2,562 research outputs found

    Personalization in cultural heritage: the road travelled and the one ahead

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    Over the last 20 years, cultural heritage has been a favored domain for personalization research. For years, researchers have experimented with the cutting edge technology of the day; now, with the convergence of internet and wireless technology, and the increasing adoption of the Web as a platform for the publication of information, the visitor is able to exploit cultural heritage material before, during and after the visit, having different goals and requirements in each phase. However, cultural heritage sites have a huge amount of information to present, which must be filtered and personalized in order to enable the individual user to easily access it. Personalization of cultural heritage information requires a system that is able to model the user (e.g., interest, knowledge and other personal characteristics), as well as contextual aspects, select the most appropriate content, and deliver it in the most suitable way. It should be noted that achieving this result is extremely challenging in the case of first-time users, such as tourists who visit a cultural heritage site for the first time (and maybe the only time in their life). In addition, as tourism is a social activity, adapting to the individual is not enough because groups and communities have to be modeled and supported as well, taking into account their mutual interests, previous mutual experience, and requirements. How to model and represent the user(s) and the context of the visit and how to reason with regard to the information that is available are the challenges faced by researchers in personalization of cultural heritage. Notwithstanding the effort invested so far, a definite solution is far from being reached, mainly because new technology and new aspects of personalization are constantly being introduced. This article surveys the research in this area. Starting from the earlier systems, which presented cultural heritage information in kiosks, it summarizes the evolution of personalization techniques in museum web sites, virtual collections and mobile guides, until recent extension of cultural heritage toward the semantic and social web. The paper concludes with current challenges and points out areas where future research is needed

    Exploring the Design Space of Extra-Linguistic Expression for Robots

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    In this paper, we explore the new design space of extra-linguistic cues inspired by graphical tropes used in graphic novels and animation to enhance the expressiveness of social robots. To achieve this, we identified a set of cues that can be used to generate expressions, including smoke/steam/fog, water droplets, and bubbles. We prototyped devices that can generate these fluid expressions for a robot and conducted design sessions where eight designers explored the use and utility of the cues in conveying the robot's internal states in various design scenarios. Our analysis of the 22 designs, the associated design justifications, and the interviews with designers revealed patterns in how each cue was used, how they were combined with nonverbal cues, and where the participants drew their inspiration from. These findings informed the design of an integrated module called EmoPack, which can be used to augment the expressive capabilities of any robot platform

    Consumer Location Based Service Perceptions and Response: a focus on Location Based Services and Emerging Mobile Lifestyles

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    Location Based Services (LBS) and electronically mediated lifestyles (e-lifestyles) represent emergent new areas with approaches (e.g. apps and e-activities) billed to change customer experiences and responses. Marketers are confronted with a challenge of understanding how consumers engage with mobile services and how to design appropriate strategies towards that (Donovan, 2013). A review of extant literature has indicated that the implementation of marketing strategies based on LBS is still in its infancy, and yet to gain widespread acceptance by consumers. The role of individual differences in consumer response to LBS is not reported in any substantive way in the literature- yet we know that e-lifestyles are now shaping different consumer responses to LBS. This PhD addresses this important area, with a focus on the role of e-lifestyles in consumer response to location-based services. The study relied on a sequential multimethod qualitative method of enquiry. Initially, in the first phase of data collection, relevant LBS websites were observed over a three-month period to explore consumer familiarity, attitudes and experience, offering some rich insights into consumer LBS awareness. In phase two of the research, specialist interviews (thirty-eight in total) were used in conjunction with cartoon tests as an effective way to establish the role of e-lifestyles, situational decision making as well as capturing actual (typical) consumer response in LBS encounters. In phase three, three focus groups were conducted with different user groups (young students, young professionals and older established working participants with families) to examine the role of individual factors in consumer LBS response. Findings in the study point to good experience with LBS with some selective engagement depending on user group profile, which broke down into ‘Involved’, ‘Observer’ or ‘Transaction’ orientations. Phase two (innovative cartoon tests) led to findings that mapped actual consumer response pathways in simulated encounters- four response pathways unique to this study emerged (immediate, delayed/future response, socially-mediated response and indifference). Findings also point towards influential individual factors such as variation on the basis of life stage, distinct patterns of proactivity and reactivity to LBS messages and the importance of situational factors on the nature of LBS response. This study contributes to the body of knowledge on LBS and e-lifestyles theory by providing deeper insights on actual consumer response process in typical LBS encounters (e.g. the UK context). It adds fresh insights into typical response processes by using specialist scenarios reflective of typical LBS encounters to map key response pathways, capturing ‘live’ customer experiences of different forms of LBS and interrogating the rationale behind individual responses using LBS scenarios. Findings also offer a clearer classification of customer response types (e.g. proactive and self-referencing LBS; reactive and cross-referencing LBS). By combining situational context, e-lifestyle and individual attributes influencing individual response to LBS in a single study, this research takes forward the argument of Weiss (2013) on the need for more in-depth examination of consumer response to LBS and takes further previous LBS adoption studies (Zhou, 2012)

