Facilitating Mechanical Design with Augmented Reality

By enhancing a real scene with computer generated objects, Augmented Reality (AR), has proven itself as a valuable Human-Computer Interface (HCI) in numerous application areas such as medical, military, entertainment and manufacturing. It enables higher performance of on-site tasks with seamless presentation of up-to-date, task-related information to the users during the operation. AR has potentials in design because the current interface provided by Computer-aided Design (CAD) packages is less intuitive and reports show that the presence of physical objects help design thinking and communication. This research explores the use of AR to improve the efficiency of a design process, specifically in mechanical design.Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA

Exile on Main Street. The Desert as Internalising Territory

The desert has traditionally been considered as background. For the history of Modern architecture it forms a backdrop, a place in which to contemplate the metropolis from without. The architect withdraws to the desert escaping the metropolis. Moving away from the understanding of the desert as ‘exterior’, the thesis postulates the possibility of understanding it as ‘threshold’, a space that mediates the relationships of the metropolis with its exteriors. Revisiting the journeys of characters like Maxime du Camp, Gustave Flaubert, Le Corbusier, Raymond Roussel, Michel Leiris, Aldo van Eyck or Herman Haan, a different conception of the desert is generated: one in which the landscape is not relegated to the background but actively engages with the figure, highlighting moments of transition—of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. Questions that have become to the fore in contemporary post-colonial discussions. In that movement, a main historical process is focused: the desert has been utilised as mechanism of internalisation. With internalisation I point to the historical process through which the modern city appropriates or absorbs within it what was excluded or defined as its outside. I look at this process particularly in the case of the modern metropolis. In this case, three main steps describe the mechanism of internalisation. First, there’s a definition of the self over a background of the other. The modern metropolis is not that much defined by its own extremely heterogeneous identity. In a more legible way, the metropolis is defined by via negativa, by setting out what the metropolis is not. In a second step, the ‘exterior’ –‘that what the metropolis-is-not’ – starts to be defined as something specific. It is not, then, an ever-expanding backdrop; but rather a bounded area within the background. It is the moment highlighted by the travellers setting out from the metropolis. Their fascination is with something specific – the categories of the exotic, the irrational, the primitive, etc. A fascination that is a reaction to the situation back home. The trouble with these ‘findings’, these exteriors, is precisely in that; they are highly entangled with the condition they were fleeing from – even if it is in a reverse way. In the final step, that category is imported back into the metropolis. While originally intended as exteriors, spaces of critique vis-à-vis the metropolis, the categories paradoxically make their way back into the metropolis, into spaces that collect, contain and, overall, put a boundary around their experiences. In this paradoxical movement, the process of internalisation is a peculiar mechanism with which the metropolis moves forward: capturing exteriors, appropriating or absorbing within what was originally excluded. The thesis is organised as a journey, following the steps of specific travellers. Each chapter deals with one particular character travelling at one particular time. These are organised in three clusters each of which deals with one specific category that was crucial for Colonialism, and that has been highlighted by post-colonial critique—identity, vision and knowledge. For these categories, I would argue, the desert supposed bringing the colonial enterprise to its limits. The desert supposed a locus in which colonialism was not unfolding as power struggle; quite the opposite, it was precisely these ‘being-out- of-control’ that became a different form of colonial appropriation. A territory that absorbs ‘median categories’ – as Edward Said sees them – not completely familiar, not completely alien. In that sense, the desert poses a relevant question to the contemporary fascination with the exteriors of Modernity. The desert remits to Bhabha’s Third Space of enunciation, a crucial area for post-colonial studies as it is where that negotiation between cultures takes place. There, Bhabha sees the potential to overcome colonial cultural appropriations into a hybrid encounter. As Bhabha proposes, “(f)or a willingness to descend into that alien territory(...) may reveal that the theoretical recognition of the split-space of enunciation may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity. (…) It makes it possible to begin envisaging national, anti- nationalist histories of the ‘people’. And by exploring this Third Space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves.” (The Location of Culture, p. 38-39) While it is still a possible fruitful terrain for contemporary cultural encounters, and a crucial quest that should continue, revisiting the stories of these characters in the desert pose the risk of the Third Space of enunciation becoming a space for internalisation rather than Bhabha’s internationalisation

