An XRI Mixed-Reality Internet-of-Things Architectural Framework Toward Immersive and Adaptive Smart Environments

The internet-of-things (IoT) refers to the growing number of embedded interconnected devices within everyday ubiquitous objects and environments, especially their networks, edge controllers, data gathering and management, sharing, and contextual analysis capabilities. However, the IoT suffers from inherent limitations in terms of human-computer interaction. In this landscape, there is a need for interfaces that have the potential to translate the IoT more solidly into the foreground of everyday smart environments, where its users are multimodal, multifaceted, and where new forms of presentation, adaptation, and immersion are essential. This work highlights the synergetic opportunities for both IoT and XR to converge toward hybrid XR objects with strong real-world connectivity, and IoT objects with rich XR interfaces. The paper contributes i) an understanding of this multi-disciplinary domain XR-IoT (XRI); ii) a theoretical perspective on how to design XRI agents based on the literature; iii) a system design architectural framework for XRI smart environment development; and iv) an early discussion of this process. It is hoped that this research enables future researchers in both communities to better understand and deploy hybrid smart XRI environments

Aqua Granda Una memoria collettiva digitale / Aqua Granda A digital community memory

This book documents the project Aqua Granda, a digital community memory launched on 12 Novem- ber 2020 by the EU H2020 ODYCCEUS project and Science Gallery Venice. It contains background on the historical roots of digital community memories and on today’s role of social media and describes the meteorological phenomena that give rise to big floods in Venice and their impact on the architecture of the city. It details how a digital community memory has been set up about the Aqua Granda floods in Venice and documents the exhibition Navigating Aqua Granda, a digital community memory in which a number of ODYCCEUS scientists and artists show how they have explored this digital community memory to help create memorials for these devastating events

Radio evolution: conference proceedings

Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

With All Due Modesty: The Selected Letters of Fanny Goldstein

With All Due Modesty: The Selected Letters of Fanny Goldstein is an annotated edition of the correspondence of Fanny Goldstein (1895–1961), librarian, social activist, and founder of Jewish Book Week. Goldstein’s accomplishments include building a significant collection of Judaica for the Boston Public Library; compiling some of the earliest bibliographies of Jewish literature in English; evaluating manuscripts for publishers; writing book reviews; and lecturing and writing on a wide range of subjects related to Jews and Judaism. The purpose of the edition is to provide a picture of Goldstein’s life as a Jew, a woman, a librarian, and a social activist and in so doing, to contribute to a more complete understanding of Boston’s Jewish community in the first half of the twentieth century. I have included in the edition both incoming and outgoing letters with a wide range of correspondents, including Charles Angoff, Mary Antin, Isaac Asimov, Alice Stone Blackwell, Felix Frankfurter, Molly Picon, Ellery Sedgwick, and Friderike Zweig. The letters span the years from 1930 to 1960. The edition includes extensive annotation based on Goldstein’s newspaper and magazine articles, pamphlets, book reviews, and other writings; hundreds of Goldstein’s letters not published here; accounts published in the Jewish press and the mainstream press; and correspondence neither written nor received by Goldstein but bearing on her life and work

Sonic interactions in virtual environments

This book tackles the design of 3D spatial interactions in an audio-centered and audio-first perspective, providing the fundamental notions related to the creation and evaluation of immersive sonic experiences. The key elements that enhance the sensation of place in a virtual environment (VE) are: Immersive audio: the computational aspects of the acoustical-space properties of Virutal Reality (VR) technologies Sonic interaction: the human-computer interplay through auditory feedback in VE VR systems: naturally support multimodal integration, impacting different application domains Sonic Interactions in Virtual Environments will feature state-of-the-art research on real-time auralization, sonic interaction design in VR, quality of the experience in multimodal scenarios, and applications. Contributors and editors include interdisciplinary experts from the fields of computer science, engineering, acoustics, psychology, design, humanities, and beyond. Their mission is to shape an emerging new field of study at the intersection of sonic interaction design and immersive media, embracing an archipelago of existing research spread in different audio communities and to increase among the VR communities, researchers, and practitioners, the awareness of the importance of sonic elements when designing immersive environments

