Digital technologies in architecture and engineering: Exploring an engaged interaction within curricula

This chapter focuses on the development and adoption of new Multimedia, Computer Aided Design, and other ICT technologies for both Architecture and Computer Sciences curricula and highlights the multidisciplinary work that can be accomplished when these two areas work together. We describe in detail the addressed educational skills and the developed research and we highlight the contributions towards the improvements of teaching and learning in those areas. We discuss in detail the role of Digital technologies, such as Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Multimedia, 3D Modelling software systems, Design Processes and its evaluation tools, such as Shape Grammar and Space Syntax, within the Architecture curricula.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Design Ltd.: Renovated Myths for the Development of Socially Embedded Technologies

This paper argues that traditional and mainstream mythologies, which have been continually told within the Information Technology domain among designers and advocators of conceptual modelling since the 1960s in different fields of computing sciences, could now be renovated or substituted in the mould of more recent discourses about performativity, complexity and end-user creativity that have been constructed across different fields in the meanwhile. In the paper, it is submitted that these discourses could motivate IT professionals in undertaking alternative approaches toward the co-construction of socio-technical systems, i.e., social settings where humans cooperate to reach common goals by means of mediating computational tools. The authors advocate further discussion about and consolidation of some concepts in design research, design practice and more generally Information Technology (IT) development, like those of: task-artifact entanglement, universatility (sic) of End-User Development (EUD) environments, bricolant/bricoleur end-user, logic of bricolage, maieuta-designers (sic), and laissez-faire method to socio-technical construction. Points backing these and similar concepts are made to promote further discussion on the need to rethink the main assumptions underlying IT design and development some fifty years later the coming of age of software and modern IT in the organizational domain.Comment: This is the peer-unreviewed of a manuscript that is to appear in D. Randall, K. Schmidt, & V. Wulf (Eds.), Designing Socially Embedded Technologies: A European Challenge (2013, forthcoming) with the title "Building Socially Embedded Technologies: Implications on Design" within an EUSSET editorial initiative (www.eusset.eu/

Manoeuvring drone (Tello Talent) using eye gaze and or fingers gestures

The project aims to combine hands and eyes to control a Tello Talent drone based on computer vision, machine learning and an eye tracking device for gaze detection and interaction. The main purpose of this project is gaming, experimental and educational for next coming generation, in addition it is very useful for the peoples who cannot use their hands, they can maneuver the drone by their eyes movement, and hopefully this will bring them some fun. The idea of this project is inspired by the progress and development in the innovative technologies such as machine learning, computer vision and object detection that offer a large field of applications which can be used in diverse domains, there are many researcher are improving, instructing and innovating the new intelligent manner for controlling the drones by combining computer vision, machine learning, artificial intelligent, etc. This project can help anyone even the people who they don¿t have any prior knowledge of programming or Computer Vision or theory of eye tracking system, they learn the basic knowledge of drone concept, object detection, programing, and integrating different hardware and software involved, then playing. As a final objective, they can able to build simple application that can control the drones by using movements of hands, eyes or both, during the practice they should take in consideration the operating condition and safety required by the manufacturers of drones and eye tracking device. The concept of Tello Talent drone is based on a series of features, functions and scripts which are already been developed, embedded in autopilot memories and are accessible by users via an SDK protocol. The SDK is used as an easy guide to developing simple and complex applications; it allows the user to develop several flying mission programs. There are different experiments were studied for checking which scenario is better in detecting the hands movement and exploring the keys points in real-time with low computing power computer. As a result, I find that the Google artificial intelligent research group offers an open source platform dedicated for developing this application; the platform is called MediaPipe based on customizable machine learning solution for live streaming video. In this project the MediaPipe and the eye tracking module are the fundamental tools for developing and realizing the application

Video Conferencing: Infrastructures, Practices, Aesthetics

The COVID-19 pandemic has reorganized existing methods of exchange, turning comparatively marginal technologies into the new normal. Multipoint videoconferencing in particular has become a favored means for web-based forms of remote communication and collaboration without physical copresence. Taking the recent mainstreaming of videoconferencing as its point of departure, this anthology examines the complex mediality of this new form of social interaction. Connecting theoretical reflection with material case studies, the contributors question practices, politics and aesthetics of videoconferencing and the specific meanings it acquires in different historical, cultural and social contexts

Augmenting Reality with Intelligent Interfaces

It is clear that our daily reality will increasingly interface with virtual inputs. We already integrate the virtual into real life through constantly evolving sensor technologies embedded into our smartphones, digital assistants, and connected devices. Simultaneously, we seek more virtual input into our reality through intelligent interfaces for the applications that these devices can run in a context rich, socially connected, and personalized way. As we progress toward a future of ubiquitous Augmented Reality (AR) interfaces, it will be important to consider how this technology can best serve the various populations that can benefit most from the addition of these intelligent interfaces. This paper proposes a new terminological framework to discuss the way AR interacts with users. An intelligent interface that combines digital objects in a real-world context can be referred to as a Pose-Interfaced Presentation (PIP): Pose refers to user location and orientation in space; Interfaced means that the program responds to a user’s intention and actions in an intelligent way; and Presentation refers to the virtual object or data being layered onto the perceptive field of the user. Finally, various benefits of AR are described and examples are provided in the areas of education, worker training, and ESL learning

