, supported decision making, while connecting city residents with their city through renditions of its data

VCVW-3D: A Virtual Construction Vehicles and Workers Dataset with 3D Annotations

Currently, object detection applications in construction are almost based on pure 2D data (both image and annotation are 2D-based), resulting in the developed artificial intelligence (AI) applications only applicable to some scenarios that only require 2D information. However, most advanced applications usually require AI agents to perceive 3D spatial information, which limits the further development of the current computer vision (CV) in construction. The lack of 3D annotated datasets for construction object detection worsens the situation. Therefore, this study creates and releases a virtual dataset with 3D annotations named VCVW-3D, which covers 15 construction scenes and involves ten categories of construction vehicles and workers. The VCVW-3D dataset is characterized by multi-scene, multi-category, multi-randomness, multi-viewpoint, multi-annotation, and binocular vision. Several typical 2D and monocular 3D object detection models are then trained and evaluated on the VCVW-3D dataset to provide a benchmark for subsequent research. The VCVW-3D is expected to bring considerable economic benefits and practical significance by reducing the costs of data construction, prototype development, and exploration of space-awareness applications, thus promoting the development of CV in construction, especially those of 3D applications

Toward Realistic Dynamics of Rotating Orbital Debris, and Implications for Lightcurve Interpretation

Optical observations of rotating space debris near GEO contain important information on size, shape, composition, and rotational states, but these aspects are difficult to extract due to data limitations and the high number of degrees of freedom in the modeling process. For tri-axial rigid debris objects created by satellite fragmentations, the most likely initial rotation state has a large component of initial angular velocity directed along the intermediate axis of inertia, leading to large angular reorientations of the body on the timescale of the rotation period. This lends some support to the simplest possible interpretation of light curves -- that they represent sets of random orientations of the objects of study. However, effects of internal friction and solar radiation are likely to cause significant modification of rotation states within a time as short as a few orbital periods. In order to examine the rotational dynamics of debris objects under the influences of these effects, a set of seven first-order coupled equations of motion were assembled in state form: three are Euler equations describing the rates of change of the components of angular velocity in the body frame, and four describe the rates of change of the components of the unit quaternion. Quaternions are a four-dimensional extension of complex numbers that form a seamless, singularity-free representation of body orientation on S3. The Euler equations contain explicit terms describing torque from solar radiation in terms of spherical harmonics, and terms representing effects of a prescribed rate of internal friction. Numerical integrations of these equations of motion are being performed, and results will be presented. Initial tests show that internal friction without solar radiation torque leads to rotation about the maximum principal axis of inertia, as required, and solar radiation torque is expected to lead to spin-up of objects. Because the axis of maximum rotational inertia tends to be roughly coincident with the normal to the largest projected cross-sectional area, internal friction is expected to lead to reduced variation of light curve amplitudes at a given phase angle, but a large dependence of the same on phase angle. At a given phase angle, databases are generated which contain reflected intensities for comprehensive sets of equally-likely orientations, represented as unit quaternions. When projected onto three dimensions (S2) and color-coded by intensity, the set is depicted as points within a solid, semi-transparent unit sphere, within which all possible reflected intensities for an object at a given phase angle may be inspected simultaneously. Rotational sequences are represented by trajectories through the sphere. Databases are generated for each of a set of phase angles separately, forming a comprehensive dataset of reflected intensities spanning all object orientations and solar phase angles. Symmetries in the problem suggest that preferred rotation states are likely, defined relative to the object-sun direction in inertial space and relative to the maximum principal axis of inertia in the body coordinate system. Such rotation states may greatly simplify the problem of light curve interpretation by reducing the number of degrees of freedom in the problem

USA v. Ruben Boria

USDC for the Eastern District of Pennsylvani

The Internet as Idea:For a Transcendental Philosophy of Technology

This article attempts to render the Internet an object of philosophical consideration. It does so by referring to Kant’s transcendental approach. The argument is that Kant’s “transcendental idealism” is one example of an approach focused on conditions that much contemporary philosophy of technology misunderstands or ignores. Diverse contemporary thinkers are engaged, including Verbeek, Brey, Stiegler, Clark and Chalmers, Feenberg, and Fuchs. The article considers how these thinkers stand in relation to tendencies towards determinism, subjectivism and excessive forms of optimism and pessimism in relation to the Internet. In terms of Kant’s transcendental idealism, I argue that contemporary philosophy of technology does not go far enough in considering the Internet as a “regulative idea.” In terms of broader transcendental approaches, I argue that openness to the transcendental calls into question presuppositions regarding what constitutes an “empirical” object of enquiry, opening philosophy of technology to important new areas of research

A Natural User Interface for Virtual Object Modeling for Immersive Gaming

We designed an interactive 3D user interface system to perform object modeling in virtual environments. Expanding on existing 3D user interface techniques, we integrate low-cost human gesture recognition that endows the user with powerful abilities to perform complex virtual object modeling tasks in an immersive game setting. Much research has been done to explore the possibilities of developing biosensors for Virtual Reality (VR) use. In the game industry, even though full body interaction techniques are involved in modern game consoles, most of the utilizations, in terms of game control, are still simple. In this project, we extended the use of motion tracking and gesture recognition techniques to create a new 3D UI system to support immersive gaming. We set a goal for the usability, which is virtual object modeling, and finally developed a game application to test its performance

Project Shearwater Ground Effect UAV

The Shearwater unmanned aerial vehicle is a maritime fixed-wing drone that is designed to use ground effect force generated between the aircraft and a body of water to efficiently propel itself near the surface of a body of water. Shearwater features a virtual reality pilot interface and will act as a hybrid underwater vehicle that will eventually be able to operate both above and beneath the ocean’s surface. The Shearwater team developed existing design work to produce major subsystems that culminated in a flyable functioning prototype. An existing airframe was updated with working control surfaces tested in simulation and in practice, an electrical control system, and a working virtual reality (VR) pilot view. The Shearwater team tested a practical prototype and developed an optimized virtual reality command and control system