Smart Computing and Sensing Technologies for Animal Welfare: A Systematic Review

Animals play a profoundly important and intricate role in our lives today. Dogs have been human companions for thousands of years, but they now work closely with us to assist the disabled, and in combat and search and rescue situations. Farm animals are a critical part of the global food supply chain, and there is increasing consumer interest in organically fed and humanely raised livestock, and how it impacts our health and environmental footprint. Wild animals are threatened with extinction by human induced factors, and shrinking and compromised habitat. This review sets the goal to systematically survey the existing literature in smart computing and sensing technologies for domestic, farm and wild animal welfare. We use the notion of \emph{animal welfare} in broad terms, to review the technologies for assessing whether animals are healthy, free of pain and suffering, and also positively stimulated in their environment. Also the notion of \emph{smart computing and sensing} is used in broad terms, to refer to computing and sensing systems that are not isolated but interconnected with communication networks, and capable of remote data collection, processing, exchange and analysis. We review smart technologies for domestic animals, indoor and outdoor animal farming, as well as animals in the wild and zoos. The findings of this review are expected to motivate future research and contribute to data, information and communication management as well as policy for animal welfare

Seven Years after the Manifesto: Literature Review and Research Directions for Technologies in Animal Computer Interaction

As technologies diversify and become embedded in everyday lives, the technologies we expose to animals, and the new technologies being developed for animals within the field of Animal Computer Interaction (ACI) are increasing. As we approach seven years since the ACI manifesto, which grounded the field within Human Computer Interaction and Computer Science, this thematic literature review looks at the technologies developed for (non-human) animals. Technologies that are analysed include tangible and physical, haptic and wearable, olfactory, screen technology and tracking systems. The conversation explores what exactly ACI is whilst questioning what it means to be animal by considering the impact and loop between machine and animal interactivity. The findings of this review are expected to form the first grounding foundation of ACI technologies informing future research in animal computing as well as suggesting future areas for exploratio

CollaborationBus Aqua: An Editor for Storytelling in Mixed Reality Settings

Capturing the interaction of users in a room based on real-world and electronic sensors provides valuable input for their interactive stories. However, in such complex scenarios there is a gap between the huge amount of rather fine-grained data that is captured and the story summarising and representing the most significant aspects of the interaction. In this paper we present the CollaborationBus Aqua editor that provides an easy to use graphical editor for capturing, authoring, and sharing stories based on mixed-reality scenarios

Towards Understanding the Positive Effect of Playing Violent Video Games on Children's Development

AbstractProblem Statement: In the literature, playing the violent games still considers as double-edged sword (Agina & Kommers, 2008). On one edge, the focus was on the aspect of using video games in teaching, social settings, and improving human- computer interfaces (e.g., Malone, 1981; .). On the other edge, the focus was on the negative outcomes and later effects (e.g., Griffiths & Hunt, 1998; ..). However, the literature clearly lacks investigating the positive effect of playing violent games on children's development processes when children act and react alone and without human's external regulation.Purpose of Study: Given the fact that the world is clearly unable to stop the production of the violent games as avoiding children to play violent games is almost impossible, the present study aimed towards understanding the positive effect of playing violent games on children's development to clarify what the future research should highly take into account. Stated differently, the present study was an attempt towards clarifying the importance of embedding violent arousal as a process of learning.Research Methods: Hundred children (50 boys, 50 girls) who, almost, daily played violent games were specifically selected. Each child was given one hour to play with “CAR-RACING” and “THE-PUNISHER”. After the session, a Friendly-Chat-Questionnaire, through nonhumn's external regulator, was achieved with each child where all children's utterances were recorded and tabulated. An extra meeting with children was achieved after the entire session.Findings: Children's self-regulation and thinking-aloud verbalization were affected by the game hero's gender; both were fluctuated even among the same gender where boys showed higher level of violent arousal. Children also showed high level of self-regulation when engaging them as deign-partners that confirmed Agina and Kommers (2008).Conclusions: Despite the negative effect of playing violent games, violent arousal has positive effect on children's development especially self-regulation and thinking aloud to express their mind's content. Thus, the most significant question for the future research on children's developmet is that: How can the violent arousal be safely transferred into children's learning settings to enable children to be “Violent-Arousal-Learners” through “Violent-Arousal-Learning”?