    Designing a ubiquitous sensor-based platform to facilitate learning for young children in Thailand

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    Education plays an important role in helping developing nations reduce poverty and improving quality of life. Ubiquitous and mobile technologies could greatly enhance education in such regions by providing augmented access to learning. This paper presents a three-year iterative study where a ubiquitous sensor based learning platform was designed, developed and tested to support science learning among primary school students in underprivileged Northern Thailand. The platform is built upon the school’s existing mobile devices and was expanded to include sensor-based technology. Throughout the iterative design process, observations, interviews and group discussions were carried out with stakeholders. This lead to key reflections and design concepts such as the value of injecting anthropomorphic qualities into the learning device and providing personally and culturally relevant learning experiences through technology. Overall, the results outlined in this paper help contribute to knowledge regarding the design, development and implementation of ubiquitous sensor-based technology to support learning

    Designing a ubiquitous sensor-based platform to facilitate learning for young children in Thailand

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    Education plays an important role in helping developing nations reduce poverty and improving quality of life. Ubiquitous and mobile technologies could greatly enhance education in such regions by providing augmented access to learning. This paper presents a three-year iterative study where a ubiquitous sensor based learning platform was designed, developed and tested to support science learning among primary school students in underprivileged Northern Thailand. The platform is built upon the school’s existing mobile devices and was expanded to include sensor-based technology. Throughout the iterative design process, observations, interviews and group discussions were carried out with stakeholders. This lead to key reflections and design concepts such as the value of injecting anthropomorphic qualities into the learning device and providing personally and culturally relevant learning experiences through technology. Overall, the results outlined in this paper help contribute to knowledge regarding the design, development and implementation of ubiquitous sensor-based technology to support learning

    Social Interactions in Immersive Virtual Environments: People, Agents, and Avatars

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    Immersive virtual environments (IVEs) have received increased popularity with applications in many fields. IVEs aim to approximate real environments, and to make users react similarly to how they would in everyday life. An important use case is the users-virtual characters (VCs) interaction. We interact with other people every day, hence we expect others to appropriately act and behave, verbally and non-verbally (i.e., pitch, proximity, gaze, turn-taking). These expectations also apply to interactions with VCs in IVEs, and this thesis tackles some of these aspects. We present three projects that inform the area of social interactions with a VC in IVEs, focusing on non-verbal behaviours. In our first study on interactions between people, we collaborated with the Social Neuroscience group at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience from UCL on a dyad multi-modal interaction. This aims to understand the conversation dynamics, focusing on gaze and turn-taking. The results show that people have a higher frequency of gaze change (from averted to direct and vice versa) when they are being looked at compared to when they are not. When they are not being looked at, they are also directing their gaze to their partners more compared to when they are being looked at. Another contribution of this work is the automated method of annotating speech and gaze data. Next, we consider agents’ higher-level non-verbal behaviours, covering social attitudes. We present a pipeline to collect data and train a machine learning (ML) model that detects social attitudes in a user-VC interaction. Here we collaborated with two game studios: Dream Reality Interaction and Maze Theory. We present a case study for the ML pipeline on social engagement recognition for the Peaky Blinders narrative VR game from Maze Theory studio. We use a reinforcement learning algorithm with imitation learning rewards and a temporal memory element. The results show that the model trained with raw data does not generalise and performs worse (60% accuracy) than the one trained with socially meaningful data (83% accuracy). In IVEs, people embody avatars and their appearance can impact social interactions. In collaboration with Microsoft Research, we report a longitudinal study in mixed-reality on avatar appearance in real-work meetings between co-workers comparing personalised full-body realistic and cartoon avatars. The results imply that when participants use realistic avatars first, they may have higher expectations and they perceive their colleagues’ emotional states with less accuracy. Participants may also become more accustomed to cartoon avatars as time passes and the overall use of avatars may lead to less accurately perceiving negative emotions. The work presented here contributes towards the field of detecting and generating nonverbal cues for VCs in IVEs. These are also important building blocks for creating autonomous agents for IVEs. Additionally, this work contributes to the games and work industry fields through an immersive ML pipeline for detecting social attitudes and through insights into using different avatar styles over time in real-world meetings

