Freeform User Interfaces for Graphical Computing

報告番号: 甲15222 ; 学位授与年月日: 2000-03-29 ; 学位の種別: 課程博士 ; 学位の種類: 博士(工学) ; 学位記番号: 博工第4717号 ; 研究科・専攻: 工学系研究科情報工学専

The Infinite Canvas: Perpetual Immersion of Sequential Narratives

In the past century, comic books have been represented as the lowest of art forms. As time progressed, the comic book as a medium evolved and became increasingly popular. The depth of the characters and the stories they enclose within their covers immerse the reader in worlds that through other mediums could not be properly depicted and experienced. The scope of this thesis will be to design a museum to host comic book art by means of analyzing its development as a popular art form and its relationship to architecture. The mission of the museum is to create an immersive comic book experience, promote the understanding and appreciation of comic art as well as to detail and discuss its artistic, cultural, and historical impact upon society. The city of Baltimore was selected as the site for this proposal. The ample diversity and grandeur of its history and character render it with a degree of richness and uniqueness rarely found in other cities. The duality of the setting in terms of affluent areas vs. impoverished ones helps denote it as a live example of the duality represented in the cities inside the comics

A stratified rendering algorithm for virtual walkthroughs of large environments

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1996.Includes bibliographical references (p. 73-74).by Rebecca Wen Fei Xiong.M.S

Refinement criteria for high fidelity interactive walkthroughs

Physically based global illumination rendering at interactive frame rates would enable users to navigate within complex virtual environments, such as archaeological models. These algorithms, however, are computationally too demanding to allow interactive navigation on current PCs. A technique based on image subsampling and spatiotemporal coherence among successive frames is exploited, while resorting to progressive refinement whenever there is available computing power. A physically based ray tracer (Radiance) is used to compute reflected radiance at the model's triangles vertices. Progressive refinement is achieved increasing the sampling frequency by subdividing certain triangles and requesting shading information for the resulting vertices. This paper proposes and evaluates different criteria for selecting which triangles to subdivide. A random criterium and two criteria based on Normalized Luminance Differences are evaluated: one operating on image space, the other on object space. Results, obtained with a model of an old roman town, show that the object space criterium is able to locate and represent visual discontinuities, such as shadows, and does so requiring less triangle subdivisions than the other two.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - POSI/CHS/42041/2001

Perspective Switching in Virtual Environments

When exploring new environments, people regularly alternate among many sources of spatial information including direct visual input, navigation aids such as maps and mobile devices, and verbal route descriptions. These spatial representations typically depict the environment from one of two perspectives: first-person, embedded route perspective or top-down, bird's eye survey perspective. Visual spatial cognition research has explored the nature of learning within each of these perspectives independently, but little work has been done to explore how on-line visual processing of combined perspectives affects cognition, meaning there is little understanding of the cognitive costs of using different navigation tools to learn large-scale environments. This dissertation addresses such questions through two experiments that guide participants through simple paths in large-scale environments, each consisting of a simple path through a small virtual town presented on a desktop computer display. By timing participants' movement through each environment and how they respond to either externally-controlled or participant-controlled perspective switches, the experiments measure the cognitive load of visually processing dynamic perspectives during navigation. These on-line processing measures are complemented by tests of visual recognition and recall memory, which reveal how switching perspectives affects the accuracy of the resulting spatial mental model. The results indicate that the cognitive load associated with changing perspectives is primarily dependent on the quantity of visual information the change introduces -- the transformation itself is not particularly disorienting after the first exposure to the environment. Furthermore, although forced perspective switches do not appear to significantly affect spatial memory accuracy relative to viewing the environment from a consistent perspective, navigator-controlled switching results in significantly more accurate spatial memory, indicating that navigation aids which allow for perspective control might better support spatial learning than fixed-perspective interfaces. The findings also support previous research showing that route perspective navigation generally yields more accurate spatial memory than survey perspective learning, particularly after extensive experience in the environment. Overall, the findings demonstrate many new aspects of how perspective affects spatial cognition, with implications for spatial learning and the design of navigation aids

A Case Study on the Advantages of 3D Walkthroughs over Photo Stitching Techniques

