3,164 research outputs found

    Mobile heritage practices. Implications for scholarly research, user experience design, and evaluation methods using mobile apps.

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    Mobile heritage apps have become one of the most popular means for audience engagement and curation of museum collections and heritage contexts. This raises practical and ethical questions for both researchers and practitioners, such as: what kind of audience engagement can be built using mobile apps? what are the current approaches? how can audience engagement with these experience be evaluated? how can those experiences be made more resilient, and in turn sustainable? In this thesis I explore experience design scholarships together with personal professional insights to analyse digital heritage practices with a view to accelerating thinking about and critique of mobile apps in particular. As a result, the chapters that follow here look at the evolution of digital heritage practices, examining the cultural, societal, and technological contexts in which mobile heritage apps are developed by the creative media industry, the academic institutions, and how these forces are shaping the user experience design methods. Drawing from studies in digital (critical) heritage, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and design thinking, this thesis provides a critical analysis of the development and use of mobile practices for the heritage. Furthermore, through an empirical and embedded approach to research, the thesis also presents auto-ethnographic case studies in order to show evidence that mobile experiences conceptualised by more organic design approaches, can result in more resilient and sustainable heritage practices. By doing so, this thesis encourages a renewed understanding of the pivotal role of these practices in the broader sociocultural, political and environmental changes.AHRC REAC

    Southern Adventist University Undergraduate Catalog 2023-2024

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    Southern Adventist University\u27s undergraduate catalog for the academic year 2023-2024.https://knowledge.e.southern.edu/undergrad_catalog/1123/thumbnail.jp

    Wearable gaming technology: A study on the relationships between wearable features and gameful experiences

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    With the parallel advancement and evolution of psycho-physiological sensors, haptics, and overall wearable computing, wearable devices have become a mainstay in everyday life. While gaming is one of the most intuitively appealing areas for using wearable devices, most gaming concepts relying on wearable devices have had only moderate success. Therefore, further knowledge is needed by game developers for innovating new gaming concepts, by wearable designers to innovate new affordances for gaming in wearables, and by gamers for seeing the possibilities of what wearables can bring to gaming. To address this research problem, we combined vignette and survey studies (N = 289) to investigate which features of wearables (integrability, wearability, modularity, sociability, programmability, bio-adaptability, audiovisuality, and embodied modality) would lead to gameful experiences. Overall, the results indicate that integrability to games, wearability, modularity, and sociability were dimensions of wearables which were most strongly connected with the expectation of a heightened game experience. The findings of the study contribute to the current understanding on the experiential value of gaming wearables, as well as providing practical guidance for gaming wearables designers and marketers.Peer reviewe

    Digital Technologies for Teaching English as a Foreign/Second Language: a collective monograph

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    Колективна монографія розкриває різні аспекти використання цифрових технологій у навчанні англійської мови як іноземної/другої мови (цифровий сторітелінг, мобільні застосунки, інтерактивне навчання і онлайн-ігри, тощо) та надає освітянам і дослідникам ресурс для збагачення їхньої професійної діяльності. Окрема увага приділена цифровим інструментам для впровадження соціально-емоційного навчання та інклюзивної освіти на уроках англійської мови. Для вчителів англійської мови, методистів, викладачів вищих закладів освіти, науковців, здобувачів вищої освіти

    Planetary Hinterlands:Extraction, Abandonment and Care

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    This open access book considers the concept of the hinterland as a crucial tool for understanding the global and planetary present as a time defined by the lasting legacies of colonialism, increasing labor precarity under late capitalist regimes, and looming climate disasters. Traditionally seen to serve a (colonial) port or market town, the hinterland here becomes a lens to attend to the times and spaces shaped and experienced across the received categories of the urban, rural, wilderness or nature. In straddling these categories, the concept of the hinterland foregrounds the human and more-than-human lively processes and forms of care that go on even in sites defined by capitalist extraction and political abandonment. Bringing together scholars from the humanities and social sciences, the book rethinks hinterland materialities, affectivities, and ecologies across places and cultural imaginations, Global North and South, urban and rural, and land and water

    Breaking Virtual Barriers : Investigating Virtual Reality for Enhanced Educational Engagement

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    Virtual reality (VR) is an innovative technology that has regained popularity in recent years. In the field of education, VR has been introduced as a tool to enhance learning experiences. This thesis presents an exploration of how VR is used from the context of educators and learners. The research employed a mixed-methods approach, including surveying and interviewing educators, and conducting empirical studies to examine engagement, usability, and user behaviour within VR. The results revealed educators are interested in using VR for a wide range of scenarios, including thought exercises, virtual field trips, and simulations. However, they face several barriers to incorporating VR into their practice, such as cost, lack of training, and technical challenges. A subsequent study found that virtual reality can no longer be assumed to be more engaging than desktop equivalents. This empirical study showed that engagement levels were similar in both VR and non-VR environments, suggesting that the novelty effect of VR may be less pronounced than previously assumed. A study against a VR mind mapping artifact, VERITAS, demonstrated that complex interactions are possible on low-cost VR devices, making VR accessible to educators and students. The analysis of user behaviour within this VR artifact showed that quantifiable strategies emerge, contributing to the understanding of how to design for collaborative VR experiences. This thesis provides insights into how the end-users in the education space perceive and use VR. The findings suggest that while educators are interested in using VR, they face barriers to adoption. The research highlights the need to design VR experiences, with understanding of existing pedagogy, that are engaging with careful thought applied to complex interactions, particularly for collaborative experiences. This research contributes to the understanding of the potential of VR in education and provides recommendations for educators and designers to enhance learning experiences using VR

