Using a disruption framework to analysis the feasibility of Virtual Reality in medical use

Virtual reality (VR) technology is considered as one of the next big things in the Internet eld. This technology can be applied in various elds. This thesis studies the feasibility of using VR technology in the medical eld, especially in the medical therapy area. This thesis also discusses the nature of disruptive innovation. The analysis is based on a literature review of virtual reality and a framework called the disruption framework, which is devastated by an important terminology, disruptive innovation. The study uses trend charts and value networks to predict the feasibility of VR in medical therapy. The result shows that the virtual reality technology can cause a disruption in the medical eld, it will a ect the existing value network into the medical eld

The Desert of the Unreal: Inequality in Virtual and Augmented Reality

The world we live in is structured by inequality: of gender, race, class, sexual orientation, disability, and more. Virtual and augmented reality technologies hold out the promise of a more perfect world, one that offers us more stimulation, more connection, more freedom, more equality than the real world. But for such technologies to be truly innovative, they must move us beyond our current limitations and prejudices. When existing inequalities are unacknowledged and unaddressed in the real world, they tend to be replicated and augmented in virtual realities. We make new worlds based on who we are and what we do in old ones. All of our worlds, virtual and physical, are the product of human choice and human creation. The developers of virtual and augmented reality make choices about which aspects of our lived history they want to replicate, enhance, or change. The design - and design flaws - of new virtual and augmented reality technologies should be critically evaluated to assess their likely impact on inequality and their consequences for legal and social policy

Re-presenting China in Digital Immersive Art: Virtual Reality, Imaginaries, and Cultural Presence

The thesis explores how digital technology, in particular virtual reality and augmented reality, is playing a role in China’s rejuvenation, especially in relation to cultural displays, performances, and art exhibitions. This project examines how audiences, both in China and globally, respond to ‘Digital China’, a concept describing how people’s everyday lives in China are becoming superconnected by digital technology. Qualitative methodology with a multi-perspectival approach is applied to advance the aim of the project

Augmented reality as a tool for public art: Making a virtual monument for 10 october 2015 bomb attack victims in Ankara

Our public space is a product of the power relationship between authority and the users of the space. As the holders of dominant power continuously impose their will over the physical and communication space, the users of the space generate countless new ways to reclaim agency. The emergence and spread of networked digital technologies during the last two decades have transformed this power relationship by providing the masses with new media. Using widely available consumer-grade computers and the internet, the users of the public space can create their communication tools and connect with others. This thesis focuses on understanding the role of one particular medium in this digital ecosystem: augmented reality. This practice-based research studies augmented reality technology as a public art tool to intervene with power relationships in the public space of our network society, through an artwork. The artwork at the centre of the research is a virtual monument at the site of 10 October 2015 Ankara bombings. The artwork aims to harness the abilities of augmented reality technology to achieve freedom of expression in public space. The research evaluates the artwork and augmented reality as a tool for public art, by synthesising the learnings from the creative production process, the study of literature and findings from the participant tests. New media researchers, artists who practice similar work or general audience who are interested in the subject can benefit from this thesis

THREE ESSAYS ON OFFSHORING DECISION-MAKING

This thesis studies biases in offshoring decisions and proposes a tool to improve understanding of the value of lead-time. Recent research results show local responsive production reduces mismatch between supply and demand, but this aspect of the cost is often overlooked in offshoring decisions, leading to suboptimal decisions. The tradeoff between lower unit costs and mismatch cost under demand uncertainty as lead-time increases, and the benefits of a local portfolio of products with different demand volatility, make the offshoring decision complex and the optimal solution sometimes counterintuitive. Building on behavioral research, I designed software-based laboratory trials to explore patterns of decisions in an offshoring problem, and a simulation-game to help teach and communicate research insights. In the first paper, I find that participants facing an offshoring problem fail to apply the economically optimal strategy. In the second paper, I find that non-economic factors like peer influence play a role in offshoring decisions. These trials are exploratory in nature and do not provide generalizable results, rather, they are a step towards a better understanding of the fundamental research questions and the conception of experiments. In the third paper, I describe the development and use of a simulation-game to help students, managers and policy makers understand the value of lead-time and volatility portfolio through an active learning approach. My work contributes to the understanding of the impact of bounded rationality in offshoring decisions and proposes a teaching method adapted to the challenges posed by the concepts involved

Simulating Social Situations in Immersive Virtual Reality - A Study of Bystander Responses to Violent Emergencies

