124 research outputs found
Grounds for a Third Place : The Starbucks Experience, Sirens, and Space
My goal in this dissertation is to help demystify or âfilterâ the âStarbucks Experienceâ for a post-pandemic world, taking stock of how a multi-national company has long outgrown its humble beginnings as a wholesale coffee bean supplier to become a digitally-integrated and hypermodern cafĂ©. I look at the role Starbucks plays within the larger cultural history of the coffee house and also consider how Starbucks has been idyllically described in corporate discourse as a comfortable and discursive âthird placeâ for informal gathering, a term that also prescribes its own radical ethos as a globally recognized customer service platform. Attempting to square Starbucksâ iconography and rhetoric with a new critical methodology, in a series of interdisciplinary case studies, I examine the role Starbucksâ âthird placeâ philosophy plays within larger conversations about urban space and commodity culture, analyze Starbucks advertising, architecture and art, and trace the mythical rise of the Starbucks Siren (and the reiterations and re-imaginings of the Starbucks Siren in art and media). While in corporate rhetoric Starbucksâ âthird placeâ is depicted as an enthralling adventure, full of play, discovery, authenticity, or âromance,â I draw on critical theory to discuss how it operates today as a space of distraction, isolation, and loss
Real-time motion capture and game engine technologies in contemporary dance
This Master of Arts thesis is made for the New Media study programme in the School of Arts, Design and Architecture at Aalto University under the supervision of Matti NiinimÀki and with advising from Nuno Antonio Do Nascimento Correia and Teemu MÀÀttÀnen.
This study is focusing on the topic of real-time motion capture and game engine technologies in contemporary dance with the goal to discover how these technologies can augment contemporary dance, both in the visual and audio domains, in a way in which sound, visuals, and choreography influence one another.
The methods being used to achieve this goal include devising mixed reality audiovisual dance performance, as a part of practice-based research methodology, related work review as well as an interview with a field expert.
Although the topic of motion capture in contemporary dance is fairly well-researched there is a clear shortage of studies on the ways game engines could be utilized in this segment of art and even less studies are conducted on modern hybrid club music and its influence on contemporary dance. Current research fills these gaps.
This study includes a brief overview of Dance and Technology art movement, elucidates motion capture and game engine technologies as well as attempts to define modern hybrid club music. It covers a broad selection of case studies from contemporary dance segment related to each category as well as the writerâs own perspective and experience with motion capture and modern hybrid club music. Furthermore, this research includes an interview with pioneering virtual performer, Sam Rolfes, who is actively using real-time motion capture, game engines, and other real-time tools in his artistic practice and finally, it explains in great detail the whole design process behind the mixed real-ity audio-visual dance performance piece "ROCK/STAR Vol.1", an artistic component of this research.
Using various game engine technologies together with the real-time motion captured data can help to establish a greater connection between different artistic domains of the performance, as well as provide a much stronger feeling of a world and a story for the performer who is wearing a suit. The ability to execute things in real-time, that this tech is offering makes it possible for performers to respond to one another, as well as the audience and the current moment in time, thus embracing and crystallizing the originality and specificity of the moment.Media files notes:
Fragment of "ROCK/STAR Vol.1" artistic component of this research
Description:
Video recording of premiere of mixed reality audiovisual dance performance "ROCK/STAR Vol.1" that took place on 20th of May 2023 in Odeion Screening Auditorium in Otaniemi.(Fragment)
Media rights: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.
Fictional Practices of Spirituality I: Interactive Media
"Fictional Practices of Spirituality" provides critical insight into the implementation of belief, mysticism, religion, and spirituality into worlds of fiction, be it interactive or non-interactive. This first volume focuses on interactive, virtual worlds - may that be the digital realms of video games and VR applications or the imaginary spaces of life action role-playing and soul-searching practices. It features analyses of spirituality as gameplay facilitator, sacred spaces and architecture in video game geography, religion in video games and spiritual acts and their dramaturgic function in video games, tabletop, or LARP, among other topics. The contributors offer a first-time ever comprehensive overview of play-rites as spiritual incentives and playful spirituality in various medial incarnations
Kaijus as environments: design & production of a colossal monster functioning as a boss level
Boss fights are a staple in most video game genres. They are milestones in the adventure, designed and intended
to test the skills that the player has acquired throughout their adventure. In some cases, they even define the
whole experience of the game, especially one type of enemy that has appeared in several instances and every
genre: colossal bosses, monsters of giant proportions usually used as a matter of spectacle and a simple yet
effective way to showcase the sheer power that players have achieved up until that point in the adventure. Titles
like God of War, Shadow of the Colossus and even many Super Mario titles use this concept in their video
games in imaginative ways to create Kaiju-like creatures working as a living environment the player has to
traverse to defeat them. However, what is the process behind creating a colossal boss that works as a breathing
environment, and how can it be achieved?