    Scalable Exploration of Complex Objects and Environments Beyond Plain Visual Replication​

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    Digital multimedia content and presentation means are rapidly increasing their sophistication and are now capable of describing detailed representations of the physical world. 3D exploration experiences allow people to appreciate, understand and interact with intrinsically virtual objects. Communicating information on objects requires the ability to explore them under different angles, as well as to mix highly photorealistic or illustrative presentations of the object themselves with additional data that provides additional insights on these objects, typically represented in the form of annotations. Effectively providing these capabilities requires the solution of important problems in visualization and user interaction. In this thesis, I studied these problems in the cultural heritage-computing-domain, focusing on the very common and important special case of mostly planar, but visually, geometrically, and semantically rich objects. These could be generally roughly flat objects with a standard frontal viewing direction (e.g., paintings, inscriptions, bas-reliefs), as well as visualizations of fully 3D objects from a particular point of views (e.g., canonical views of buildings or statues). Selecting a precise application domain and a specific presentation mode allowed me to concentrate on the well defined use-case of the exploration of annotated relightable stratigraphic models (in particular, for local and remote museum presentation). My main results and contributions to the state of the art have been a novel technique for interactively controlling visualization lenses while automatically maintaining good focus-and-context parameters, a novel approach for avoiding clutter in an annotated model and for guiding users towards interesting areas, and a method for structuring audio-visual object annotations into a graph and for using that graph to improve guidance and support storytelling and automated tours. We demonstrated the effectiveness and potential of our techniques by performing interactive exploration sessions on various screen sizes and types ranging from desktop devices to large-screen displays for a walk-up-and-use museum installation. KEYWORDS - Computer Graphics, Human-Computer Interaction, Interactive Lenses, Focus-and-Context, Annotated Models, Cultural Heritage Computing

    Understanding Agreement and Disagreement in Listeners’ Perceived Emotion in Live Music Performance

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    Emotion perception of music is subjective and time dependent. Most computational music emotion recognition (MER) systems overlook time- and listener-dependent factors by averaging emotion judgments across listeners. In this work, we investigate the influence of music, setting (live vs lab vs online), and individual factors on music emotion perception over time. In an initial study, we explore changes in perceived music emotions among audience members during live classical music performances. Fifteen audience members used a mobile application to annotate time-varying emotion judgments based on the valence-arousal model. Inter-rater reliability analyses indicate that consistency in emotion judgments varies significantly across rehearsal segments, with systematic disagreements in certain segments. In a follow-up study, we examine listeners' reasons for their ratings in segments with high and low agreement. We relate these reasons to acoustic features and individual differences. Twenty-one listeners annotated perceived emotions while watching a recorded video of the live performance. They then reflected on their judgments and provided explanations retrospectively. Disagreements were attributed to listeners attending to different musical features or being uncertain about the expressed emotions. Emotion judgments were significantly associated with personality traits, gender, cultural background, and music preference. Thematic analysis of explanations revealed cognitive processes underlying music emotion perception, highlighting attributes less frequently discussed in MER studies, such as instrumentation, arrangement, musical structure, and multimodal factors related to performer expression. Exploratory models incorporating these semantic features and individual factors were developed to predict perceived music emotion over time. Regression analyses confirmed the significance of listener-informed semantic features as independent variables, with individual factors acting as moderators between loudness, pitch range, and arousal. In our final study, we analyzed the effects of individual differences on music emotion perception among 128 participants with diverse backgrounds. Participants annotated perceived emotions for 51 piano performances of different compositions from the Western canon, spanning various era. Linear mixed effects models revealed significant variations in valence and arousal ratings, as well as the frequency of emotion ratings, with regard to several individual factors: music sophistication, music preferences, personality traits, and mood states. Additionally, participants' ratings of arousal, valence, and emotional agreement were significantly associated to the historical time periods of the examined clips. This research highlights the complexity of music emotion perception, revealing it to be a dynamic, individual and context-dependent process. It paves the way for the development of more individually nuanced, time-based models in music psychology, opening up new avenues for personalised music emotion recognition and recommendation, music emotion-driven generation and therapeutic applications

    Reshaping the Museum of Zoology in Rome by Visual Storytelling and Interactive Iconography

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    This article summarizes the concept of a new immersive and interactive setting for the Zoology Museum in Rome, Italy. The concept, co-designed with all the museum’s curators, is aimed at enhancing the experiential involvement of the visitors by visual storytelling and interactive iconography. Thanks to immersive and interactive technologies designed by Centro Studi Logos, developed by Logosnet and known as e-REALâ and MirrorMeä, zoological findings and memoirs come to life and interact directly with the visitors in order to deepen their understanding, visualize stories and live experiences, and interact with the founder of the Museum (Mr. Arrigoni degli Oddi) who is now a virtualized avatar, or digital human, able to talk with the visitors. All the interactions are powered through simple hand gestures and, in a few cases, vocal inputs that transform into recognized commands from multimedia systems
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