Interface Homem-Máquina Multi Robótica em Unity3D

More than ever the use of autonomous vehicles to accomplish objectives deemed too dangerous or even impossible by human standards is increasing. This demand puts to the test our capabilities for managing teams of multiple robots and creating intuitive interactions with these teams is a must. Creating means to abstract and condense the information that reaches the end user into a single kit of software would improve its manageability considerably. The development of a centralized graphical user interface is proposed to alleviate the workload of the human operator. This interface is thought out to be simple in delivering its information taking cues from video games, a well known industry in studying the theory behind the creation of user interfaces. Sensorial information is abstracted in a graphical perspective much like the attributes of a character inside a video game. The Unity game engine was used to implement such an interface, integrating ROS with a layer of DDS to manage the communications while providing QoS settings. The DDS solves the problem of multiple ROS masters by setting up a separate network where users can connect and disconnect seamlessly from the network, without the need to restart roscore on each machine. Interactions between these two software is made by using websockets on a local network. Visual representations of the sensors onboard the autonomous vehicles transform the huge stream of data into human understandable formats for immediate response by the operator. Dynamic generation of terrain was accomplished by the use of LiDAR and side-scan sensors, if available, to map the surroundings, while Mapbox provided prefetched terrain data from OpenStreetMaps.Mais do que nunca, o uso de veículos autónomos para cumprir objectivos considerados demasiado perigosos ou até mesmo impossíveis segundo os padrões humanos tem vindo a aumentar. Este requerimento testa as nossas capacidades de gestão de equipas de múltiplos robôs e torna a criação de interações intuitivas com estas equipas numa necessidade. Criar meios de abstrair e condensar a informação que chega ao utilizador final num só pacote de software iria melhorar a sua gestão consideravelmente. O desenvolvimento de uma interface gráfica centralizada é proposta de modo a aliviar a carga de trabalho do operador humano. Esta interface é pensada para transmitir a sua informação como um vídeo jogo, sendo que esta é uma indústria que conhecida pelo seu estudo de interfaces de utilizador. Informação sensorial é abstraída com uma perspectiva gráfica tal como os atributos de uma personagem de um vídeo jogo. O motor de jogo Unity foi o utilizado para implementar tal interface integrando funcionalidades de ROS com uma camada de DDS, responsável pela gestão das comunicações, fornecendo opções de QoS. O DDS resolve o problema de múltiplos ROS master estabelecendo uma rede separada em que os utilizadores podem conectar-se e desconectar-se simultaneamente sem haver a necessidade de reiniciar o roscore em cada máquina. Interações entre os dois software é efetuada através de websockets numa rede local. Representações visuais dos sensores a bordo dos veículos autónomos transformam os enormes fluxos de dados em formatos facilmente compreensíveis por humanos para resposta imediata por parte do operador. Geração dinâmica de ambientes virtuais foi tornado possível com recurso a sensores como LiDAR e side-scan, caso existam, enquanto que API’s como Mapbox e OpenStreetMaps forneceram dados estáticos destes ambientes

Transcoding for web accessibility for the blind : semantics from structure

True accessibility requires minimizing the scanning time to find a particular piece of information. Sequentially reading web pages do not provide this type of accessibility, for instance before the user gets to the actual text content of the page it has to go through a lot of menus and headers. However if the user could navigate a web page based through semantically classified blocks then the user could jump faster to the actual content of the page, skipping all the menus and other parts of the page. We propose a transcoding engine that tackles accessibility at two distinct, yet complementary, levels: for specific known sites and general unknown sites. We present a tool for building customized scripts for known sites that turns this process in an extremely simple task, which can be performed by anyone, without any expertise. For general unknown sites, our approach relies on statistical analysis of the structural blocks that define a web page to infer a semantic for the block.(undefined

Live Life to the Power of PS2: Locating the Digital Games Industry in the New Media Environment

The digital games industry is a global entertainment business stretching from Tokyo to San Francisco to London. In May each year, game developers from around the world meet in Los Angeles to pitch their ideas to publishers, sneak a preview of other games and do licensing deals with hardware companies and Hollywood studios. The show has much in common with Melia and Cannes: it has all the glitz, the hype and the stars. The main difference is that the stars are non-human, the digital game producers are relatively unknown and this form of popular culture has been largely ignored by established university media programmes and media researchers

