Voxel-based Urban Vegetation Volume Analysis with LiDAR Point Cloud

The 3D volume and spatial distribution of urban vegetation are highly related to the delivery of multiple ecosystem services. However, due to the intricate vegetation structure, little research has been conducted to visualize and model the 3D spatial structure of urban vegetation. This study proposes an automated voxel-based modeling method to visualize and quantify the urban vegetation volume with LiDAR point cloud and performs a case study of the No.6 Middle School campus in Hengyang City, Hunan Province, China. The PointCNN model is used to perform semantic segmentation of the LiDAR data to extract the tree points. Then the points are voxelized into a 3D volume model with 1m×1m×1m cells. The result shows that the total vegetation volume of the area is 61,192m³, accounting for 37.28% of the total voxelized study area. The green space in front of the north teaching buildings has the largest proportion of vegetation volume, 19,366m³, accounting for 68.37% of the vegetation volume of the whole campus, due to the diverse vegetation and complex structure. The automated segmentation voxel modeling process could provide an efficient way to represent the spatial distribution of urban greenery. With an adjustable voxel size, the model could be adapted to various scales from regional to neighborhood. The model could also be used to analyze the green space structure at the human scale, as well as the interactions between green space and the surrounding environment, and to provide spatial data for the evaluation of multiple ecosystem services

Arena: A General Evaluation Platform and Building Toolkit for Multi-Agent Intelligence

Learning agents that are not only capable of taking tests, but also innovating is becoming a hot topic in AI. One of the most promising paths towards this vision is multi-agent learning, where agents act as the environment for each other, and improving each agent means proposing new problems for others. However, existing evaluation platforms are either not compatible with multi-agent settings, or limited to a specific game. That is, there is not yet a general evaluation platform for research on multi-agent intelligence. To this end, we introduce Arena, a general evaluation platform for multi-agent intelligence with 35 games of diverse logics and representations. Furthermore, multi-agent intelligence is still at the stage where many problems remain unexplored. Therefore, we provide a building toolkit for researchers to easily invent and build novel multi-agent problems from the provided game set based on a GUI-configurable social tree and five basic multi-agent reward schemes. Finally, we provide Python implementations of five state-of-the-art deep multi-agent reinforcement learning baselines. Along with the baseline implementations, we release a set of 100 best agents/teams that we can train with different training schemes for each game, as the base for evaluating agents with population performance. As such, the research community can perform comparisons under a stable and uniform standard. All the implementations and accompanied tutorials have been open-sourced for the community at https://sites.google.com/view/arena-unity/

Game-based Platforms for Artificial Intelligence Research

Games have been the perfect test-beds for artificial intelligence research for the characteristics that widely exist in real-world scenarios. Learning and optimisation, decision making in dynamic and uncertain environments, game theory, planning and scheduling, design and education are common research areas shared between games and real-world problems. Numerous open-sourced games or game-based environments have been implemented for studying artificial intelligence. In addition to single- or multi-player, collaborative or adversarial games, there has also been growing interest in implementing platforms for creative design in recent years. Those platforms provide ideal benchmarks for exploring and comparing artificial intelligence ideas and techniques. This paper reviews the game-based platforms for artificial intelligence research, discusses the research trend induced by the evolution of those platforms, and gives an outlook

Gaming variables in linguistic research. Italian scale validation and a Minecraft pilot study

This paper deals with the concept of gamified science and its recent applications to the linguistic field. We argue that, albeit promising, this paradigm still lacks analytical tools to model the effects of the peculiar experimental setting on the results obtained. After a theoretical introduction to the User Engagement and Gaming Literacy constructs, we present two validated Italian translations of scales representing them. Lastly, we test these two gaming variables in a pilot study on the postvocalic realizations of /k t/ in the Florentine variety. Results show that both variables positively condition the production of non-continuants (i.e., emphasized words) but through different underlying mechanisms

