Neural Radiance Fields: Past, Present, and Future

The various aspects like modeling and interpreting 3D environments and surroundings have enticed humans to progress their research in 3D Computer Vision, Computer Graphics, and Machine Learning. An attempt made by Mildenhall et al in their paper about NeRFs (Neural Radiance Fields) led to a boom in Computer Graphics, Robotics, Computer Vision, and the possible scope of High-Resolution Low Storage Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality-based 3D models have gained traction from res with more than 1000 preprints related to NeRFs published. This paper serves as a bridge for people starting to study these fields by building on the basics of Mathematics, Geometry, Computer Vision, and Computer Graphics to the difficulties encountered in Implicit Representations at the intersection of all these disciplines. This survey provides the history of rendering, Implicit Learning, and NeRFs, the progression of research on NeRFs, and the potential applications and implications of NeRFs in today's world. In doing so, this survey categorizes all the NeRF-related research in terms of the datasets used, objective functions, applications solved, and evaluation criteria for these applications.Comment: 413 pages, 9 figures, 277 citation

Digital Food Marketing to Children and Adolescents: Problematic Practices and Policy Interventions

Examines trends in digital marketing to youth that uses "immersive" techniques, social media, behavioral profiling, location targeting and mobile marketing, and neuroscience methods. Recommends principles for regulating inappropriate advertising to youth

Avatar Training - A Humanistic and Creativity Driven Approach

Avatar Training A Humanistic and Creativity Driven Approach This project is about the development of a program prototype for a humanistic and creativity driven approach to avatar training to be delivered in Second Life™ (SL). Specifically, the program aims at developing the skills necessary to make a presentation in, and to safely explore, SL. It was proposed to create a unique learning framework that takes into account the targeted clientele, adult professionals with no or limited experience with SL, the sensibilities of 3D immersive social virtual environment, the avatar training needs, and the possibility to weave in creativity skills practice. To that end, the resulting framework for a humanistic and creativity driven approach to avatar training integrates elements of the following four learning frameworks: 1) Dialogue Education, a framework for adult learning; 2) Torrance Incubation Model, to weave in creativity skills training; 3) Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, to inform the hierarchy of avatar training needs; and 4) Scopes’ Cybergogy of Learning Archetypes and Learning Domains to take advantage of the affordance of Second Life for immersive and experiential learning

The Metaverse: Survey, Trends, Novel Pipeline Ecosystem & Future Directions

The Metaverse offers a second world beyond reality, where boundaries are non-existent, and possibilities are endless through engagement and immersive experiences using the virtual reality (VR) technology. Many disciplines can benefit from the advancement of the Metaverse when accurately developed, including the fields of technology, gaming, education, art, and culture. Nevertheless, developing the Metaverse environment to its full potential is an ambiguous task that needs proper guidance and directions. Existing surveys on the Metaverse focus only on a specific aspect and discipline of the Metaverse and lack a holistic view of the entire process. To this end, a more holistic, multi-disciplinary, in-depth, and academic and industry-oriented review is required to provide a thorough study of the Metaverse development pipeline. To address these issues, we present in this survey a novel multi-layered pipeline ecosystem composed of (1) the Metaverse computing, networking, communications and hardware infrastructure, (2) environment digitization, and (3) user interactions. For every layer, we discuss the components that detail the steps of its development. Also, for each of these components, we examine the impact of a set of enabling technologies and empowering domains (e.g., Artificial Intelligence, Security & Privacy, Blockchain, Business, Ethics, and Social) on its advancement. In addition, we explain the importance of these technologies to support decentralization, interoperability, user experiences, interactions, and monetization. Our presented study highlights the existing challenges for each component, followed by research directions and potential solutions. To the best of our knowledge, this survey is the most comprehensive and allows users, scholars, and entrepreneurs to get an in-depth understanding of the Metaverse ecosystem to find their opportunities and potentials for contribution

Current trends on ICT technologies for enterprise information s²ystems

The proposed paper discusses the current trends on ICT technologies for Enterprise Information Systems. The paper starts by defining four big challenges of the next generation of information systems: (1) Data Value Chain Management; (2) Context Awareness; (3) Interaction and Visualization; and (4) Human Learning. The major contributions towards the next generation of information systems are elaborated based on the work and experience of the authors and their teams. This includes: (1) Ontology based solutions for semantic interoperability; (2) Context aware infrastructures; (3) Product Avatar based interactions; and (4) Human learning. Finally the current state of research is discussed highlighting the impact of these solutions on the economic and social landscape