The goal of this research is to show how immersive virtual reality (IVR) can be used to study human responses to extreme emergencies in social situations. Participants interact realistically with animated virtual humans. We show this through experimental studies of bystander responses to a violent confrontation, and find that there are conditions under which people intervene to help virtual characters that are threatened. We go on to show that a reinforcement learning (RL) method can capture the types of actions of virtual humans that lead to greater intervention on the part of the bystander. It has been shown that people tend to respond realistically in social situations depicted in IVR when they have the illusion of ’being there’ (Place Illusion, PI) and that what they perceive appears to be really happening (Plausibility Illusion, Psi). This has enabled IVR technology for the study of several fields including human behavioural studies, social phobia treatment and both physical and psychiatric rehabilitation. Additionally, IVR helps to overcome ethical issues such as deception that can arise from the nature of the study. The highly controlled environment reduces the variations induced by the repetition of the study, and thus, increases the internal validity. Furthermore, IVR allows setting up life-size computer-generated simulations and enables the possibility of interaction with natural body movements, making their responses close to being authentic thus increasing the ecological validity. We carried out a series of experiments to understand the circumstances likely to make people intervene when they witness a confrontation between two people. Faced with a potentially violent situation, any individual has to decide whether to intervene to try to prevent the violence, or do nothing. Evidence demonstrates that factors such as a shared social identity between the bystander and either the victim or the aggressor, the presence of other bystanders or authority figures and their behaviour influence people’s responses to an emergency. But for ethical and validity reasons, it is very difficult to set up studies with real actors which observe how people react to violence. The results of the experiments in this thesis show that the likelihood of a bystander intervention can be increased or diminished if the bystander perceives the other people present in the scene as sharing some type of affiliation with him. The main experiment variable that we manipulated was whether the people in the scene supported the same football team as the bystander, or on the contrary they did not have an explicit association with any team in particular. Additionally, this thesis provides evidence that the bystander effect also occurs in an immersive virtual environment (IVE) and that the strength of this phenomenon varies depending on the social identity of the characters present in the scene. The last part of the thesis shows that RL can provide learning capabilities to a computer to study human behaviour and use the knowledge towards eliciting pre-determined responses from real people in IVEs, such as increasing the likelihood of intervention in a violent emergency

Communication, behavioural biases and financial markets ; a case study of Tesla Inc.

This aim of this research is to evaluate the effect of corporate communication on setting investor expectations about a stock´s fair valuation. By means of a case study analysis of the Tesla Inc. stock price since the initial public offering (IPO), it seeks to empirically explore the extent to which investor sentiment was influenced by fundamentals or by behavioural aspects. The increased internet connectivity, the additional information available to economic agents or investors (Stigler, 1961) as well as higher transparency (Leff, 1984) of companies has impacts in the context of the efficient market hypothesis (Fama, 1970) and Behavioural Finance (Odean 1998a, Kahneman and Tversky 1973, 1979, Scharfenstein and Stein 1990). The methodology employed is positivist, utilizing statistical time-series techniques/models on the basis of Arbitrage Pricing Theory (Ross, 1976), Vector Autoregression (VAR), Vector Error Correction Models (VECM) and Impulse Response Functions. The data sources, by means of web-crawlers, algorithms and manual interpretation of media, operationalize the sentiment indicators required (Nisar and Yeung, 2018). Accordingly, it seeks to determine whether stock price movements were pre-dominantly explained by aggregated or individual sentiment variables representing a meaningful tool to proxy emotions and social media in response to communication. Through a deductive approach, patterns and theoretical underpinnings are sought to be explained by communication-driven deviations from Tesla Inc.´s intrinsic value. Ultimately, it seeks to re-emphasize that traditional finance theories require the adoption of behavioural proxies to appropriately capture short-term movements as informational advantages can still yield additional results. In so doing, this research evaluates indicators of selected behavioural biases associated to communication that may impact the value of incorporating fundamental information and help explain changes in share prices. Therefore, this research is geared to establishing an understanding of and extent to which sentiment determinant corporate communication should be focused and provide a basis to be replicated for similar case studies

Johannesburg as dystopia: South African science fiction as political criticism

This thesis will interrogate the spatial dynamics and configurations of one of the country’s most prominent cities: Johannesburg. Johannesburg has been, and continues to be, a central focus in the nation’s imaginary. There is a trend within South African science fiction (sf) – both literature and film – to portray Johannesburg as a dystopian, post-law, poverty-stricken space as a means of conceptualising the socioeconomic situation within the country. This study will isolate Johannesburg-based works of sf and interrogate why authors and filmmakers disproportionately return to this setting. Investigated are three contemporary works, namely, Zoo City (2010) by Lauren Beukes, Neill Blomkamp’s film, Chappie (2015), and Dub Steps (2015) by Andrew Miller. This study explores the ways in which South African works of sf serve as social and political critique in the post-apartheid era of financial disparity, the formation of new boundaries, divisions of space and privilege, and the dereliction of critical infrastructure. The primary methodology of this thesis is that of Marxist literary analysis (specifically with reference to Louis Althusser’s theoretical models), which will be conducted alongside discussions of authentic history of the country as well as political developments in order to illustrate how South African sf critically engages with, and succinctly critiques, its context. The aesthetics of African sf are inseparable from the politics of the past and the current moment and through the aesthetics of the future, South Africans can reimagine the politics of the now. This study therefore also revisits a selection of non-sf Johannesburg-set novels published post-1925 and argues that these texts can be studied as early examples of South African dystopian writing. In doing so, this study illustrates that dystopian writing about and in South Africa is not an advent of the 21st century, but an extension of a long history of critical engagement. This thesis suggests that the dystopian genre is helpful in reframing the issues of the present (and the past) so that some form of meaningful change is theorized. The underlying impulse of dystopian cultural production is ultimately hopeful: a worse context is imagined to warn society of its follies so that these shortcomings and issues can be corrected, thereby avoiding the disastrous world(s) portrayed in the fiction. In this way, this study contends that local sf should not be inextricably linked to the melancholia that thoughts of dystopia bring about. Rather, the nuanced criticism contained within these dystopian texts is testament to the country’s ever-enduring spirit of change and transformation

Transformation theory and e-commerce adoption

This thesis investigates business transformation on the Internet; particularly the nature and significance of Cyber transformation theory and the Marketspace Model as a framework for E-commerce adoption. E-commerce can raise a firm\u27s productivity, transform customer relationships and open up new markets. The extent to which nations become adopters of E-commerce is set to become a source of comparative national competitive advantage (or disadvantage) in the twenty first century