This project aims to study the process of colossal boss creation and design and apply level design and asset
creation. To do this, the author will investigate the main aspects and key-defining features of these bosses,
analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of existing bosses in videogames such as God of War 3âs Cronos and
Shadow of the Colossus and Solar Ashâs bosses in terms of art production and game design. From this study
and following the art process for creating creatures in the video game industry, the author will conceptualize,
design and produce a working, playable prototype of a boss fight, showcased in the final presentation
Human Preference Score: Better Aligning Text-to-Image Models with Human Preference
Recent years have witnessed a rapid growth of deep generative models, with
text-to-image models gaining significant attention from the public. However,
existing models often generate images that do not align well with human
preferences, such as awkward combinations of limbs and facial expressions. To
address this issue, we collect a dataset of human choices on generated images
from the Stable Foundation Discord channel. Our experiments demonstrate that
current evaluation metrics for generative models do not correlate well with
human choices. Thus, we train a human preference classifier with the collected
dataset and derive a Human Preference Score (HPS) based on the classifier.
Using HPS, we propose a simple yet effective method to adapt Stable Diffusion
to better align with human preferences. Our experiments show that HPS
outperforms CLIP in predicting human choices and has good generalization
capability toward images generated from other models. By tuning Stable
Diffusion with the guidance of HPS, the adapted model is able to generate
images that are more preferred by human users. The project page is available
here: https://tgxs002.github.io/align_sd_web/ .Comment: Accepted by ICCV 202
Digital 3D reconstruction as a research environment in art and architecture history: uncertainty classification and visualisation
The dissertation addresses the still not solved challenges concerned with the source-based digital 3D reconstruction, visualisation and documentation in the domain of archaeology, art and architecture history.
The emerging BIM methodology and the exchange data format IFC are changing the way of collaboration, visualisation and documentation in the planning, construction and facility management process. The introduction and development of the Semantic Web (Web 3.0), spreading the idea of structured, formalised and linked data, offers semantically enriched human- and machine-readable data.
In contrast to civil engineering and cultural heritage, academic object-oriented disciplines, like archaeology, art and architecture history, are acting as outside spectators.
Since the 1990s, it has been argued that a 3D model is not likely to be considered a scientific reconstruction unless it is grounded on accurate documentation and visualisation. However, these standards are still missing and the validation of the outcomes is not fulfilled. Meanwhile, the digital research data remain ephemeral and continue to fill the growing digital cemeteries.
This study focuses, therefore, on the evaluation of the source-based digital 3D reconstructions and, especially, on uncertainty assessment in the case of hypothetical reconstructions of destroyed or never built artefacts according to scientific principles, making the models shareable and reusable by a potentially wide audience.
The work initially focuses on terminology and on the definition of a workflow especially related to the classification and visualisation of uncertainty. The workflow is then applied to specific cases of 3D models uploaded to the DFG repository of the AI Mainz. In this way, the available methods of documenting, visualising and communicating uncertainty are analysed.
In the end, this process will lead to a validation or a correction of the workflow and the initial assumptions, but also (dealing with different hypotheses) to a better definition of the levels of uncertainty
When Children Draw Gods
This open access book explores how children draw god. It looks at childrenâs drawings collected in a large variety of cultural and religious traditions. Coverage demonstrates the richness of drawing as a method for studying representations of the divine. In the process, it also contributes to our understanding of this concept, its origins, and its development. This intercultural work brings together scholars from different disciplines and countries, including Switzerland, Japan, Russia, Iran, Brazil, and the Netherlands. It does more than share the results of their research and analysis. The volume also critically examines the contributions and limitations of this methodology. In addition, it also reflects on the new empirical and theoretical perspectives within the broader framework of the study of this concept. The concept of god is one of the most difficult to grasp. This volume offers new insights by focusing on the many different ways children depict god throughout the world. Readers will discover the importance of spatial imagery and color choices in drawings of god. They will also learn about how the divine's emotional expression correlates to age, gender, and religiosity as well as strategies used by children who are prohibited from representing their god
HumanSD: A Native Skeleton-Guided Diffusion Model for Human Image Generation
Controllable human image generation (HIG) has numerous real-life
applications. State-of-the-art solutions, such as ControlNet and T2I-Adapter,
introduce an additional learnable branch on top of the frozen pre-trained
stable diffusion (SD) model, which can enforce various conditions, including
skeleton guidance of HIG. While such a plug-and-play approach is appealing, the
inevitable and uncertain conflicts between the original images produced from
the frozen SD branch and the given condition incur significant challenges for
the learnable branch, which essentially conducts image feature editing for
condition enforcement. In this work, we propose a native skeleton-guided
diffusion model for controllable HIG called HumanSD. Instead of performing
image editing with dual-branch diffusion, we fine-tune the original SD model
using a novel heatmap-guided denoising loss. This strategy effectively and
efficiently strengthens the given skeleton condition during model training
while mitigating the catastrophic forgetting effects. HumanSD is fine-tuned on
the assembly of three large-scale human-centric datasets with text-image-pose
information, two of which are established in this work. As shown in Figure 1,
HumanSD outperforms ControlNet in terms of accurate pose control and image
quality, particularly when the given skeleton guidance is sophisticated
Actor & Avatar: A Scientific and Artistic Catalog
What kind of relationship do we have with artificial beings (avatars, puppets, robots, etc.)? What does it mean to mirror ourselves in them, to perform them or to play trial identity games with them? Actor & Avatar addresses these questions from artistic and scholarly angles. Contributions on the making of "technical others" and philosophical reflections on artificial alterity are flanked by neuroscientific studies on different ways of perceiving living persons and artificial counterparts. The contributors have achieved a successful artistic-scientific collaboration with extensive visual material
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