35 research outputs found

    Creating immersive, play-anywhere handheld augmented reality stories, through remote user testing

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    This thesis outlines new instances of Extended Reality (XR) stories as well as associated user studies with them, to create more immersive story experiences delivered at a user’s choice of location through a mobile phone. This extends prior work on Location Based Experiences (LBEs), which have typically been designed to offer a game or story at a pre-determined location. A play-anywhere experience offers potential to open up LBEs to a wider audience, as well as to those may prefer to take part individually or closer to home, such attitude shifts becoming increasingly more common. The current research adopted an in the wild approach combining practice, studies and theory, with most user data being collected remotely. Each story application developed is subsequently referred to as an app, with each app offering a bespoke story incorporating Augmented Reality (AR) features, to better bring users’ location inline with the narrative. Testing the apps across various locations matched their intended use, and resulted in new guidelines for both incorporating AR into such LBEs, as well as for conducting remote user studies. A final app offered a site-specific curated story, with all study participants taking part under similar conditions at the same location, the ability to observe them using the app providing additional insights. The story apps used available local map data alongside Handheld Augmented Reality (HAR), to overlay interactable virtual objects on top of the physical environment, and visible on the phone’s display. Guidelines from related methodologies were used to better allow for the variety of factors that might influence different users’ immersion and engagement. These included the implementation of the AR features, the story itself, real world activity, and personal preferences including onboarding requirements. The approach taken contributed a reverse methodology to a lot of related research, that would typically begin with laboratory testing before moving to public spaces. User studies with the five mobile apps contributed guidelines for such experiences, that could benefit both practitioners and researchers in related fields. In the later case, a need was identified to develop new research tools specifically suited to the subtleties of handheld play-anywhere LBEs, such issues explored within the apps tested. The guidelines identified for offering more effective XR LBEs were also implemented in the creation of a new open source Unity project, called Map Story Engine. This offers a tool to test new features, as well as providing a fully customisable template for practitioners to author their own play-anywhere HAR stories and games

    Utilizing Personality Theory To Help High School Students Find Meaningful Spiritual Growth Practices at Portland Adventist Academy in Portland, Oregon

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    The Problem Some students at Portland Adventist Academy (PAA) struggle to connect with God and many never develop personal habits of connecting with God or learn how to grow into mature relationships with God. The Method I developed twelve devotional habits designed for different personality types. Six of the habits focused on prayer and six on Scripture. I taught six religion classes for three weeks, collecting data from 100 junior and senior PAA students. Their ages spanned from 15 to 19: two students were 15 years old, thirty-eight were 16, thirty-eight were 17, twenty were 18, and two were 19. They were fairly evenly dispersed with regard to gender: fifty students identified male, forty-nine female, and one preferred not to indicate gender. With the exception of some introductory and conclusory lectures, discussions, and activities, the majority of the class periods were spent with the students practicing the devotional habits and giving me feedback. Throughout the experience, I administered several digital questionnaires to the participants using Google Forms: before we began the experience a Big Five personality instrument–Soto and John’s BFI-2 (2017), after each devotional habit exercise the Spiritual Exercise Perceived Efficacy Assessment (SEPEA), on the final day of the threeweek period an experience overview assessment, and four months later, a slightly altered version of that final assessment. A mixed methods approach, the questionnaires collected both quantitative and qualitative data, which I analyzed in Excel and SPSS. Results On both final assessments (90 participants filled out the first and 95 the second), over 71% of the participants reported the experience helped them find more meaningful ways of connecting with God. Over 70 students indicated they repeated or planned to repeat an entire habit or an activity within a habit in both the first and second final assessment. The SEPEA received positive face validity feedback and demonstrated high internal consistency, but criterion validity checks were inconclusive. I found significant correlations between personality traits and some devotional habits (for example, with N = 97, Pearson’s r = 0.369 for agreeableness and the sixth devotional habit and r = 0.323 and 0.328 for the habits designed for habits designed for those high in Perception and Intuitiveness on the Myers-Briggs respectively) and activities (for example, with N = 91, Pearson’s r = 0.319 for extraversion and group sharing activities) suggesting several personality-score-derived recommendations for spiritual practices. I saw the highest correlations between the habits themselves. When asked for feedback about the overall experience, 98 students gave some kind of positive feedback. Both quantitative results and quantitative feedback provided insights regarding changes that could be made to the intervention to make it more effective in similar contexts in the future. Conclusions This intervention is a viable way to help high school students find meaningful spiritual practices because it provides open, social, and experiential activities in a safe spiritual environment and has many spiritually positive results. These results provide more robust research support for existing literature that claims a relationship between personality and spiritual practice preferences. It also suggests, if working with a large group and using these same habits, one should introduce the habits in the order L3, L1, S6, S3, L2, S1, S2, S7, S5, S4, S8, L4 (See Appendix F for the list of habits). An additional finding suggests The SEPEA is a viable instrument for measuring perceptions of spiritual activities, but its implications and usefulness need to be further explored by use in one-on-one spiritual direction, comparison with other spirituality measures, and use with larger and varying groups. The intervention’s effect on spiritual maturation should be researched further, as well as its ability to further connect personality and spirituality if habits were designed around Big Five rather than MBTI personality factors