The poetics of hermeticism: Andre Breton's shift towards the occult in the War years

André Breton, leader of the Surrealist movement, which he had founded with others in 1924 in the wake of the First World War, left Nazi-occupied France in 1941. Sailing from Marseilles, with an enforced three week stop in Martinique while waiting for onward passage, he chose to carry the spirit of Surrealism into ‘exile’ in the United States until 1946, rather than risk its extinction by remaining in war-torn Europe. Following his journey into exile, this thesis traces the trajectory of Breton’s thought and poetic output of 1941–1948, studying the major works written during those years and following his ever deeper research into hermeticism, myth and the occult in his quest for “un mythe nouveau” for the post-war world. Having abandoned political action on leaving the Communist Party in 1935, he nonetheless remained preoccupied with political thought, searching to find a means of creating a better society for a shattered post-war world, while at the same time maintaining a close connection between art and life. Realizing that any political system would inflect Surrealism to its own ends, Breton sought to find a means of achieving his aim through a return to the role of the ‘poet-mage’ of Romanticism. We follow the poet on his quest during these years, revealing his in-depth exploration of the tenets of Romanticism in which he discovers the roots of Surrealism, demonstrating also how he was affected by his re-reading of Victor Hugo, with whom he identifies to a certain extent during his time in exile. We study his poetic output of these years, in which we follow from their earliest stages indications of the shift in direction, away from political action towards hermeticism and the occult. On his return to France in 1946, we see Breton come under sustained attack from his detractors for his journey into hermeticism. Undaunted, he holds to his course, apparently unaware of his misreading of the spirit of the time. Although Surrealism is far from dead, its leader seems from this time to lose his creative inspiration and while his writing continues, his poetic output dwindles to almost nothing. However, even some years after Breton’s death, Julien Gracq predicts that it is “no longer unreasonable to imagine […] that one day Surrealism will have an heir, a movement whose form we cannot predict”

Realidade aumentada aplicada ao design

Este artigo apresenta o estado da arte da Realidade Aumentada aplicada ao design. São apresentados exemplos de aplicações da Realidade Aumentada em áreas como design de produtos, arquitetura, indústria automotiva, educação e design colaborativo. Também é apresentada uma rápida visão geral sobre as tecnologias envolvidas na criação de aplicações de Realidade Aumentada.Postprint (published version

Realidade aumentada aplicada ao design

Este artigo apresenta o estado da arte da Realidade Aumentada aplicada ao design. São apresentados exemplos de aplicações da Realidade Aumentada em áreas como design de produtos, arquitetura, indústria automotiva, educação e design colaborativo. Também é apresentada uma rápida visão geral sobre as tecnologias envolvidas na criação de aplicações de Realidade Aumentada.Postprint (published version

IMPROVE: collaborative design review in mobile mixed reality

In this paper we introduce an innovative application designed to make collaborative design review in the architectural and automotive domain more effective. For this purpose we present a system architecture which combines variety of visualization displays such as high resolution multi-tile displays, TabletPCs and head-mounted displays with innovative 2D and 3D Interaction Paradigms to better support collaborative mobile mixed reality design reviews. Our research and development is motivated by two use scenarios: automotive and architectural design review involving real users from Page\Park architects and FIAT Elasis. Our activities are supported by the EU IST project IMPROVE aimed at developing advanced display techniques, fostering activities in the areas of: optical see-through HMD development using unique OLED technology, marker-less optical tracking, mixed reality rendering, image calibration for large tiled displays, collaborative tablet-based and projection wall oriented interaction and stereoscopic video streaming for mobile users. The paper gives an overview of the hardware and software developments within IMPROVE and concludes with results from first user tests

Surfing the interzones: posthuman geographies in twentieth century literature and film

