Disturbance and plausibility in a virtual rock concert: a pilot study

We present methods used to produce and study a first version of an attempt to reconstruct a 1983 live rock concert in virtual reality. An approximately 10 minute performance by the rock band Dire Straits was rendered in virtual reality, based on the use of computer vision techniques to extract the appearance and movements of the band, and crowd simulation for the audience. An online pilot study was conducted where participants experienced the scenario and freely wrote about their experience. The documents produced were analyzed using sentiment analysis, and groups of responses with similar sentiment scores were found and compared. The results showed that some participants were disturbed not by the band performance but by the accompanying virtual audience that surrounded them. The results point to a profound level of plausibility of the experience, though not in the way that the authors expected. The findings add to our understanding of plausibility of virtual environments.This work is funded by the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant Moments in Time in Immersive Virtual Environments (MoTIVE) #742989.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

A separate reality : An update on place Illusion and plausibility in virtual reality

We review the concept of presence in virtual reality, normally thought of as the sense of “being there” in the virtual world. We argued in a 2009 paper that presence consists of two orthogonal illusions that we refer to as Place Illusion (PI, the illusion of being in the place depicted by the VR) and Plausibility (Psi, the illusion that the virtual situations and events are really happening). Both are with the proviso that the participant in the virtual reality knows for sure that these are illusions. Presence (PI and Psi) together with the illusion of ownership over the virtual body that self-represents the participant, are the three key illusions of virtual reality. Copresence, togetherness with others in the virtual world, can be a consequence in the context of interaction between remotely located participants in the same shared virtual environments, or between participants and virtual humans. We then review several different methods of measuring presence: questionnaires, physiological and behavioural measures, breaks in presence, and a psychophysics method based on transitions between different system configurations. Presence is not the only way to assess the responses of people to virtual reality experiences, and we present methods that rely solely on participant preferences, including the use of sentiment analysis that allows participants to express their experience in their own words rather than be required to adopt the terminology and concepts of researchers. We discuss several open questions and controversies that exist in this field, providing an update to the 2009 paper, in particular with respect to models of Plausibility. We argue that Plausibility is the most interesting and complex illusion to understand and is worthy of significant more research. Regarding measurement we conclude that the ideal method would be a combination of a psychophysical method and qualitative methods including sentiment analysis.Postprint (published version

How research programs come apart: the example of supersymmetry and the disunity of physics

According to Peter Galison, the coordination of different ``subcultures'' within a scientific field happens through local exchanges within ``trading zones''. In his view, the workability of such trading zones is not guaranteed, and science is not necessarily driven towards further integration. In this paper, we develop and apply quantitative methods (using semantic, authorship, and citation data from scientific literature), inspired by Galison's framework, to the case of the disunity of high-energy physics. We give prominence to supersymmetry, a concept that has given rise to several major but distinct research programs in the field, such as the formulation of a consistent theory of quantum gravity or the search for new particles. We show that ``theory'' and `phenomenology'' in high-energy physics should be regarded as distinct theoretical subcultures, between which supersymmetry has helped sustain scientific ``trades''. However, as we demonstrate using a topic model, the phenomenological component of supersymmetry research has lost traction and the ability of supersymmetry to tie these subcultures together is now compromised. Our work supports that even fields with an initially strong sentiment of unity may eventually generate diverging research programs and demonstrates the fruitfulness of the notion of trading zones for informing quantitative approaches to scientific pluralism

Is Subjectivity Possible - the Post-Modern Subject in Legal Theory

This article puts forward a thesis and then attempts to prove (or at least to develop) that thesis in two related areas. The thesis is that legal theory in general, and critical legal theory in particular, has concentrated too much on critiques of objectivity, wrongly assuming that subjectivity was an unproblematic term. Subjectivity, like mortality, has seemed not only attainable but inevitable. It is objectivity which is presumed to be the problematic goal of our theories and our attempts at doctrinal interpretation. This article reverses the focus, concentrating on the construction of subjectivity in law and social theory... Having pointed out that critical theories focus mainly on the impossibility of reaching objectivity, I show that some of the same critiques can be turned on the construction of subjectivity as well. The parallelism is more than mere symmetry. Just as the concept of objectivity can be used to armour decisions or social practices, so theoretical results and ideological slant can be dictated by loading up the abstract subject of a political or economic theory with a particular set of drives, motivations, and ways of reasoning...I then turn to the legal subject around whom the law revolves and try to develop a sketchy history of the changing qualities which that subject has been believed to possess. I conclude that the ideas associated with postmodernism are a useful framework for understanding the subject in legal theory and in legal practice. In fact, bizarre as it may seem, the law already incorporates a more postmodern view of the subject than either economics or mainstream political theory

Two-way automata and transducers with planar behaviours are aperiodic

We consider a notion of planarity for two-way finite automata and transducers, inspired by Temperley-Lieb monoids of planar diagrams. We show that this restriction captures star-free languages and first-order transductions.Comment: 18 pages, DMTCS submissio

De-Placement: Constructing and Mapping Place in Collaboration with Artists

Extension of the formal report using images to present a more visual exploration of project findings.Arts and Humanities Research Counci

Black Ice, Volume 4: A Year Of Activism

Black Ice, a publication of the BSU, features art, essays, fashion, humor, poetry, photography, stories rants, and much more

Tensor Decompositions for Signal Processing Applications From Two-way to Multiway Component Analysis

The widespread use of multi-sensor technology and the emergence of big datasets has highlighted the limitations of standard flat-view matrix models and the necessity to move towards more versatile data analysis tools. We show that higher-order tensors (i.e., multiway arrays) enable such a fundamental paradigm shift towards models that are essentially polynomial and whose uniqueness, unlike the matrix methods, is guaranteed under verymild and natural conditions. Benefiting fromthe power ofmultilinear algebra as theirmathematical backbone, data analysis techniques using tensor decompositions are shown to have great flexibility in the choice of constraints that match data properties, and to find more general latent components in the data than matrix-based methods. A comprehensive introduction to tensor decompositions is provided from a signal processing perspective, starting from the algebraic foundations, via basic Canonical Polyadic and Tucker models, through to advanced cause-effect and multi-view data analysis schemes. We show that tensor decompositions enable natural generalizations of some commonly used signal processing paradigms, such as canonical correlation and subspace techniques, signal separation, linear regression, feature extraction and classification. We also cover computational aspects, and point out how ideas from compressed sensing and scientific computing may be used for addressing the otherwise unmanageable storage and manipulation problems associated with big datasets. The concepts are supported by illustrative real world case studies illuminating the benefits of the tensor framework, as efficient and promising tools for modern signal processing, data analysis and machine learning applications; these benefits also extend to vector/matrix data through tensorization. Keywords: ICA, NMF, CPD, Tucker decomposition, HOSVD, tensor networks, Tensor Train