    Prioritizing Content of Interest in Multimedia Data Compression

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    Image and video compression techniques make data transmission and storage in digital multimedia systems more efficient and feasible for the system's limited storage and bandwidth. Many generic image and video compression techniques such as JPEG and H.264/AVC have been standardized and are now widely adopted. Despite their great success, we observe that these standard compression techniques are not the best solution for data compression in special types of multimedia systems such as microscopy videos and low-power wireless broadcast systems. In these application-specific systems where the content of interest in the multimedia data is known and well-defined, we should re-think the design of a data compression pipeline. We hypothesize that by identifying and prioritizing multimedia data's content of interest, new compression methods can be invented that are far more effective than standard techniques. In this dissertation, a set of new data compression methods based on the idea of prioritizing the content of interest has been proposed for three different kinds of multimedia systems. I will show that the key to designing efficient compression techniques in these three cases is to prioritize the content of interest in the data. The definition of the content of interest of multimedia data depends on the application. First, I show that for microscopy videos, the content of interest is defined as the spatial regions in the video frame with pixels that don't only contain noise. Keeping data in those regions with high quality and throwing out other information yields to a novel microscopy video compression technique. Second, I show that for a Bluetooth low energy beacon based system, practical multimedia data storage and transmission is possible by prioritizing content of interest. I designed custom image compression techniques that preserve edges in a binary image, or foreground regions of a color image of indoor or outdoor objects. Last, I present a new indoor Bluetooth low energy beacon based augmented reality system that integrates a 3D moving object compression method that prioritizes the content of interest.Doctor of Philosoph

    CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

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    Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

    Structure evaluation of computer human animation quality

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    The University of Bedfordshire in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyThis work will give a wide survey for various techniques that are present in the field of character computer animation, which concentrates particularly on those techniques and problems involved in the production of realistic character synthesis and motion. A preliminary user study (including Questionnaire, online publishing such as flicker.com, interview, multiple choice questions, publishing on Android mobile phone, and questionnaire analysis, validation, statistical evaluation, design steps and Character Animation Observation) was conducted to explore design questions, identify users' needs, and obtain a "true story" of quality character animation and the effect of using animation as useful tools in Education. The first set of questionnaires were designed to accommodate the evaluation of animation from candidates from different walks of life, ranging from animators, gamers, teacher assistances (TA), students, teaches, professionals and researchers using and evaluating pre-prepared animated character videos scenarios, and the study outcomes has reviewed the recent advances techniques of character animation, motion editing that enable the control of complex animations by interactively blending, improving and tuning artificial or captured motions. The goal of this work was to augment the students learning intuition by providing ways to make education and learning more interesting, useful and fun objectively, in order to improve students’ respond and understanding to any subject area through the use of animation also by producing the required high quality motion, reaction, interaction and story board to viewers of the motion. We present a variety of different evaluation to the motion quality by measuring user sensitivity, observations to any noticeable artefact, usability, usefulness etc. to derive clear useful guidelines from the results, and discuss several interesting systematic trends we have uncovered in the experimental data. We also present an efficient technique for evaluating the capability of animation influence on education to fulfil the requirements of a given scenario, along with the advantages and the effect on those deficiencies of some methods commonly used to improve animation quality to serve the learning process. Finally, we propose a wide range of extensions and statistical calculation enabled by these evaluation tools, such as Wilcoxon, F-test, T-test, Wondershare Quiz creator (WQC), Chi square and many others explained with full details
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