This dissertation presents an analysis of posthuman texts through a discussion of posthuman landscapes, bodies, and communities in literature and film. In the introduction, I explore and situate the relatively recent term posthuman in relation to definitions proposed by other theorists, including N. Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, Hans Moravec, Max More, and Francis Fukuyama. I position the posthuman as being primarily celebratory about the collapse of restrictive human boundaries such as gender and race, yet also containing within it more disturbing elements of the uncanny and apocalyptic. My project deals primarily with hybrid texts, in which the posthuman intersects and overlaps with other posts, including postmodernism and postcolonialism. In the first chapter, I examine the novels comprising J.G. Ballard's disaster series, and apply Bakhtin's theories of hybridization, and Deleuze and Guattari's notions of voyagings, becomings, and bodies without organs to delineate the elements that constitute a posthuman landscape. In the second chapter, I address Andy Warhol, Valerie Solanas, and Werner Herzog in terms of issues of identity, mechanization, and replication with regards to the posthuman. In chapter three, I turn to posthuman cinema, and apply the notion of the cyborg to the work of David Lynch, as well as delineate the elements that constitute a posthuman film through a discussion of the Danish Dogme 95 film movement. In chapter four, I extend my discussion of modified bodies to address texts by Iain Banks and Angela Carter in terms of gender disruptions and new myths for the posthuman age. The final chapter, Second Life vs. The Mole People, examines both the optimism that the posthuman provides and also th tangible, social cost of the posthuman, through a juxtaposition of the elite metaverse of Second Life with the homeless subway tunnel dwellers in New York City, termed the mole people

Design and Evaluation of a Virtual Reality-Based Car Configuration Concept

The Daimler AG provided a concept preview towards the individualization of interior trim parts at the International Motor Show in September 2017, which was named unleash the color. At the show, a tablet computer was used to enable the configuration of a car. The configuration output, in turn, could be either directly previewed on the tablet computer or experienced using a virtual reality application. However, as the car configuration procedure is usually performed iteratively, a user experiences frequent context switches of the used software application, which often leads to an embittered perceived user experience and usability. To remedy these drawbacks, one promising approach constitutes the idea to integrate the configuration procedure into a proper virtual reality application. The work at hand presents Xconcept, which draws upon various state-of-the-art approaches from the field of human-computer interaction to provide a suitable car configuration procedure based on a virtual reality setting. Among other important factors, one fundamental goal of Xconcept constitutes the perceived user experience independently of age, gender, or previous virtual reality experiences. To evaluate whether or not this can be achieved with Xconcept, we conducted a study with employees of the Daimler AG. Although the results of the study reveal that with rising age, the rating of the Xconcept deteriorates, the overall user experience and usability has been rated positively. Interestingly, gender and previous experiences with virtual reality applications had no significant effect on the rating of the user experience. Altogether, Xconcept shows valuable insights to ease the car configuration procedure based on a proper virtual reality setting

Hearsay, Testimony and Conference: Citationality in the Works of Marguerite Duras, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida.

This dissertation involves an examination of the effects and implications of three modes of citationality: hearsay, testimony and conference. As a term coined by Jacques Derrida, citationality involves the problematization of questions related to borders and limits and to the attempt to re-present the originary event thought to lie beyond the performance of citational acts of bearing witness. In chapter one I situate my project theoretically through an examination of the principles of deconstruction. In particular, Jacques Derrida\u27s work on the metaphysical concepts of presence and speech, in terms of repeatability or iterability, bears heavily on my study. As a function of iterability, citationality refers to the potential inherent in every element, textual, linguistic, or otherwise, to be disseminated and cited in a plurality of contexts and to assume a new and different meaning. It is from this perspective, from the possibility of citation, of exceeding limits and escaping regulation, that I conduct my analysis of what I call hearsay, testimony and conference in certain twentieth century texts. Chapters two through four focus on an application of the previously mentioned modes of citationality in the texts of Marguerite Duras, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, respectively. In chapter two, I examine Marguerite Duras\u27 Lol V. Stein cycle in which a reliance on hearsay impedes textual closure while generating a multiplicity of other texts that cite and re-cite one another. In chapter three, I analyze several recits by Maurice Blanchot in terms of testimony. These texts reveal the problematic in attempting to access and re-present that which has already been present and result in an effect of mise-en-abime of citations. Chapter four involves a reading of several polylogues by Jacques Derrida as instances of conference. Their insistence on a plurality of voices enables a deconstruction of the logos of restitution. While chapters two through four are devoted to a narrow application of a practice of citationality, chapter five marks the expansion of my topic. In this chapter, I situate previously raised questions of citationality in contemporary contexts with political and cultural implications