    Assuming Data Integrity and Empirical Evidence to The Contrary

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    Background: Not all respondents to surveys apply their minds or understand the posed questions, and as such provide answers which lack coherence, and this threatens the integrity of the research. Casual inspection and limited research of the 10-item Big Five Inventory (BFI-10), included in the dataset of the World Values Survey (WVS), suggested that random responses may be common. Objective: To specify the percentage of cases in the BRI-10 which include incoherent or contradictory responses and to test the extent to which the removal of these cases will improve the quality of the dataset. Method: The WVS data on the BFI-10, measuring the Big Five Personality (B5P), in South Africa (N=3 531), was used. Incoherent or contradictory responses were removed. Then the cases from the cleaned-up dataset were analysed for their theoretical validity. Results: Only 1 612 (45.7%) cases were identified as not including incoherent or contradictory responses. The cleaned-up data did not mirror the B5P- structure, as was envisaged. The test for common method bias was negative. Conclusion: In most cases the responses were incoherent. Cleaning up the data did not improve the psychometric properties of the BFI-10. This raises concerns about the quality of the WVS data, the BFI-10, and the universality of B5P-theory. Given these results, it would be unwise to use the BFI-10 in South Africa. Researchers are alerted to do a proper assessment of the psychometric properties of instruments before they use it, particularly in a cross-cultural setting

    Leading Towards Voice and Innovation: The Role of Psychological Contract

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    Background: Empirical evidence generally suggests that psychological contract breach (PCB) leads to negative outcomes. However, some literature argues that, occasionally, PCB leads to positive outcomes. Aim: To empirically determine when these positive outcomes occur, focusing on the role of psychological contract (PC) and leadership style (LS), and outcomes such as employ voice (EV) and innovative work behaviour (IWB). Method: A cross-sectional survey design was adopted, using reputable questionnaires on PC, PCB, EV, IWB, and leadership styles. Correlation analyses were used to test direct links within the model, while regression analyses were used to test for the moderation effects. Results: Data with acceptable psychometric properties were collected from 11 organisations (N=620). The results revealed that PCB does not lead to substantial changes in IWB. PCB correlated positively with prohibitive EV, but did not influence promotive EV, which was a significant driver of IWB. Leadership styles were weak predictors of EV and IWB, and LS only partially moderated the PCB-EV relationship. Conclusion: PCB did not lead to positive outcomes. Neither did LS influencing the relationships between PCB and EV or IWB. Further, LS only partially influenced the relationships between variables, and not in a manner which positively influence IWB

    A comparison of the CAR and DAGAR spatial random effects models with an application to diabetics rate estimation in Belgium