Game Portability Using a Service-Oriented Approach

Game assets are portable between games. The games themselves are, however, dependent on the game engine they were developed on. Middleware has attempted to address this by, for instance, separating out the AI from the core game engine. Our work takes this further by separating the game from the game engine, and making it portable between game engines. The game elements that we make portable are the game logic, the object model, and the game state, which represent the game's brain, and which we collectively refer to as the game factor, or G-factor. We achieve this using an architecture based around a service-oriented approach. We present an overview of this architecture and its use in developing games. The evaluation demonstrates that the architecture does not affect performance unduly, adds little development overhead, is scaleable, and supports modifiability

Re-engineering jake2 to work on a grid using the GridGain Middleware

With the advent of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), engineers and designers of games came across with many questions that needed to be answered such as, for example, "how to allow a large amount of clients to play simultaneously on the same server?", "how to guarantee a good quality of service (QoS) to a great number of clients?", "how many resources will be necessary?", "how to optimize these resources to the maximum?". A possible answer to these questions relies on the usage of grid computing. Taking into account the parallel and distributed nature of grid computing, we can say that grid computing allows for more scalability in terms of a growing number of players, guarantees shorter communication time between clients and servers, and allows for a better resource management and usage (e.g., memory, CPU, core balancing usage, etc.) than the traditional serial computing model. However, the main focus of this thesis is not about grid computing. Instead, this thesis describes the re-engineering process of an existing multiplayer computer game, called Jake2, by transforming it into a MMOG, which is then put to run on a grid

Augmenting spaces and creating interactive experiences using video camera networks

This research addresses the problem of creating interactive experiences to encourage people to explore spaces. Besides the obvious spaces to visit, such as museums or art galleries, spaces that people visit can be, for example, a supermarket or a restaurant. As technology evolves, people become more demanding in the way they use it and expect better forms of interaction with the space that surrounds them. Interaction with the space allows information to be transmitted to the visitors in a friendly way, leading visitors to explore it and gain knowledge. Systems to provide better experiences while exploring spaces demand hardware and software that is not in the reach of every space owner either because of the cost or inconvenience of the installation, that can damage artefacts or the space environment. We propose a system adaptable to the spaces, that uses a video camera network and a wi-fi network present at the space (or that can be installed) to provide means to support interactive experiences using the visitor’s mobile device. The system is composed of an infrastructure (called vuSpot), a language grammar used to describe interactions at a space (called XploreDescription), a visual tool used to design interactive experiences (called XploreBuilder) and a tool used to create interactive experiences (called urSpace). By using XploreBuilder, a tool built of top of vuSpot, a user with little or no experience in programming can define a space and design interactive experiences. This tool generates a description of the space and of the interactions at that space (that complies with the XploreDescription grammar). These descriptions can be given to urSpace, another tool built of top of vuSpot, that creates the interactive experience application. With this system we explore new forms of interaction and use mobile devices and pico projectors to deliver additional information to the users leading to the creation of interactive experiences. The several components are presented as well as the results of the respective user tests, which were positive. The design and implementation becomes cheaper, faster, more flexible and, since it does not depend on the knowledge of a programming language, accessible for the general public.NOVA Laboratory for Computer Science and Informatics (NOVA LINCS), Multimodal Systems, Departamento de Informática (DI), Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia (FCT), Universidade Nova de Lisboa (UNL) and Escola Superior de Tecnologia de Setúbal (EST Setúbal), Instituto Politécnico de Setúbal (IPS)

Languages of games and play: A systematic mapping study

Digital games are a powerful means for creating enticing, beautiful, educational, and often highly addictive interactive experiences that impact the lives of billions of players worldwide. We explore what informs the design and construction of good games to learn how to speed-up game development. In particular, we study to what extent languages, notations, patterns, and tools, can offer experts theoretical foundations, systematic techniques, and practical solutions they need to raise their productivity and improve the quality of games and play. Despite the growing number of publications on this topic there is currently no overview describing the state-of-the-art that relates research areas, goals, and applications. As a result, efforts and successes are often one-off, lessons learned go overlooked, language reuse remains minimal, and opportunities for collaboration and synergy are lost. We present a systematic map that identifies relevant publications and gives an overview of research areas and publication venues. In addition, we categorize research perspectives along common objectives, techniques, and approaches, illustrated by summaries of selected languages. Finally, we distill challenges and opportunities for future research and development