Role of Wireless technology in mobile augmented reality system (MARS)

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The Female Gaze in Contemporary Japanese Literature

The female gaze can be used by writers and readers to look at narratives from a perspective that sees women as subjects instead of objects. Applying a female gaze to discourses that have traditionally been male-dominated opens new avenues of interpretation that are empowering from a feminist perspective. In this dissertation, I use the murder mystery novels of the bestselling female author Kirino Natsuo and the graphic novels of a prolific four-woman artistic collective called CLAMP to demonstrate how writers are capable of applying a female gaze to the themes of their work and how readers can and have read their work from the perspectives allowed by a female gaze. Kirino Natsuo presents a female perspective on such issues as prostitution, marriage, and equal employment laws in her novels, which are often based on sensationalist news stories. Meanwhile, CLAMP challenges the discourses surrounding the production and consumption of fictional women, especially the young female characters, or shojo, that have become iconic in Japanese popular culture. Likewise, the female consumers of popular media are able to view and interpret popular texts in such a way as to subjectify female characters and emphasize feminist themes. In addition, the erotic elements of a female gaze may be used to apply a subversive interpretation of the overt or implicit phallocentrism of mainstream media. The male gaze should not be taken for granted in the study of literary texts and graphic novels, and an awareness of an active female gaze can change the ways in which we understand contemporary Japanese literature and popular culture. Female readers and writers can find enjoyment and create messages of feminist empowerment even in works with flawed and problematic representations of femininity. The female gaze thus acts as a mode of resistant reading that allows alternate methods of reading, viewing, and interpreting the female characters and the gendered themes and issues of a text, regardless of the gender of the creators or the gender of the reader

Wearable computing and contextual awareness

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 1999.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 231-248).Computer hardware continues to shrink in size and increase in capability. This trend has allowed the prevailing concept of a computer to evolve from the mainframe to the minicomputer to the desktop. Just as the physical hardware changes, so does the use of the technology, tending towards more interactive and personal systems. Currently, another physical change is underway, placing computational power on the user's body. These wearable machines encourage new applications that were formerly infeasible and, correspondingly, will result in new usage patterns. This thesis suggests that the fundamental improvement offered by wearable computing is an increased sense of user context. I hypothesize that on-body systems can sense the user's context with little or no assistance from environmental infrastructure. These body-centered systems that "see" as the user sees and "hear" as the user hears, provide a unique "first-person" viewpoint of the user's environment. By exploiting models recovered by these systems, interfaces are created which require minimal directed action or attention by the user. In addition, more traditional applications are augmented by the contextual information recovered by these systems. To investigate these issues, I provide perceptually sensible tools for recovering and modeling user context in a mobile, everyday environment. These tools include a downward-facing, camera-based system for establishing the location of the user; a tag-based object recognition system for augmented reality; and several on-body gesture recognition systems to identify various user tasks in constrained environments. To address the practicality of contextually-aware wearable computers, issues of power recovery, heat dissipation, and weight distribution are examined. In addition, I have encouraged a community of wearable computer users at the Media Lab through design, management, and support of hardware and software infrastructure. This unique community provides a heightened awareness of the use and social issues of wearable computing. As much as possible, the lessons from this experience will be conveyed in the thesis.by Thad Eugene Starner.Ph.D