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    When hierarchically modelling an epidemiological phenomenon on a finite collection of sites in space, one must always take a latent spatial effect into account in order to capture the correlation structure that links the phenomenon to the territory. In this work, we compare two autoregressive spatial models that can be used for this purpose: the classical CAR model and the more recent DAGAR model. Differently from the former, the latter has a desirable property: its ρ parameter can be naturally interpreted as the average neighbor pair correlation and, in addition, this parameter can be directly estimated when the effect is modelled using a DAGAR rather than a CAR structure. As an application, we model the diabetics rate in Belgium in 2014 and show the adequacy of these models in predicting the response variable when no covariates are available

    A Statistical Approach to the Alignment of fMRI Data

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    Multi-subject functional Magnetic Resonance Image studies are critical. The anatomical and functional structure varies across subjects, so the image alignment is necessary. We define a probabilistic model to describe functional alignment. Imposing a prior distribution, as the matrix Fisher Von Mises distribution, of the orthogonal transformation parameter, the anatomical information is embedded in the estimation of the parameters, i.e., penalizing the combination of spatially distant voxels. Real applications show an improvement in the classification and interpretability of the results compared to various functional alignment methods

    Abstraction Fashion: Seeing and Making Network Abstractions and Computational Fashions

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    Human life today is enmeshed with network organisms. What we value, the ways we talk, and the subject matter we pay attention to are all dependent on and depended upon by the networks that dominate our imagination. The internet, private social platforms, and the virtual and physical supply chains that create the hardware, software, and memetic abstractions with which we think are all examples of network organisms. Each has found a viability mechanism that permits it to survive and thrive in the present moment. Each viability mechanism creates its own unique incentives for self-perpetuation, which drive the outward appearances with which we are familiar. These incentives manifest as product forms, interface abstractions, and socially optimized beliefs and identities. To grapple with what drives the abstractions these network organisms output, this dissertation builds a worldview for seeing and making with computational networks. Computing machines are composed of abstractions, simulate abstractions, and project their abstractions onto the world. Creating in this medium requires resources that can be acquired through attention manipulation and fashion performance. The text culminates in an appendix documenting ewaste club, an art research-creation project that combines wearable cameras, supply chain inspired fashion, and disposable computers. Through a mixture of practical projects, historical analysis, and technical explanation, this dissertation proposes several new concepts linking fashion, the arts, and computation to making in the time of networks

    Proceedings of the 21st International Congress of Aesthetics, Possible Worlds of Contemporary Aesthetics Aesthetics Between History, Geography and Media

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    The Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade and the Society for Aesthetics of Architecture and Visual Arts of Serbia (DEAVUS) are proud to be able to organize the 21st ICA Congress on “Possible Worlds of Contemporary Aesthetics: Aesthetics Between History, Geography and Media”. We are proud to announce that we received over 500 submissions from 56 countries, which makes this Congress the greatest gathering of aestheticians in this region in the last 40 years. The ICA 2019 Belgrade aims to map out contemporary aesthetics practices in a vivid dialogue of aestheticians, philosophers, art theorists, architecture theorists, culture theorists, media theorists, artists, media entrepreneurs, architects, cultural activists and researchers in the fields of humanities and social sciences. More precisely, the goal is to map the possible worlds of contemporary aesthetics in Europe, Asia, North and South America, Africa and Australia. The idea is to show, interpret and map the unity and diverseness in aesthetic thought, expression, research, and philosophies on our shared planet. Our goal is to promote a dialogue concerning aesthetics in those parts of the world that have not been involved with the work of the International Association for Aesthetics to this day. Global dialogue, understanding and cooperation are what we aim to achieve. That said, the 21st ICA is the first Congress to highlight the aesthetic issues of marginalised regions that have not been fully involved in the work of the IAA. This will be accomplished, among others, via thematic round tables discussing contemporary aesthetics in East Africa and South America. Today, aesthetics is recognized as an important philosophical, theoretical and even scientific discipline that aims at interpreting the complexity of phenomena in our contemporary world. People rather talk about possible worlds or possible aesthetic regimes rather than a unique and consistent philosophical, scientific or theoretical discipline
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