Influence of immersion on user's spatial presence and memory in virtual environments

This study examines the influence of immersion on users' sense of spatial presence and spatial memory in virtual environments. The single factor was systematically manipulated in three conditions. A sample of 32 participants was used to test the study hypotheses. This study employed a between-subject design, and participants were randomly assigned to one of the three experimental conditions. The results from statistical analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) revealed the influence of immersion on the spatial presence and spatial memory. The results of this study revealed that higher level of immersion including a wider field of view and the stereoscopic display did lead to a greater sense of presence and improved spatial memory performance. This study has practical implications across various domains including architectural design and visualization, developing virtual reality systems, and training simulators.Includes bibliographical reference

Modeling and Simulation in Engineering

This book provides an open platform to establish and share knowledge developed by scholars, scientists, and engineers from all over the world, about various applications of the modeling and simulation in the design process of products, in various engineering fields. The book consists of 12 chapters arranged in two sections (3D Modeling and Virtual Prototyping), reflecting the multidimensionality of applications related to modeling and simulation. Some of the most recent modeling and simulation techniques, as well as some of the most accurate and sophisticated software in treating complex systems, are applied. All the original contributions in this book are jointed by the basic principle of a successful modeling and simulation process: as complex as necessary, and as simple as possible. The idea is to manipulate the simplifying assumptions in a way that reduces the complexity of the model (in order to make a real-time simulation), but without altering the precision of the results

Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films

Whatever the filmmaker may do to them — including nothing more than reproduce them exactly as he or she found them — recycled images call attention to themselves as images, as products of the image-producing industries of film and television, and therefore as pieces of the vast and intricate mosaic of information, entertainment, and persuasion that constitute the media-saturated environment of modern — or many would say, postmodern — life. By reminding us that we are seeing images produced and disseminated by the media, found footage films open the door to a critical examination of the methods and motives underlying the media's use of images

Cultural Polysemy: Exploring Cultural Codes Through Digital and Non-Digital Practices

Culture is a coherent entity we use for describing our cooperative interests with others in political, social, and historical contexts. Culture is functional in that it is defined through individual and collective articulations in time and space. Its representations occur through macro categories of nations, race, habits, practices, and values as embodied in the following models: contexting (Hall, 1976); value orientation (Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck, 1961); cultural dimension (Hofstede, 1996); Seven-Dimensions of culture (Trompenaars & Hampden-Turner, 1997); Seven Value Types (Schwartz, 1999). Culture also gets defined in terms of its situatedness based on specificity of contexts and practices: social constructionist approach (Dohney-Farina, 1986; Porter, 1993; Mirel, 1996); discourse approach (Scollon et al., 1995). In professional and technical communication, the practice of splitting culture into macro and micro categories is influenced by the American linguistic anthropologist Kenneth L. Pike (1954) who theorized cultural distinctions through a linguistic route of tagmemics that looks at the connection between language use and sociocultural behavior (Franklin, 1996) through emic and etic approaches. Emic accounts focus on individual and relative aspects of a culture, while etic elements provide descriptive universals to enable macro comparison between cultures

Accurate and discernible photocollages

There currently exist several techniques for selecting and combining images from a digital image library into a single image so that the result meets certain prespecified visual criteria. Image mosaic methods, first explored by Connors and Trivedi[18], arrange library images according to some tiling arrangement, often a regular grid, so that the combination of images, when viewed as a whole, resembles some input target image. Other techniques, such as Autocollage of Rother et al.[78], seek only to combine images in an interesting and visually pleasing manner, according to certain composition principles, without attempting to approximate any target image. Each of these techniques provide a myriad of creative options for artists who wish to combine several levels of meaning into a single image or who wish to exploit the meaning and symbolism contained in each of a large set of images through an efficient and easy process. We first examine the most notable and successful of these methods, and summarize the advantages and limitations of each. We then formulate a set of goals for an image collage system that combines the advantages of these methods while addressing and mitigating the drawbacks. Particularly, we propose a system for creating photocollages that approximate a target image as an aggregation of smaller images, chosen from a large library, so that interesting visual correspondences between images are exploited. In this way, we allow users to create collages in which multiple layers of meaning are encoded, with meaningful visual links between each layer. In service of this goal, we ensure that the images used are as large as possible and are combined in such a way that boundaries between images are not immediately apparent, as in Autocollage. This has required us to apply a multiscale approach to searching and comparing images from a large database, which achieves both speed and accuracy. We also propose a new framework for color post-processing, and propose novel techniques for decomposing images according to object and texture information

SOW: Digitization and longterm preservation of weather maps at ZAMG

The targets of this concept are: delivering a catalog of requirements; the evaluation of tools; possible file formats (e.g. FITS) necessary for digitization and longtime preservation of the historical weather maps at ZAMG (Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics, Austria's national weather and geophysical service

INTEGRATED SURVEY PROCEDURES FOR THE VIRTUAL READING AND FRUITION OF HISTORICAL BUILDINGS

This paper presents the developments of research related to the integration of digital survey methodologies with reference to image-based and range-based technologies. Starting from the processing of point clouds, the data were processed for both the geometric interpretation of the space as well as production of three-dimensional models that describe the constitutive and morphological relationships. The subject of the study was the church of San Carlo all'Arena in Naples (Italy), with a HBIM model being produced that is semantically consistent with the real building. Starting from the data acquired, a visualization system was created for the virtual exploration of the building