Mental vision:a computer graphics platform for virtual reality, science and education

Despite the wide amount of computer graphics frameworks and solutions available for virtual reality, it is still difficult to find a perfect one fitting at the same time the many constraints of research and educational contexts. Advanced functionalities and user-friendliness, rendering speed and portability, or scalability and image quality are opposite characteristics rarely found into a same approach. Furthermore, fruition of virtual reality specific devices like CAVEs or wearable systems is limited by their costs and accessibility, being most of these innovations reserved to institutions and specialists able to afford and manage them through strong background knowledge in programming. Finally, computer graphics and virtual reality are a complex and difficult matter to learn, due to the heterogeneity of notions a developer needs to practice with before attempting to implement a full virtual environment. In this thesis we describe our contributions to these topics, assembled in what we called the Mental Vision platform. Mental Vision is a framework composed of three main entities. First, a teaching/research oriented graphics engine, simplifying access to 2D/3D real-time rendering on mobile devices, personal computers and CAVE systems. Second, a series of pedagogical modules to introduce and practice computer graphics and virtual reality techniques. Third, two advanced VR systems: a wearable, lightweight and handsfree mixed reality setup, and a four sides CAVE designed through off the shelf hardware. In this dissertation we explain our conceptual, architectural and technical approach, pointing out how we managed to create a robust and coherent solution reducing complexity related to cross-platform and multi-device 3D rendering, and answering simultaneously to contradictory common needs of computer graphics and virtual reality for researchers and students. A series of case studies evaluates how Mental Vision concretely satisfies these needs and achieves its goals on in vitro benchmarks and in vivo scientific and educational projects

Digital visceral: textural play and the flamboyant gesture in digital screen violence

Screen violence continues to be marked by strategies that emerged in the late 1960s – what Arthur Penn called the ‘ballet of blood’ in films like Bonnie and Clyde and the Wild Bunch – specifically, a combination of temporal elasticity, graphic detail, and the flamboyant elaboration of the physical effects of violence. Yet the affordances of computer-generated images appear to be intensifying these strategies. Today audiences are, in Sean Cubitt’s words, ‘connoisseurs of compositing’ (2013) that have a tactile understanding of the inherent discreteness of the elements of the digital composite. As a result, contemporary films are eschewing the dominant tendency of the 1990s and early 2000s to construct so-called ‘seamless’ digital composite, and producing sequences of digital screen violence that are frequently characterized by a refusal of seamlessness and an impulse towards increased flamboyance, abstraction and textural play that is more familiar from histories of exploitation cinema and the repeatable logics of videogame violence and YouTube mash-ups. This paper will analyse the aesthetic characteristics and the phenomenological appeals of this recent evolution in screen violence, mapping an audio-visual field that is persistently marked by a textural dissonance between haptic imagery and geometric abstraction

Experimental Music and Collaboration: Developing Artistry Through Performance Practice

This project locates collaboration and collaborative performance as a potential site for artistic growth. This study analyzes six collaborative projects: composed pieces for electric guitar accompanying a staged performance of collaged texts, an audio-visual installation, the preparation of several short pieces to accompany choreographed dances, a 90-minute soundtrack to a performance mixed live, an ongoing improvisational duo, and a live visuals performance to accompany Sunburned Hand of the Man at Duke University. It traces the growth of my artistry while also providing a method for both doing and writing about collaboration. In addition, it offers a model for understanding collaborative compensation and evaluating collaborative structures. The study begins in 2015 at the beginning of my master’s degree coursework and ends in 2022 with the completion of this dissertation. Each chapter analyzes a unique performance I contributed to and provides a brief overview of the project, discusses my background with my collaborator, reviews any planning work, maps the influences that informed my creative choices, offers a description of my methods, recalls my memories of the performance event, and ends with a reflection on the collaborative process. The conclusion of this study explores collaboration across power dynamics and offers several models for collaborative structures and possibilities for payment and compensation both in academic and in popular and professional contexts

Augmented reality in architecture degree: new approaches in scene illumination and user evaluation

Postprint (published version