13,234 research outputs found
Identifying immersive environmentsâ most relevant research topics: an instrument to query researchers and practitioners
This paper provides an instrument for ascertaining researchersâ perspectives on the relative relevance of technological challenges facing immersive environments in view of their adoption in learning contexts, along three dimensions: access, content production, and deployment. It described its theoretical grounding and expert-review process, from a set of previously-identified challenges and expert feedback cycles. The paper details the motivation, setup, and methods employed, as well as the issues detected in the cycles and how they were addressed while developing the instrument. As a research instrument, it aims to be employed across diverse communities of research and practice, helping direct research efforts and hence contribute to wider use of immersive environments in learning, and possibly contribute towards the development of news
and more adequate systems.The work presented herein has been partially funded under the European H2020 program H2020-ICT-2015, BEACONING project, grant agreement nr. 687676.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Division of labor, skill complementarity, and heterophily in socioeconomic networks
Constituents of complex systems interact with each other and self-organize to
form complex networks. Empirical results show that the link formation process
of many real networks follows either the global principle of popularity or the
local principle of similarity or a tradeoff between the two. In particular, it
has been shown that in social networks individuals exhibit significant
homophily when choosing their collaborators. We demonstrate, however, that in
populations in which there is a division of labor, skill complementarity is an
important factor in the formation of socioeconomic networks and an individual's
choice of collaborators is strongly affected by heterophily. We analyze 124
evolving virtual worlds of a popular "massively multiplayer online role-playing
game" (MMORPG) in which people belong to three different professions and are
allowed to work and interact with each other in a somewhat realistic manner. We
find evidence of heterophily in the formation of collaboration networks, where
people prefer to forge social ties with people who have professions different
from their own. We then construct an economic model to quantify the heterophily
by assuming that individuals in socioeconomic systems choose collaborators that
are of maximum utility. The results of model calibration confirm the presence
of heterophily. Both empirical analysis and model calibration show that the
heterophilous feature is persistent along the evolution of virtual worlds. We
also find that the degree of complementarity in virtual societies is positively
correlated with their economic output. Our work sheds new light on the
scientific research utility of virtual worlds for studying human behaviors in
complex socioeconomic systems.Comment: 14 Latex pages + 3 figure
Social architecture and the emergence of power laws in online social games
This paper explores the concept of the âsocial architectureâ of games, and tests the theory that it is possible to analyse game mechanics based on the effect they have on the social behaviour of the players.
Using tools from Social Network Analysis, these studies confirm that social activity in games reliably follows a power distribution: a few players are responsible for a disproportionate amount of social interactions. Based on this, the scaling exponent is highlighted as a simple measure of sociability that is constant for a game design. This allows for the direct comparison of social activity in very different games. In addition, it can act as a powerful analytical tool for highlighting anomalies in game designs that detrimentally affect playersâ ability to interact socially.
Although the social architectures of games are complicated systems, SNA allows for quantitative analysis of social behaviours of players in meaningful ways, which are to the benefit of game designers
Using facial feature extraction to enhance the creation of 3D human models
The creation of personalised 3D characters has evolved to provide a high degree of realism in both appearance and animation. Further to the creation of generic characters the capabilities exist to create a personalised character from images of an individual. This provides the possibility of immersing an individual into a virtual world. Feature detection, particularly on the face, can be used to
greatly enhance the realism of the model. To address this innovative contour based templates are used to extract an individual from four orthogonal views providing localisation of the face. Then adaptive facial feature extraction from multiple views is used to enhance the realism of the model
Gaming on and off the social graph: the social structure of Facebook games
Games built on Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become a phenomenon since 3rd party developer tools were released by OSNs such as Facebook. However, apart from their explosive popularity, little is known about the nature of the social networks that are built during play. In this paper, we present the findings of a network analysis study carried out on two Facebook applications, in comparison with a similar but stand-alone game. We found that games built both on and off a social graph exhibit similar social properties. Specifically, the distribution of player-to-player interactions decays as a power law with a similar exponent for the majority of players. For games built on the social network platform however, we find that the networks are characterised by a sharp cut-off, compared with the classically scale-free nature of the social network for the game not built on an existing social graph
A Classification of Scripting Systems for Entertainment and Serious Computer Games
The technology base for modern computer games is usually provided by a game engine. Many game engines have built-in dedicated scripting languages that allow the development of complete games that are built using those engines, as well as extensive modification of existing games through scripting alone. While some of these game engines implement proprietary languages, others use existing scripting systems that have been modified according to the game engine's requirements. Scripting languages generally provide a very high level of abstraction method for syntactically controlling the behaviour of their host applications and different types of scripting system allow different types of modification of their underlying host application. In this paper we propose a simple classification for scripting systems used in computer games for entertainment and serious purposes
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