Viewing the Future? Virtual Reality In Journalism

Journalism underwent a flurry of virtual reality content creation, production and distribution starting in the final months of 2015. The New York Times distributed more than 1 million cardboard virtual reality viewers and released an app showing a spherical video short about displaced refugees. The Los Angeles Times landed people next to a crater on Mars. USA TODAY took visitors on a ride-along in the "Back to the Future" car on the Universal Studios lot and on a spin through Old Havana in a bright pink '57 Ford. ABC News went to North Korea for a spherical view of a military parade and to Syria to see artifacts threatened by war. The Emblematic Group, a company that creates virtual reality content, followed a woman navigating a gauntlet of anti- abortion demonstrators at a family planning clinic and allowed people to witness a murder-suicide stemming from domestic violence.In short, the period from October 2015 through February 2016 was one of significant experimentation with virtual reality (VR) storytelling. These efforts are part of an initial foray into determining whether VR is a feasible way to present news. The year 2016 is shaping up as a period of further testing and careful monitoring of potential growth in the use of virtual reality among consumers

The Migration Of Forms: Bullet Time As Microgenre

Rehak considers the ways in which the film The Matrix branded bullet time both as technical process and stylistic convention, and discusses bullet time\u27s ancestry in image experimentation of the 1980s and 1990s. In his analysis, Rehak uses the conceptual framework of the microgenre to explore the cultural lifespan of bullet time, treating it less as a singular special effect than a package of photographic and digital techniques whose fortunes were shaped by a complex interplay of technology, narrative and style. Rehak\u27s goal is to shed light not just on bullet time, but on the changing behavior of visual texts in contemporary media. He examines an overview of special effects scholarship to date, most notably the indication that the repetition of special effects dulls their effectiveness, in part due to the changing competencies of audiences. Rehak also looks at the struggle of the filmmakers of The Matrix to craft sequels that simultaneously preserved bullet time\u27s appeal while varying it enough to ensure another breakthrough

Deep Thermal Imaging: Proximate Material Type Recognition in the Wild through Deep Learning of Spatial Surface Temperature Patterns

We introduce Deep Thermal Imaging, a new approach for close-range automatic recognition of materials to enhance the understanding of people and ubiquitous technologies of their proximal environment. Our approach uses a low-cost mobile thermal camera integrated into a smartphone to capture thermal textures. A deep neural network classifies these textures into material types. This approach works effectively without the need for ambient light sources or direct contact with materials. Furthermore, the use of a deep learning network removes the need to handcraft the set of features for different materials. We evaluated the performance of the system by training it to recognise 32 material types in both indoor and outdoor environments. Our approach produced recognition accuracies above 98% in 14,860 images of 15 indoor materials and above 89% in 26,584 images of 17 outdoor materials. We conclude by discussing its potentials for real-time use in HCI applications and future directions.Comment: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing System

Watching the Watchmen: Best Practices for Police Body Cameras

This paper examines the research on the costs and benefits of police body cameras, arguing that the devices can, if properly deployed and regulated, provide a valuable disincentive to police abuses as well as valuable evidence for punishing abuses when they occur

The colour of life: novel visualisations of population Lifestyles

Colour permeates our daily lives, yet we rarely take notice of it. In this work we utilise the SenseCam (a visual lifelogging tool), to investigte the predominant colours in one million minutes of human life that a group of 20 individuals encounter throughout their normal daily activities. We also compare the colours that different groups of people are exposed to in their typical days. This information is presented in using a novel colour-wheel visualisation which is a new means of illustrating that people are exposed to bright colours over longer durations of time during summer months, and more dark colours during winter months