63,643 research outputs found
A Mimetic Strategy to Engage Voluntary Physical Activity In Interactive Entertainment
We describe the design and implementation of a vision based interactive
entertainment system that makes use of both involuntary and voluntary control
paradigms. Unintentional input to the system from a potential viewer is used to
drive attention-getting output and encourage the transition to voluntary
interactive behaviour. The iMime system consists of a character animation
engine based on the interaction metaphor of a mime performer that simulates
non-verbal communication strategies, without spoken dialogue, to capture and
hold the attention of a viewer. The system was developed in the context of a
project studying care of dementia sufferers. Care for a dementia sufferer can
place unreasonable demands on the time and attentional resources of their
caregivers or family members. Our study contributes to the eventual development
of a system aimed at providing relief to dementia caregivers, while at the same
time serving as a source of pleasant interactive entertainment for viewers. The
work reported here is also aimed at a more general study of the design of
interactive entertainment systems involving a mixture of voluntary and
involuntary control.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, ECAG08 worksho
Emotion resonance and divergence: a semiotic analysis of music and sound in 'The Lost Thing', an animated short film and 'Elizabeth' a film trailer
Music and sound contributions of interpersonal meaning to film narratives may be different from or similar to meanings made by language and image, and dynamic interactions between several modalities may generate new story messages. Such interpretive potentials of music and voice sound in motion pictures are rarely considered in social semiotic investigations of intermodality. This paper therefore shares two semiotic studies of distinct and combined music, English speech and image systems in an animated short film and a promotional filmtrailer. The paper considers the impact of music and voice sound on interpretations of film narrative meanings. A music system relevant to the analysis of filmic emotion is proposed. Examples show how music and intonation contribute meaning to lexical, visual and gestural elements of the cinematic spaces. Also described are relations of divergence and resonance between emotion types in various couplings of music, intonation, words and images across story phases. The research is relevant to educational knowledge about sound, and semiotic studies of multimodality
Gulliver project: performers and visitors
This paper discusses two projects in our research environment. The Gulliver
project, an ambitious project conceived by some artists connected to our
research efforts, and the Aveiro-project, as well ambitious, but with goals
that can be achieved beause of technological developments, rather than be
dependent on artistic and 'political' (read: financial) sources. Both projects
are on virtual and augmented reality. The main goal is to design inhabited
environments, where 'inhabited' refers to autonomous agents and agents that
represent humans, realtime or off-line, visiting the virtual environment and
interacting with other agents. The Gulliver environment has been designed by
two artists: Matjaz Stuk and Alena Hudcovicova. The Aveiro project is a research
effort of a group of researchers trying to design models of intelligence and
interaction underlying the behavior of (groups of) agents inhabiting virtual
worlds. In this paper we survey the current state of both projects and we
discuss current and future attempts to have music performances by virtual and
real performers in these environments
Agent Assistance: From Problem Solving to Music Teaching
We report on our research on agents that act and behave in a web learning environment. This research is part of a general approach to agents acting and behaving in virtual environments where they are involved in providing information, performing transactions, demonstrating products and, more generally, assisting users or visitors of the web environment in doing what they want or have been asked to do. While initially we hardly provided our agents with 'teaching knowledge', we now are in the process of making such knowledge explicit, especially in models that take into account that assisting and teaching takes place in a visualized and information-rich environment. Our main (embodied) tutor-agent is called Jacob; it knows about the Towers of Hanoi, a well-known problem that is offered to CS students to learn about recursion. Other agents we are working on assist a visitor in navigating in a virtual world or help the visitor in getting information. We are now designing a music teacher - using knowledge of software engineering and how to design multi-modal interactions, from previous projects
Exploring the Affective Loop
Research in psychology and neurology shows that both body and mind are
involved when experiencing emotions (Damasio 1994, Davidson et al.
2003). People are also very physical when they try to communicate their
emotions. Somewhere in between beings consciously and unconsciously
aware of it ourselves, we produce both verbal and physical signs to make
other people understand how we feel. Simultaneously, this production of
signs involves us in a stronger personal experience of the emotions we
express.
