Affect and believability in game characters:a review of the use of affective computing in games

Virtual agents are important in many digital environments. Designing a character that highly engages users in terms of interaction is an intricate task constrained by many requirements. One aspect that has gained more attention recently is the effective dimension of the agent. Several studies have addressed the possibility of developing an affect-aware system for a better user experience. Particularly in games, including emotional and social features in NPCs adds depth to the characters, enriches interaction possibilities, and combined with the basic level of competence, creates a more appealing game. Design requirements for emotionally intelligent NPCs differ from general autonomous agents with the main goal being a stronger player-agent relationship as opposed to problem solving and goal assessment. Nevertheless, deploying an affective module into NPCs adds to the complexity of the architecture and constraints. In addition, using such composite NPC in games seems beyond current technology, despite some brave attempts. However, a MARPO-type modular architecture would seem a useful starting point for adding emotions

Anticipatory Mobile Computing: A Survey of the State of the Art and Research Challenges

Today's mobile phones are far from mere communication devices they were ten years ago. Equipped with sophisticated sensors and advanced computing hardware, phones can be used to infer users' location, activity, social setting and more. As devices become increasingly intelligent, their capabilities evolve beyond inferring context to predicting it, and then reasoning and acting upon the predicted context. This article provides an overview of the current state of the art in mobile sensing and context prediction paving the way for full-fledged anticipatory mobile computing. We present a survey of phenomena that mobile phones can infer and predict, and offer a description of machine learning techniques used for such predictions. We then discuss proactive decision making and decision delivery via the user-device feedback loop. Finally, we discuss the challenges and opportunities of anticipatory mobile computing.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figure

Know Thy Toucher

Most of current academic and commercial surface computing systems are capable of multitouch detection and hence allow simultaneous input from multiple users. Although there are so far only few applications in this area which rely on identifying the user, we believe that the association of touches to users will become an essential feature of surface computing as applications mature, new application areas emerge, and the enabling technology is readily available. As the capacitive technology used in present user identification enabled tabletops is limited with respect to the supported number of users and screen size, we outline a user identification enabled tabletop concept based on computer vision and biometric hand shape information, and introduce the prototype system we built to further investigate this concept. In a preliminary consideration, we derive concepts for identifying users by examining what new possibilities are enabled and by introducing different scopes of identification

Toward future 'mixed reality' learning spaces for STEAM education

Digital technology is becoming more integrated and part of modern society. As this begins to happen, technologies including augmented reality, virtual reality, 3d printing and user supplied mobile devices (collectively referred to as mixed reality) are often being touted as likely to become more a part of the classroom and learning environment. In the discipline areas of STEAM education, experts are expected to be at the forefront of technology and how it might fit into their classroom. This is especially important because increasingly, educators are finding themselves surrounded by new learners that expect to be engaged with participatory, interactive, sensory-rich, experimental activities with greater opportunities for student input and creativity. This paper will explore learner and academic perspectives on mixed reality case studies in 3d spatial design (multimedia and architecture), paramedic science and information technology, through the use of existing data as well as additional one-on-one interviews around the use of mixed reality in the classroom. Results show that mixed reality can provide engagement, critical thinking and problem solving benefits for students in line with this new generation of learners, but also demonstrates that more work needs to be done to refine mixed reality solutions for the classroom

Gsi demo: Multiuser gesture/speech interaction over digital tables by wrapping single user applications

Most commercial software applications are designed for a single user using a keyboard/mouse over an upright monitor. Our interest is exploiting these systems so they work over a digital table. Mirroring what people do when working over traditional tables, we want to allow multiple people to interact naturally with the tabletop application and with each other via rich speech and hand gesture and speech interaction on a digital table for geospatial applications- Google Earth, Warcraft III and The Sims. In this paper, we describe our underlying architecture: GSI Demo. First, GSI Demo creates a run-time wrapper around existing single user applications: it accepts and translates speech and gestures from multiple people into a single stream of keyboard and mouse inputs recognized by the application. Second, it lets people use multimodal demonstration- instead of programming- to quickly map their own speech and gestures to these keyboard/mouse inputs. For example, continuous gestures are trained by saying ¨Computer, when I do (one finger gesture), you do (mouse drag) ¨. Similarly, discrete speech commands can be trained by saying ¨Computer, when I say (layer bars), you do (keyboard and mouse macro) ¨. The end result is that end users can rapidly transform single user commercial applications into a multi-user, multimodal digital tabletop system