Virtual tours and interactive walkthroughs enable a more in-depth platform for communicating information. Many current techniques employ the use of Photo Stitching to accomplish this. However, over the last decade advancements in computing power and the accessibility of game engines, meant that developing rich 3D content for virtual tours is more possible than ever before. As such, the purpose of this paper is to present a study into the advantages of developing an interactive 3D virtual tour of student facilities, using the Unreal Development 4 Game Engine, for educational establishments. The project aims to demonstrate a comparison between the use of Photo Stitching and 3D Modelled interactive walkthrough for developing rich visual environments. The research reveals that the approach in this paper can improve educational facilities prominence within universities, and contains many advantages over Photo Stitching techniques

Engaging Spaces

The book presents different perspectives of analysis and new models of experience, reconfirming the importance assigned to the wellbeing and human-centered approach in the contemporary spatial design disciplinary debate. The focus on “engaging spaces” is due to the increase of participatory experiences in the design strategies supporting designers who want create tailor made environment to feel people more conscious of the great value of social relations. The title of the book anticipates the aim to explore the transformation process which we are living, both in private and in public spaces, underlining the central role of design to define new qualities of connections to live together in relation with the space around us. The volume is divided into two parts described below. The first, “Social design for engaging spaces”, explores private and public space case studies introducing new hybrid dimensions through the social engagement in “living communities” and reports participatory design approaches in the transformation processes of shared common spaces, such as schools, intended as incubators of social practices. The second, “Experience design for engaging spaces”, describes more in-depth the experience of human beings in relation to physical and emotional aspects of space, focusing on the quality of the built environment that deeply affects people’s wellbeing, social interaction, and cohesion, and investigating ephemeral practices and projects to experience design through a conscious sensorial approach. The pandemic and the return to a “post-pandemic new normal” have led us to further reflect on the spatial processes of transformation and hybridization and their shared use in both the private and public spheres, exploring the importance of participatory and engaging strategies in the different phases of the design process with the aim to increase social awareness. Being back to the physical perception of spaces has confirmed the importance of evaluating the project’s sensorial aspects with a new awareness. This novel attitude leads to rediscovering the values of measurable space in the constant confrontation with the virtual perspective that triumphed during the pandemic, introducing the “time” factor in the design discipline even with a broader complexity than before

Monetized Gameplay: Analyzing Commodification in Rainbow Six Siege

Game studies scholars have had growing concerns over the last decade about monetization strategies in video games. This major research paper expands on this conversation by analyzing monetization in the case of Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six. The paper explores different commodification strategies such as platformization, assetization, gamblification, and data extraction as well as monetization devices such as the battle pass and loot box. By applying elements of the app-walkthrough method to Rainbow Six Siege, this project concludes that previous efforts to regulate monetization in video games ought to recognize monetization systems’ deep integration with gameplay. Monetization strategies, I argue, overlap with and shape gameplay. Moreover, rather than approach them as separate, I suggest that monetization and gameplay are mutually constituted. The paper draws on game news sources to support the analysis of monetization systems. Ultimately, this MRP reveals: 1) that gamblification is not a discrete practice that only exists in the Rainbow Six Siege’s menus, but is embedded throughout the game; 2) that keeping the player engaged allows for data capital to keep being extracted; and 3) that Rainbow Six Siege places the onus of responsibility on the player and makes monetization seem as if it is a gift

EgoEnv: Human-centric environment representations from egocentric video

First-person video highlights a camera-wearer's activities in the context of their persistent environment. However, current video understanding approaches reason over visual features from short video clips that are detached from the underlying physical space and capture only what is immediately visible. To facilitate human-centric environment understanding, we present an approach that links egocentric video and the environment by learning representations that are predictive of the camera-wearer's (potentially unseen) local surroundings. We train such models using videos from agents in simulated 3D environments where the environment is fully observable, and test them on human-captured real-world videos from unseen environments. On two human-centric video tasks, we show that models equipped with our environment-aware features consistently outperform their counterparts with traditional clip features. Moreover, despite being trained exclusively on simulated videos, our approach successfully handles real-world videos from HouseTours and Ego4D, and achieves state-of-the-art results on the Ego4D NLQ challenge. Project page: https://vision.cs.utexas.edu/projects/ego-env/Comment: Published in NeurIPS 2023 (Oral