Research students exhibition catalogue 2011

The catalogue demonstrates the scope and vibrancy of current inquiries and pays tribute to the creative capacity and investment of UCA research students. It brings together contributions from students who are at different stages in their research ad/venture. Their explorations are connected by the centrality of contemporary material practices as focal point for the reconsideration of societal values, cultural symbols and rituals and their meaning, and the trans/formation of individual, collective and national identities The media and formats employed range from cloth, jewellery and ceramics to analogue film, the human voice and the representation of dress and fashionin virtual environments. Thematic interests span from explorations at the interface of art and medical science to an investigation of the role of art in contested spaces, or the role of metonymy in ‘how the arts think’ And whilst the projects are motivated by personal curiosity and passion, their outcomes transcend the boundaries of individual practice and offer new insights, under-standing and applications for the benefit of wider society. Prof. Kerstin Me

HoME: a Household Multimodal Environment

We introduce HoME: a Household Multimodal Environment for artificial agents to learn from vision, audio, semantics, physics, and interaction with objects and other agents, all within a realistic context. HoME integrates over 45,000 diverse 3D house layouts based on the SUNCG dataset, a scale which may facilitate learning, generalization, and transfer. HoME is an open-source, OpenAI Gym-compatible platform extensible to tasks in reinforcement learning, language grounding, sound-based navigation, robotics, multi-agent learning, and more. We hope HoME better enables artificial agents to learn as humans do: in an interactive, multimodal, and richly contextualized setting.Comment: Presented at NIPS 2017's Visually-Grounded Interaction and Language Worksho

Visual communication in urban planning and urban design

This report documents the current status of visual communication in urban design and planning. Visual communication is examined through discussion of standalone and network media, specifically concentrating on visualisation on the World Wide Web(WWW).Firstly, we examine the use of Solid and Geometric Modelling for visualising urban planning and urban design. This report documents and compares examples of the use of Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML) and proprietary WWW based Virtual Reality modelling software. Examples include the modelling of Bath and Glasgow using both VRML 1.0 and 2.0. A review is carried out on the use of Virtual Worldsand their role in visualising urban form within multi-user environments. The use of Virtual Worlds is developed into a case study of the possibilities and limitations of Virtual Internet Design Arenas (ViDAs), an initiative undertaken at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London. The use of Virtual Worlds and their development towards ViDAs is seen as one of the most important developments in visual communication for urban planning and urban design since the development plan.Secondly, photorealistic media in the process of communicating plans is examined.The process of creating photorealistic media is documented, examples of the Virtual Streetscape and Wired Whitehall Virtual Urban Interface System are provided. The conclusion is drawn that although the use of photo-realistic media on the WWW provides a way to visually communicate planning information, its use is limited. The merging of photorealistic media and solid geometric modelling is reviewed in the creation of Augmented Reality. Augmented Reality is seen to provide an important step forward in the ability to quickly and easily visualise urban planning and urban design information.Thirdly, the role of visual communication of planning data through GIS is examined interms of desktop, three dimensional and Internet based GIS systems. The evolution to Internet GIS is seen as a critical component in the development of virtual cities which will allow urban planners and urban designers to visualise and model the complexity of the built environment in networked virtual reality.Finally a viewpoint is put forward of the Virtual City, linking Internet GIS with photorealistic multi-user Virtual Worlds. At present there are constraints on how far virtual cities can be developed, but a view is provided on how these networked virtual worlds are developing to aid visual communication in urban planning and urban design

Mixed reality participants in smart meeting rooms and smart home enviroments

Human–computer interaction requires modeling of the user. A user profile typically contains preferences, interests, characteristics, and interaction behavior. However, in its multimodal interaction with a smart environment the user displays characteristics that show how the user, not necessarily consciously, verbally and nonverbally provides the smart environment with useful input and feedback. Especially in ambient intelligence environments we encounter situations where the environment supports interaction between the environment, smart objects (e.g., mobile robots, smart furniture) and human participants in the environment. Therefore it is useful for the profile to contain a physical representation of the user obtained by multi-modal capturing techniques. We discuss the modeling and simulation of interacting participants in a virtual meeting room, we discuss how remote meeting participants can take part in meeting activities and they have some observations on translating research results to smart home environments