Science, Education and Social Vision of Five Nineteenth Century Headmasters

From Waterloo to the First World War, British teachers associated with four selected schools expected their students to improve social conditions in Britain. They used advanced teaching methods, provided world views and opportunities for informal learning. Their school costs were above average. Robert Owen, Richard Dawes and Frederick Sanderson became associated with conservative groups which eventually undid their attainments. George Edmondson, then Charles Willmore, free of opposition, continued until market forces closed their school

The Winter of Russia’s Discontent

This book aims to trace the different directions that Russia has taken after initiating its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. The authors, coming from positions of policy, academia, and practice, employ a transdisciplinary approach to critically engage the question of how Russia as an actor will develop in such an altered paradigm through three lines of argumentation. The first of these themes is centred on Russia’s relations with other major powers and how these ligatures might condition future developments in a global perspective. The second topic relates the effect of the ‘Russian idea’ on domestic dynamics within Russia, as well as with how it has coloured understandings of Russia in the West. Finally, the authors discuss possible future weaknesses for Russia and question whether they will actually be as serious as previously thought. While no singular to the guiding answer can be posited, these dialogues nonetheless contribute to building a solid foundation for discussions within and between transatlantic capitals as well as globally

What Opportunities For Storytelling Might Near-future Technologies Offer Creatives, And How Might Personal Data Affect This?

A common feature of storytelling, at least when it comes to a western, and classical perspective, is that of linearity. Stories often have a single path through them that the content of the story, the Fabula, is arranged along, with this arrangement of the content of the story, the Syuzhet, often being dictated by a single authorial voice. However, a rise in technology and an audience’s willingness to experience new storytelling methods has helped give rise to more experimentation, leading to the popularisation of audience-controlled linearity and interactive storytelling. There can be tension within this way of telling stories as it is commonly believed that in order to increase the interactive quality of a story you have to reduce the quality of the narrative, with some storytellers and researchers approaching narrative and interactivity as opposing forces. I believe that, by doing this, researchers and artists are accidentally limiting the scope of the combinations of Narrative and Interactivity they consider when researching these qualities of storytelling experiences. Narrative and Interactivity are neutral and complex features that can be mediated in different ways throughout a storytelling experience to create enjoyment in an audience, one of the main aims of most stories. Perhaps the multi-faceted nature of enjoyment has made reliably researching it seem difficult, futile, or even perhaps unscientific in the past, but using Roth’s (2015) battery of experimentally valid enjoyment questionnaires allows me to examine the enjoyment elicited in responses to an interactive narrative experience in an experimentally valid and appropriately detailed way. This means that I should be able to derive which quantities and qualities of interactivity and narrative create or hinder the creation of not just enjoyment in an audience, but specific facets and flavours of audience enjoyment. In order to test this hypothesis I had to build an interactive storytelling experience that could vary its amount of Narrative or Interactivity, and it became apparent while doing this that the system that runs this, a branching narrative that presented different video clips depending on audience responses, could also be used to run the research itself, not just deliver the narrative content of the research experience. Using this system, and taking inspiration from my experience with making interactive digital theatre and using magician’s crowd control techniques, such as the Equivoque Force or Barnum Statements, an automated researcher was created to help brief the participants, calibrate the audience behaviour data tracking system, and deliver quantitative and qualitative data collection procedures to the audience. This researcher felt lifelike without the use of complicated AI or machine learning by using a clever mix of simple narrative path systems and a careful anticipation of likely participant responses. The effectiveness of this sort of automated researcher was also investigated as part of this thesis. I found: • Various new methodologies that have wide uses for different researchers, including the automated research assistant and a way of analysing and comparing digital theatre experiences, called a Dramatography, as well as continued evidence for the use of a Performance Led Research and Rapid Iterative Prototyping a valuable methodology for examining these sorts of creative research questions. • In spite of the theory concerning the balance of Interactivity and Narrative, I found that a narratively rich and meaningfully interactive experience is achievable via a creative, low- resource methodology, that a minimal use of easy-to-measure audience behaviour data is required to create the feeling of meaningful interactivity and liveness, and that the type of audience behaviour data used to create that feeling didn’t have a significant effect on audience enjoyment. • That a majority of participants had positive things to say about the automated research assistant and found the experience of undergoing the research user-friendly in spite of the lack of a human researcher, meaning that a scalable and on-demand research methodology for both complex quantitative and qualitative data collection, with a recognisably human face, is possible