Emotions are also communicated in the digital world, but there is little
focus on users' personal as well as physical experience of emotions in
the available digital media. In order to explore whether and how we can
expand existing media, we have designed, implemented and evaluated
/eMoto/, a mobile service for sending affective messages to others. With
eMoto, we explicitly aim to address both cognitive and physical
experiences of human emotions. Through combining affective gestures for
input with affective expressions that make use of colors, shapes and
animations for the background of messages, the interaction "pulls" the
user into an /affective loop/. In this thesis we define what we mean by
affective loop and present a user-centered design approach expressed
through four design principles inspired by previous work within Human
Computer Interaction (HCI) but adjusted to our purposes; /embodiment/
(Dourish 2001) as a means to address how people communicate emotions in
real life, /flow/ (Csikszentmihalyi 1990) to reach a state of
involvement that goes further than the current context, /ambiguity/ of
the designed expressions (Gaver et al. 2003) to allow for open-ended
interpretation by the end-users instead of simplistic, one-emotion
one-expression pairs and /natural but designed expressions/ to address
people's natural couplings between cognitively and physically
experienced emotions. We also present results from an end-user study of
eMoto that indicates that subjects got both physically and emotionally
involved in the interaction and that the designed "openness" and
ambiguity of the expressions, was appreciated and understood by our
subjects. Through the user study, we identified four potential design
problems that have to be tackled in order to achieve an affective loop
effect; the extent to which users' /feel in control/ of the interaction,
/harmony and coherence/ between cognitive and physical expressions/,/
/timing/ of expressions and feedback in a communicational setting, and
effects of users' /personality/ on their emotional expressions and
experiences of the interaction
An investigation of the role of background music in IVWs for learning
Empirical evidence is needed to corroborate the intuitions of gamers and game developers in understanding the benefits of Immersive Virtual Worlds (IVWs) as a learning environment and the role that music plays within these environments. We report an investigation to determine if background music of the genre typically found in computerâbased roleâplaying games has an effect on learning in a computerâanimated history lesson about the Macquarie Lighthouse within an IVW. In Experiment 1, music stimuli were created from four different computer game soundtracks. Seventyâtwo undergraduate students watched the presentation and completed a survey including biographical details, questions on the historical material presented and questions relating to their perceived level of immersion. While the tempo and pitch of the music was unrelated to learning, music conditions resulted in a higher number of accurately remembered facts than the no music condition. One soundtrack showed a statistically significant improvement in memorisation of facts over other music conditions. Also an interaction between the levels of perceived immersion and ability to accurately remember facts was observed. Experiment 2, involving 48 undergraduate students, further investigated the effect of music, sense of immersion and how different display systems affect memory for facts
The Evolution of Stop-motion Animation Technique Through 120 Years of Technological Innovations
Stop-motion animation history has been put on paper by several scholars and practitioners who tried to organize 120 years of technological innovations and material experiments dealing with a huge literature. Bruce Holman (1975), Neil Pettigrew (1999), Ken Priebe (2010), Stefano Bessoni (2014), and more recently AdriĂĄn Encinas Salamanca (2017), provided the most detailed even tough partial attempts of systematization, and designed historical reconstructions by considering specific periods of time, film lengths or the use of stop-motion as special effect rather than an animation technique. This article provides another partial historical reconstruction of the evolution of stop-motion and outlines the main events that occurred in the development of this technique, following criteria based on the innovations in the technology of materials and manufacturing processes that have influenced the fabrication of puppets until the present day. The systematization follows a chronological order and takes into account events that changed the technique of a puppetsâ manufacturing process as a consequence of the use of either new fabrication processes or materials. Starting from the accident that made the French film-pioneer Georges MĂ©liĂšs discover the trick of the replacement technique at the end of the nineteenth century, the reconstruction goes through 120 years of experiments and films. âBuild upâ puppets fabricated by the Russian puppet animator Ladislaw Starevicz with insect exoskeletons, the use of clay puppets and the innovations introduced by LAIKA entertainment in the last decade such as Stereoscopic photography and the 3D computer printed replacement pieces, and then the increasing influence of digital technologies in the process of puppet fabrication are some of the main considered events. Technology transfers, new materialsâ features, innovations in the way of animating puppets, are the main aspects through which this historical analysis approaches the previously mentioned events. This short analysis is supposed to remind and demonstrate that stop-motion animation is an interdisciplinary occasion of both artistic expression and technological experimentation, and that its evolution and aesthetic is related to cultural, geographical and technological issues. Lastly, if the technology of materials and processes is a constantly evolving field, what future can be expected for this cinematographic technique? The article ends with this open question and without providing an answer it implicitly states the role of stop-motion as a driving force for innovations that come from other fields and are incentivized by the needs of this specific sector
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