Navigation in REVERIE's Virtual Environments

This work presents a novel navigation system for social collaborative virtual environments populated with multiple characters. The navigation system ensures collision free movement of avatars and agents. It supports direct user manipulation, automated path planning, positioning to get seated, and follow-me behaviour for groups. In follow-me mode, the socially aware system manages the mise en place of individuals within a group. A use case centred around on an educational virtual trip to the European Parliament created for the REVERIE FP7 project, also serves as an example to bring forward aspects of such navigational requirements

Lessons from digital puppetry - Updating a design framework for a perceptual user interface

While digital puppeteering is largely used just to augment full body motion capture in digital production, its technology and traditional concepts could inform a more naturalized multi-modal human computer interaction than is currently used with the new perceptual systems such as Kinect. Emerging immersive social media networks with their fully live virtual or augmented environments and largely inexperienced users would benefit the most from this strategy. This paper intends to define digital puppeteering as it is currently understood, and summarize its broad shortcomings based on expert evaluation. Based on this evaluation it will suggest updates and experiments using current perceptual technology and concepts in cognitive processing for existing human computer interaction taxonomy. This updated framework may be more intuitive and suitable in developing extensions to an emerging perceptual user interface for the general public

Using Cognitive Walkthrough and Hybrid Prototyping to Gather User Requirements in Early Design Virtual Reality Prototypes

To evaluate Virtual Reality (VR) prototypes usability involves a va-riety of single-perspective or Hybrid methods. The latter has being suggested by literature as offering a more complete sets of requirements highlighting both ‘in-world’ and user interface problems. This paper describes our experiences in using a single-perspective method for gathering user requirements in the REVERIE (Real and Virtual Engagement In Realistic Immersive Environment) project. The study reports results involving nine evaluators who reviewed two hybrid VR prototypes with educational context. It was found that this approach was effective in highlighting a plethora of usability problems covering all as-pects of the two VR prototypes. The performance of our approach was similar to the literature. Although additional validation work is required, we can con-clude that our approach may provide a viable option to evaluate early design VR prototypes when required (e.g., when the expertise needed to use a hybrid method is not available). Future work aims to compare the performance of our approach with two-stage and multiple stage hybrid methods

Aesthetics of computation : unveiling the visual machine

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2001."September 2001."Includes bibliographical references (p. 106-110).This thesis presents a new paradigm for the design of visual programming languages, with the goal of making computation visible and, in turn, more accessible. The Visual Machine Model emphasizes the need for clear visual representations of both machines and materials, and the importance of continuity. Five dynamic visual programming languages were designed and implemented according to the specification of the Visual Machine Model. In addition to individual analysis, a comparative evaluation of all five design experiments is conducted with respect to several ease of use metrics and Visual Machine qualities. While formal user tests have not been conducted, preliminary results from general user experiences indicate that being able to see and interact with computation does enhance the programming process.Jared Schiffman.S.M

The Archaic Makes the Avant-garde. Experimental Practice and Primordial Image. Reading the Brazilian Post-neoconcrete and the Japanese Gutai Artists Through Mircea Eliade and Carl Gustav Jung.

The Archaic Makes the Avant-Garde, Experimental Practice and Primordial Image is a research on the work, practice and creative process of the Brazilian Post-Neoconcrete artists Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica, and of the Japanese Gutai group. These artists adopted a concrete ludic relationship between the body and the material; their empirical processes preceded and dispensed theoretical consideration. As a result, their practice and work substantiated a very primal bond between artist, matter and creative drive, through which they cumulatively experienced the creative potency, exerted the creative command, and re-enacted the original creation. Having dismissed content in the work of art - the conventions oflanguage, meaning, and representation - their imagery consistently placed them in the existential condition of the 'absolute beginning'. However, at the cutting edge of artistic production, in the pursuit of a new order of creation, underlying the experimental practices and works of these avant-garde artists, and evinced in recurrent primordial images of the pattern of 'restoration of the creative time', rests a universal knowledge, embodied and archaic. It remains largely unconscious, consisting of a psychophysiological device to surpass consciousness and attain a cosmicized atemporal mode of being - the condition of 'absolute beginning' that the avant-garde extols for creation - and known in ancient practical philosophies as the ascension of the kundalinf energy (libido, orgone, or sexuality are aspects of this energy - thus, a creative, generative principle). This knowledge is constantly brought forward, in inexorable reminders of the 'teleology of creation' of that inner program of emancipation. The analysis of the work and practice of these artists took on from the theory and method of authors Mircea Eliade, Gustav Jung, as well as Nise da Silveira. They acknowledged this psycho-physiological process, verified its correspondence with specific human aspirations or existential situations, figured within dreams, symbols, myths, reveries, insights and plastic artistic creation. And, from this generative and emancipatory attribute of the psyche, they also looked into the purposefulness of the creative accomplishment, which is arguably the ultimate question of this research