X-Databases - The Integration of XML into Enterprise Database Management Systems

An examination of how the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and database management systems (DBMS) fit together, and current approaches to providing database technologies that support XML. Analysis of how XML is being deployed in four classes of XML Database (X-Database) applications provides a basis for understanding the direction of X-Database technology and associated standards. In a simple implementation, an XML Document Type Definition (DTD) is mapped to relational structures, and XML data are stored in a DBMS (Oracle8i). Sample queries are presented to retrieve XML from the database. A middleware tool (XSQL Java Servlet) is used to transform query results into records on a Web page. The results demonstrate that relational databases require data to be rigidly mapped to relational structures. The paper concludes by exploring future challenges to integrating XML and DTDs with X-Databases, which establishes the need for a more "native" integration approach

Intranet of the future: functional study, comparison of products and practical implementation

Future intranet: functional study, comparison of products and practical implementation 1. Introduction The project has fulfilled three goals: 1) To perform a study of the functionalities which have to be covered in a modern intranet (web 2.0, unified communication, collaboration, etc) 2) To perform a comparison of tools of the market which can be used to implement intranets (commercial and open source products) 3) To test three of these tools (Oracle WebCenter, Liferay Portal and Microsoft SharePoint) and develop a prototype with Oracle WebCenter. In addition, it includes a research about the evolution of the Intranets among the time, as well as a work to discover the current state of this kind of platforms over the entire world. In this introductory research it is also convenient to include other topics which are not strictly technical involving the use of this Intranet. To be more concrete, there is an analysis of the importance of the human role and management of the Intranet, the process of deploying a new Intranet in an organization and methods to evaluate the performance of this new system.   2. Functional study The approach taken to fulfil this goal is to develop a theoretical model describing the relationship between the Intranet and its users, and a complete set of functionalities which could be covered in the Intranet of the future. These functionalities are categorized in groups. The project describes these groups and the functionalities included on them. 3. Comparison of products The project will describe and compare several technologies which can be used to develop an Intranet that we have previously modelled. The purpose here is to discover the strong points and weaknesses of each technology if it was used to develop the Intranet we desire. After having done such a review, the project focuses on three technologies and performs an extensive evaluation of them. Finally, an extensive comparison between these three technologies is done, highlighting where they offer better solutions and performance compared to the other possibilities. 4. Practical implementation The project focuses on three technologies: Oracle WebCenter, Liferay Portal and Microsoft SharePoint. Then, a prototype which covers a set of functionalities of the modelled Intranet has been built with Oracle WebCenter

Communicative 2.0 : video games and digital culture in the foreign language classroom

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2006.I explore two core concepts in today's youth entertainment culture that will increasingly become central in future attempts to design affordable foreign language learning materials that hope to bridge the chasm between education and foreign popular culture. In the process, I outline a series of example applications that apply these concepts to developing rich foreign language materials -- starting with more experimental/long-term approaches such as using video game modding techniques to make language learning friendly video games and ending with more concrete, ready-to-go, applications like extending open source content management applications. The first concept I look at is that of "Remix culture." In short, Remix culture describes the way in which youth culture today more visibly orients itself around creating media by extracting component pieces from other people's media creations, then connecting them together to form something new. In the video game world this phenomena is more specifically termed 'modding.' In this process, amateur fans take a professional commercial game title and then modify it in creative ways that the original designers may not have considered.(cont.) Outside of video games, we see terms like "web 2.0" used to describe technologies that allow website viewers to play a role in authoring additions to the sites they are reading, or "mashups" where users use programming interfaces to rapidly create web content by mashing together pieces from different sources. The second emerging concept critical for curricular designers to follow is that of transmedia storytelling. Traditionally, one might assume a model in which distinct media forms are used to serve distinct cultural practices: television or novels tell stories, video games are for play, blogs for socializing and textbooks for learning. While initially this may have been the case, as each of the media forms above have evolved, they have expanded to cover multiple other cultural practices, often by extending across other media forms. By following the evolution of the interactions between these various media forms and activities within entertainment industries, we can find valuable insight when forecasting their possible interactions in the education industry.by Ravi Purushotma.S.M

DRIVER Technology Watch Report

This report is part of the Discovery Workpackage (WP4) and is the third report out of four deliverables. The objective of this report is to give an overview of the latest technical developments in the world of digital repositories, digital libraries and beyond, in order to serve as theoretical and practical input for the technical DRIVER developments, especially those focused on enhanced publications. This report consists of two main parts, one part focuses on interoperability standards for enhanced publications, the other part consists of three subchapters, which give a landscape picture of current and surfacing technologies and communities crucial to DRIVER. These three subchapters contain the GRID, CRIS and LTP communities and technologies. Every chapter contains a theoretical explanation, followed by case studies and the outcomes and opportunities for DRIVER in this field