15,013 research outputs found
Life-Sized Audiovisual Spatial Social Scenes with Multiple Characters: MARC & SMART-IÂČ
International audienceWith the increasing use of virtual characters in virtual and mixed reality settings, the coordination of realism in audiovisual rendering and expressive virtual characters becomes a key issue. In this paper we introduce a new system combining two systems for tackling the issue of realism and high quality in audiovisual rendering and life-sized expressive characters. The goal of the resulting SMART-MARC platform is to investigate the impact of realism on multiple levels: spatial audiovisual rendering of a scene, appearance and expressive behaviors of virtual characters. Potential interactive applications include mediated communication in virtual worlds, therapy, game, arts and elearning. Future experimental studies will focus on 3D audio/visual coherence, social perception and ecologically valid interaction scenes
Being together, worlds apart: a virtual-worldly phenomenology
Previous work in Game Studies has centered on several loci of investigation in seeking to understand virtual gameworlds. First, researchers have scrutinized the concept of the virtual world itself and how it relates to the idea of âthe magic circleâ. Second, the field has outlined various forms of experienced âpresenceâ. Third, scholarship has noted that the boundaries between the world of everyday life and virtual worlds are porous, and that this fosters a multiplicity of identities as players identify both with themselves-offline and themselves-in-game. Despite widespread agreement that these topics are targets for research, so far those working on these topics do not have mutually agreed-upon framework. Here we draw upon the work of Alfred Schutz to take up this call. We provide a phenomenological framework which can be used to describe the phenomena of interest to Game Studies, as well as open new avenues of inquiry, in a way acceptable and useful to all. This helps to distinguish the core of the field from the supplemental theoretical and critical commitments which characterize diverse approaches within the field
Programs as Polypeptides
We describe a visual programming language for defining behaviors manifested
by reified actors in a 2D virtual world that can be compiled into programs
comprised of sequences of combinators that are themselves reified as actors.
This makes it possible to build programs that build programs from components of
a few fixed types delivered by diffusion using processes that resemble
chemistry as much as computation.Comment: in European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL '15), York, UK, 201
Virtual World-Weariness: On Delaying the Experiential Erosion of Digital Environments
A common understanding of the role of a game developer includes establishing (or at least partially establishing) what is interactively and perceptually available in (video)game environments: what elements and behaviors those worlds include and allow, and what is â instead â left out of their âpossibility horizonâ. The term âpossibility horizonâ references the Ancient Greek origin of the term âhorizonâ, áœÏÎżÏ (oros), which denotes a frontier â a spatial limit. On this etymological foundation, âhorizonâ is used here to indicate the spatial and operational boundaries that a (video)game environment affords its players.
This book chapter discusses a particular feeling that emerge in relation to playful encounters with the âpossibility horizonsâ of videogames. I am referring here to the realization, as a player, that a game environment can be experientially exhausted and is, as such, ultimately banal. In other words, I will examine how our deliberate engagement with the interactive environments of digital games can trigger sensations that are analogous to what Romantic authors referred to as Weltschmerz (âworld-wearinessâ)
Self-reflexive videogames: observations and corollaries on virtual worlds as philosophical artifacts
Self-reflexive videogames are videogames designed to materialize critical and/or satirical perspectives on the ways in which videogames themselves are designed, played, sold, manipulated, experienced, and understood as social objects. This essay focuses on the use of virtual worlds as mediators, and in particular on the use of videogames to guide and encourage reflections on technical, interactive, and thematic conventions in videogame design and development. Structurally, it is composed of two interconnected parts:
1) In the first part of this essay, I will discuss NECESSARY EVIL (Gualeni et al., 2013), an experimental videogame that I designed as a self-reflexive virtual artifact. With the objective of clarifying the philosophical aspirations of self-reflexive videogames â and in order to understand how those aspirations can be practically pursued â I will dissect and examine the design decisions that contributed to the qualities of NECESSARY EVIL as an example of âplayable philosophyâ.
2) Taking off from the perspectives on self-reflexive videogames offered in the first part of the essay, the second half will focus on virtual worlds as viable mediators of philosophical thought more in general. In this section, I will argue that, both through the practice of game design and through the interactive experiences of virtual worlds, twenty-first century philosophers have the possibility to challenge the often-unquestioned understanding of written discourse as the only context in which philosophical thought can emerge and be developed
Speech-driven Animation with Meaningful Behaviors
Conversational agents (CAs) play an important role in human computer
interaction. Creating believable movements for CAs is challenging, since the
movements have to be meaningful and natural, reflecting the coupling between
gestures and speech. Studies in the past have mainly relied on rule-based or
data-driven approaches. Rule-based methods focus on creating meaningful
behaviors conveying the underlying message, but the gestures cannot be easily
synchronized with speech. Data-driven approaches, especially speech-driven
models, can capture the relationship between speech and gestures. However, they
create behaviors disregarding the meaning of the message. This study proposes
to bridge the gap between these two approaches overcoming their limitations.
The approach builds a dynamic Bayesian network (DBN), where a discrete variable
is added to constrain the behaviors on the underlying constraint. The study
implements and evaluates the approach with two constraints: discourse functions
and prototypical behaviors. By constraining on the discourse functions (e.g.,
questions), the model learns the characteristic behaviors associated with a
given discourse class learning the rules from the data. By constraining on
prototypical behaviors (e.g., head nods), the approach can be embedded in a
rule-based system as a behavior realizer creating trajectories that are timely
synchronized with speech. The study proposes a DBN structure and a training
approach that (1) models the cause-effect relationship between the constraint
and the gestures, (2) initializes the state configuration models increasing the
range of the generated behaviors, and (3) captures the differences in the
behaviors across constraints by enforcing sparse transitions between shared and
exclusive states per constraint. Objective and subjective evaluations
demonstrate the benefits of the proposed approach over an unconstrained model.Comment: 13 pages, 12 figures, 5 table
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