Designing a Participatory and Interactive Opera

Opera as an art form should lend itself to participatory design, given its wide variety of theatrical and musical components. Opera, however, imposes its own constraints and challenges. The problem as laid out in the early stages of the project was to design a short one-act interactive opera that could be managed within a modest budget. The source material was a science fiction manuscript currently undergoing publication by a small independent publishing house. Our research and production team included a composer, several singers/musicians, an engineer, a designer, and a choreographer/dancer as well as the writer. Furthermore, several of these had done extensive work with interactive and immersive environments. In addition to the opera itself, which incorporated both live and virtual elements, we recycled the 3d virtual designs as the substratum for an online co-creation environment that could be used to elicit public participation in the future development of our operas. We discuss both the diverse challenges involved in creating the opera and the co-creation environment, and highlight projected future work

An Information-Based Dynamic Extrapolation Model for Networked Virtual Environments

Various Information Management techniques have been developed to help maintain a consistent shared virtual world in a Networked Virtual Environment. However, such techniques have to be carefully adapted to the application state dynamics and the underlying network. This work presents a novel framework that minimizes inconsistency by optimizing bandwidth usage to deliver useful information. This framework measures the state evolution using an information model and dynamically switches extrapolation models and the packet rate to make the most information-efficient usage of the available bandwidth. The results shown demonstrate that this approach can help optimize consistency under constrained and time-varying network conditions

Bonding Over Distances: Building Social Presence Using Mixed Reality for Transnational Families

Sparked by the frustrations experienced in transnational family communication and inspired by an interest in exploring the potentials of a mixed reality (MR) future landscape, this study investigates the primary research question: how can we use mixed reality to build social presence for transnational family communication? This study reviews literature and contextual works from relevant fields, including presence and social presence, mixed reality, transnational relationships (inter-family and human-space relationships), and technology for social presence for transnational families. Then, the researcher situates this study at the intersection of the before mentioned categories. Utilizing the Research through Design methodology and paired user testing methods, this study describes 4 iterative MR prototypes for building social presence for transnational families, highlighting each prototype’s relation to a secondary research question, exploration goals, features, performance evaluation, and takeaways for the next iteration. Then, it documents and analyzes data collected from in-depth user testing sessions with 6 transnational family pairs totaling 12 participants, each with one member living locally (in Toronto), and the other overseas. The quantitative and qualitative data were collected from different components of the user testing, including observation notes from paired-up live connection sessions for collaborative tasks, interviews, and online surveys. This study contributes to theory at the overlapping fields of social presence, mixed reality research, transnational family relationship, and human-space relationship. The mixed reality prototypes, design frameworks, and evaluation criteria for designing mixed reality spaces to build social presence for transnational families also provide significance to design practice

Social media as a data gathering tool for international business qualitative research: opportunities and challenges

Lusophone African (LA) multinational enterprises (MNEs) are becoming a significant pan-African and global economic force regarding their international presence and influence. However, given the extreme poverty and lack of development in their home markets, many LA enterprises seeking to internationalize lack resources and legitimacy in international markets. Compared to higher income emerging markets, Lusophone enterprises in Africa face more significant challenges in their internationalization efforts. Concomitantly, conducting significant international business (IB) research in these markets to understand these MNEs internationalization strategies can be a very daunting task. The fast-growing rise of social media on the Internet, however, provides an opportunity for IB researchers to examine new phenomena in these markets in innovative ways. Unfortunately, for various reasons, qualitative researchers in IB have not fully embraced this opportunity. This article studies the use of social media in qualitative research in the field of IB. It offers an illustrative case based on qualitative research on internationalization modes of LAMNEs conducted by the authors in Angola and Mozambique using social media to identify and qualify the population sample, as well as interact with subjects and collect data. It discusses some of the challenges of using social media in those regions of Africa and suggests how scholars can design their studies to capitalize on social media and corresponding data as a tool for qualitative research. This article underscores the potential opportunities and challenges inherent in the use of social media in IB-oriented qualitative research, providing recommendations on how qualitative IB researchers can design their studies to capitalize on data generated by social media.https://doi.org/10.1080/15475778.2019.1634406https://doi.org/10.1080/15475778.2019.1634406https://doi.org/10.1080/15475778.2019.1634406https://doi.org/10.1080/15475778.2019.1634406Accepted manuscriptPublished versio