Seventh Annual Workshop on Space Operations Applications and Research (SOAR 1993), volume 1

This document contains papers presented at the Space Operations, Applications and Research Symposium (SOAR) Symposium hosted by NASA/Johnson Space Center (JSC) on August 3-5, 1993, and held at JSC Gilruth Recreation Center. SOAR included NASA and USAF programmatic overview, plenary session, panel discussions, panel sessions, and exhibits. It invited technical papers in support of U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, Department of Energy, NASA, and USAF programs in the following areas: robotics and telepresence, automation and intelligent systems, human factors, life support, and space maintenance and servicing. SOAR was concerned with Government-sponsored research and development relevant to aerospace operations. More than 100 technical papers, 17 exhibits, a plenary session, several panel discussions, and several keynote speeches were included in SOAR '93

Applications of Virtual Reality

Information Technology is growing rapidly. With the birth of high-resolution graphics, high-speed computing and user interaction devices Virtual Reality has emerged as a major new technology in the mid 90es, last century. Virtual Reality technology is currently used in a broad range of applications. The best known are games, movies, simulations, therapy. From a manufacturing standpoint, there are some attractive applications including training, education, collaborative work and learning. This book provides an up-to-date discussion of the current research in Virtual Reality and its applications. It describes the current Virtual Reality state-of-the-art and points out many areas where there is still work to be done. We have chosen certain areas to cover in this book, which we believe will have potential significant impact on Virtual Reality and its applications. This book provides a definitive resource for wide variety of people including academicians, designers, developers, educators, engineers, practitioners, researchers, and graduate students

Annual Report 2020-2021

LETTER FROM THE DEAN As I write this letter during the beginning of the 2021–22 academic year, we have started to welcome the majority of our students to campus— many for the very first time, and some for the first time in a year and a half. It has been wonderful to be together, in-person, again. Four quarters of learning and working remotely was challenging, to be sure, but I have been consistently amazed by the resilience, innovation, and hard work of our students, faculty, and staff, even in the most difficult of circumstances. This annual report, covering the 2020–21 academic year—one that was entirely virtual—highlights many of those examples: from a second place national ranking by our Security Daemons team to hosting a blockbuster virtual screenwriting conference with top talent; from gaming grants helping us reach historically excluded youth to alumni successes across our three schools. Recently, I announced that, after 40 years at DePaul and 15 years as the Dean of CDM, I will be stepping down from the deanship at the end of the 2021–22 academic year. I began my tenure at DePaul in 1981 as an assistant professor, with the founding of the Department of Computer Science, joining seven faculty members who were leaving the mathematics department for this new venture. It has been amazing to watch our college grow during that time. We now have more than 40 undergraduate and graduate degree programs, over 22,000 college alumni, and a catalog of nationally ranked programs. And we plan to keep going. If there is anything I’ve learned at CDM, it’s that a lot can be accomplished in a year (as this report shows), and I’m committed to working hard and continuing the progress we’ve made together in 2021–22. David MillerDeanhttps://via.library.depaul.edu/cdmannual/1004/thumbnail.jp

Virtual Valcamonica: collaborative exploration of prehistoric petroglyphs and their surrounding environment in multi-user virtual reality

In this paper, we present a novel, multi-user, virtual reality environment for the interactive, collaborative 3D analysis of large 3D scans and the technical advancements that were necessary to build it: a multi-view rendering system for large 3D point clouds, a suitable display infrastructure and a suite of collaborative 3D interaction techniques. The cultural heritage site of Valcamonica in Italy with its large collection of prehistoric rock-art served as an exemplary use case for evaluation. The results show that our output-sensitive level-of-detail rendering system is capable of visualizing a 3D dataset with an aggregate size of more than 14 billion points at interactive frame rates. The system design in this exemplar application results from close exchange with a small group of potential users: archaeologists with expertise in rock-art and allows them to explore the prehistoric art and its spatial context with highly realistic appearance. A set of dedicated interaction techniques was developed to facilitate collaborative visual analysis. A multi-display workspace supports the immediate comparison of geographically distributed artifacts. An expert review of the final demonstrator confirmed the potential for added value in rock-art research and the usability of our collaborative interaction techniques

Report on the Information Retrieval Festival (IRFest2017)

The Information Retrieval Festival took place in April 2017 in Glasgow. The focus of the workshop was to bring together IR researchers from the various Scottish universities and beyond in order to facilitate more awareness, increased interaction and reflection on the status of the field and its future. The program included an industry session, research talks, demos and posters as well as two keynotes. The first keynote was delivered by Prof. Jaana Kekalenien, who provided a historical, critical reflection of realism in Interactive Information Retrieval Experimentation, while the second keynote was delivered by Prof. Maarten de Rijke, who argued for more Artificial Intelligence usage in IR solutions and deployments. The workshop was followed by a "Tour de Scotland" where delegates were taken from Glasgow to Aberdeen for the European Conference in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2017

Interactive Film History: The Challenge of Classification

It is widely considered that technology gave birth and continues to play a vital role in film production around the globe. Technological advancements have shaped film language and the audience experience throughout history. With the emergence of interactivity and the proliferation of new digital media and technologies, new opportunities, discourses and challenges have arisen. In this context, this paper discusses that current classification approaches are not appropriate for capturing in a comprehensive manner the multidimensional aspects of interactive film history. It is proposed that a new classification system is needed in order to map the history of interactive filmmaking and cinema, alongside the development and affordances of the different interactive technologies in use, like the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and web technologies, 360o video, Virtual and Augmented Reality, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) among others. Other prominent characteristics and practices that are considered include the enablement of either single- and/or collective multi-interaction of the audience with the moving image; the role of complex algorithms and the type of data analysis performed; technologies that make direct use of the audience’s physiology and cognitive state, such as the Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs); as well as the gamification of the film viewing experience. Accordingly, a new approach to identifying a suitable systematic structure is outlined, as opposed to recycling the conventional methods of classification, chronological order and genre categorisation

Re-presenting China in Digital Immersive Art: Virtual Reality, Imaginaries, and Cultural Presence

The thesis explores how digital technology, in particular virtual reality and augmented reality, is playing a role in China’s rejuvenation, especially in relation to cultural displays, performances, and art exhibitions. This project examines how audiences, both in China and globally, respond to ‘Digital China’, a concept describing how people’s everyday lives in China are becoming superconnected by digital technology. Qualitative methodology with a multi-perspectival approach is applied to advance the aim of the project