UNI Grad Student News, v17n5 [v.15n5], April 2017

Inside this Issue: --Message From the Dean--Current Faculty Profile--Current Student Profile--Alumni Profile--10th Annual Graduate Student Symposium--UNI Rise: Refugee and Immigrant Support and Empowerment--Cedar Valley’s Little Free Pantries--UNI MBA International Hong Kong Alumni--Student Accoladeshttps://scholarworks.uni.edu/gsnews/1029/thumbnail.jp

Let’s get it started: Eye tracking in VR with the Pupil Labs eye tracking add-on for the HTC Vive

Combining eye tracking and virtual reality (VR) is a promising approach to tackle various applied research questions. As this approach is relatively new, routines are not established yet and the first steps can be full of potential pitfalls. The present paper gives a practice example to lower the boundaries for getting started. More specifically, I focus on an affordable add-on technology, the Pupil Labs eye tracking add-on for the HTC Vive. As add-on technology with all relevant source code available on GitHub, a high degree of freedom in preprocessing, visualizing, and analyzing eye tracking data in VR can be achieved. At the same time, some extra preparatory steps for the setup of hardware and software are necessary. Therefore, specifics of eye tracking in VR from unboxing, software integration, and procedures to analyzing the data and maintaining the hardware will be addressed. The Pupil Labs eye tracking add-on for the HTC Vive represents a highly transparent approach to existing alternatives. Characteristics of eye tracking in VR in contrast to other head-mounded and remote eye trackers applied in the physical world will be discussed. In conclusion, the paper contributes to the idea of open science in two ways: First, by making the necessary routines transparent and therefore reproducible. Second, by stressing the benefits of using open source software

Apportioned Commodity Fetishism and the Transformative Power of Game Studies

This chapter explores the ways in which the field of Game Studies helps shape popular understandings of player, play, and game, and specifically how the field alters the conceptual, linguistic, and discursive apparatuses that gamers use to contextualize, describe, and make sense of their experiences. The chapter deploys the concept of apportioned commodity fetishism to analyze the phenomena of discourse as practice, persona, and vagaries of game design, recursion, lexical formation, institutionalization, systems of self-effectiveness, theory as anti-theory, and commodification

Game-Based Learning, Gamification in Education and Serious Games

The aim of this book is to present and discuss new advances in serious games to show how they could enhance the effectiveness and outreach of education, advertising, social awareness, health, policies, etc. We present their use in structured learning activities, not only with a focus on game-based learning, but also on the use of game elements and game design techniques to gamify the learning process. The published contributions really demonstrate the wide scope of application of game-based approaches in terms of purpose, target groups, technologies and domains and one aspect they have in common is that they provide evidence of how effective serious games, game-based learning and gamification can be

U+16E99

The general understanding and professional practice of graphic design have been shaped by the perspectives, needs, and desires of white, cis-gendered, heterosexual men in imperialist, capitalist societies. The tools, substrates, professional networks, institutions, processes, theories, grammars, and values that have come to define the discipline have been formed from this position. Consequently, graphic design primarily serves the needs of the settler in settler colonial regimes like the United States. This reality has prompted many designers like myself who come from colonized communities or whose identity troubles this rubric to question the framework of the discipline and our position within it. My thesis is rooted within this broader inquiry, which for me, as a Black and Indigenous person, began a few years ago through the emergence of two decolonial movements in the communities I call home: the BlackLivesMatter movement in Minneapolis following the live-streamed extra-judicial killing of Philando Castile by a White police officer; and the NoDAPL movement in Standing Rock which sought to prevent the construction of an oil pipeline across the river my tribe depends upon for water. The inquiries that evolved from the social and political contexts in which I began my formal design education have particular salience now amidst current manifestations of colonial oppression: a deadly global pandemic that has disproportionately claimed the lives of Black and Indigenous people due to the violence of structural inequities in the United States; the resurgence of the Keystone XL oil pipeline threatening the ecological sovereignty and well-being of numerous indigenous communities in the Midwest, including my own; and the nation wide uprisings sparked by the extra-judicial killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. As I write this, I can hear the whir of police and military helicopters surveilling the streets of Providence for protesters out past state-mandated curfew. My background and the urgent socio-political contexts surrounding my design education have forced me to seek out creative and subversive methodologies to bend a design discipline defined for the service of settler colonialism towards ongoing decolonial movements in Black and Indigenous communities. Using design in the service of decolonial movements will require new articulations of tools, substrates, networks, institutions, processes, theories, grammars, and values. Fortunately, there is a long tradition to draw from in marginalized communities of repurposing tools not designed for us to meet our own needs. Decolonization is not a destination along a binary array. Rather, it is a vector traversed through a lifelong practice seeking what lies beyond the decolonial horizon. In a decolonial design practice, design and the products of design are not an end; for endeavors with no end, process is the product. Design is the work that leads to and through the personal, interpersonal, and systemic work of decolonization. A radical design practice uses craft as a vehicle for the beyond, one of many possible methods that activate the decolonial moments, gestures, and utterances between people that triangulate new vectors for our collective liberation and help carry us there. As such, rather than catalog design works, the images in this publication utter a personal narrative of formative moments that transpired through the work of design. I am the work design helps make. U+16E99 is one articulation of a decolonial design practice uttered through the poetic grammars of Black, Indigenous, Queer, and Feminist thinkers, makers, and organizers. It is an attempt to define a trajectory for my own creative practice that centers my values, needs, and desires, while navigating the demands, precarities, and limitations of the academic institutions and settler colonial contexts in which this mapping takes place