La ‘vista in prima persona’ tra esperienza reale e fruizione digitale

Il contributo espone i termini di una riflessione critica sul tema della ’vista in prima persona‘ così come definita nell’ambito delle rappresentazioni tridimensionali digitali virtuali interattive. Il tema gemmato da considerazioni riguardanti la meraviglia percettiva, comunicativa, illusoria e narrativa, propria delle prospettive architettoniche, analizza alcuni scenari della fruizione prospettica digitale, confrontandoli con le caratteristiche fondamentali dell’esperienza naturale del movimento e della visione nel mondo reale. L’obiettivo cui mira la ricerca, oggetto di questo contributo, è di individuare alcune macroscopiche criticità e lacune funzionali, oggi singolarmente trascurate, sulle quali sia possibile intervenire qualitativamente per perfezionare l’esperienza percettiva e, per conseguenza, l’attività conoscitiva dello spazio virtuale digitale così come dell’informazione in esso contenuto.The contribution exposes the terms of a critical reflection on the theme of “first person view” as defined in the context of interactive virtual digital three-dimensional representations. The theme, gemmed by considerations regarding the perceptive, communicative, illusory and narrative wonder, typical of architectural perspectives, analyzes some scenarios of digital perspective use, comparing them with the fundamental characteristics of the natural experience of movement and vision in the real world. The aim of the research object of this contribution is to identify some macroscopic criticalities and functional gaps, today individually overlooked, on which it is possible to intervene qua- litatively to perfect the perceptual experience and, consequently, the cognitive activity of the digital virtual space , as well as the information it contains

Literacy for digital futures : Mind, body, text

The unprecedented rate of global, technological, and societal change calls for a radical, new understanding of literacy. This book offers a nuanced framework for making sense of literacy by addressing knowledge as contextualised, embodied, multimodal, and digitally mediated. In today’s world of technological breakthroughs, social shifts, and rapid changes to the educational landscape, literacy can no longer be understood through established curriculum and static text structures. To prepare teachers, scholars, and researchers for the digital future, the book is organised around three themes – Mind and Materiality; Body and Senses; and Texts and Digital Semiotics – to shape readers’ understanding of literacy. Opening up new interdisciplinary themes, Mills, Unsworth, and Scholes confront emerging issues for next-generation digital literacy practices. The volume helps new and established researchers rethink dynamic changes in the materiality of texts and their implications for the mind and body, and features recommendations for educational and professional practice

10 years of the PCG workshop : past and future trends

As of 2020, the international workshop on Procedural Content Generation enters its second decade. The annual workshop, hosted by the international conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, has collected a corpus of 95 papers published in its first 10 years. This paper provides an overview of the workshop’s activities and surveys the prevalent research topics emerging over the years.peer-reviewe

A Player’s Sense of Place: Computer Games as Anatopistic Medium

This project works to understand how open-world computer games help generate a sense of place from the player. Since their development over a half century ago, computer games have primarily been discussed in terms of space. Yet the way we think about space today is much different than how those scientists calculated space as a construction of time, mass, and location. But as computer games have evolved, the language has failed to accommodate the more nuanced qualities of game spaces. This project aims at articulating the nuances of place through phenomenological methods to objectively analyze the player experience as performed through various behaviors. Using a conceptual model that partially illustrates sense of place, I demonstrate how players create out of place—or anatopistic—places through play. After a historical survey of play as it is manifested through interaction with miniaturized environments, I turn to computer games as they have helped embody their creators’ sense of place. The third and fourth chapters offer a pair of case studies that reflect upon the experiences of the individual player and player groups. First, I compare virtual photography with tourism to reveal an array of sensibilities suggestive of the pursuit of place. This is followed with a look at Niantic’s Pokémon Go and how player groups use the game to act out ritualistic forms of play. Positioning the player as a “ludopilgrim,” I demonstrate how players perform individual or intersubjectively meaningful places as a form of transgressive placemaking

Is Virtual Reality the Future of Learning? A Critical Reflection

The year 2016 marks the so-called second wave of VR, which was initiated by the first consumer VR-HMD, Oculus Rift (development kit), entering the market. There are four practical advantages in the field of virtual reality learning: a shift from abstract to tangible settings, interactivity rather than passive observations, using desirable but practically infeasible methods, and breaking the bounds of reality. In contrast, current VR technologies also feature certain limitations. The most common negative factor is motion sickness, which distracts the user. We conducted a multiple case study and invited 41 people to participate in two different scenarios. One was a self-developed 360° video and the other was a self-developed interactive scenario. We investigate different barriers which hamper individual learning in VR and we point out that there is a potential for implicit learning in virtual reality