Freeform User Interfaces for Graphical Computing

報告番号: 甲15222 ; 学位授与年月日: 2000-03-29 ; 学位の種別: 課程博士 ; 学位の種類: 博士(工学) ; 学位記番号: 博工第4717号 ; 研究科・専攻: 工学系研究科情報工学専

Datura: distributing activity in peer to peer collaborative virtual environments

Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) are an exciting advance in the field of Virtual Reality (VR) research. By joining VR systems---and users---at widely scattered geographic locations, VR changes from an isolated experience to one of communication, interaction, and collaboration. Much research effort is being placed into the development of tools and techniques to power these collaborative experiences.;This dissertation describes the Datura toolkit for CVE development and, more importantly, the new concepts and methods that make Datura unique. We focus on the idea of Location of Computation (LoC)---methods for determining where, among all the sites participating in a CVE, particular calculations or particular decisions should be made. Datura connects sites into a peer to peer network, allowing each one to participate fully in bringing the virtual world to life.;Datura works at the level of elements---individual components that imbue shared objects with data, behaviors, and capabilities. These elements are shared among all sites, and control over them can be granted or migrated individually. This dissertation discusses the mechanisms for transferring control and computation, and provides a system for deciding where control should reside for each element in a CVE. An extensive set of tests and evaluations are also described, verifying the capabilities of the Datura system and demonstrating the performance and error-handling gains that are made by this fine-grained control over the location of computation

Utilizing a 3D game engine to develop a virtual design review system

A design review process is where information is exchanged between the designers and design reviewers to resolve any potential design related issues, and to ensure that the interests and goals of the owner are met. The effective execution of design review will minimize potential errors or conflicts, reduce the time for review, shorten the project life-cycle, allow for earlier occupancy, and ultimately translate into significant total project savings to the owner. However, the current methods of design review are still heavily relying on 2D paper-based format, sequential and lack central and integrated information base for efficient exchange and flow of information. There is thus a need for the use of a new medium that allow for 3D visualization of designs, collaboration among designers and design reviewers, and early and easy access to design review information. This paper documents the innovative utilization of a 3D game engine, the Torque Game Engine as the underlying tool and enabling technology for a design review system, the Virtual Design Review System for architectural designs. Two major elements are incorporated; 1) a 3D game engine as the driving tool for the development and implementation of design review processes, and 2) a virtual environment as the medium for design review, where visualization of design and design review information is based on sound principles of GUI design. The development of the VDRS involves two major phases; firstly, the creation of the assets and the assembly of the virtual environment, and secondly, the modification of existing functions or introducing new functionality through programming of the 3D game engine in order to support design review in a virtual environment. The features that are included in the VDRS are support for database, real-time collaboration across network, viewing and navigation modes, 3D object manipulation, parametric input, GUI, and organization for 3D objects

Virtual worlds as adjustable environments for immersion in business meetings

Managing modern organizations requires innovative measures to facilitate interaction. In this paper, we focus on interaction mechanisms, such as business meetings. We attempt to highlight the possible contributions of virtual worlds in terms of such organizational mechanisms. This original work presents a review of the literature about business meetings and their structural properties. It also presents the specific properties of virtual worlds that serve as a mechanism for facilitating the interaction of multiple participants. Our research demonstrates that immersion is a property common to both meetings and virtual worlds. This immersion is expressed in a wide range of forms that are described in this paper

Interaction in an immersive virtual Beijing courtyard house

Courtyard housing had been a standard dwelling type in China for more than 3000 years, which integrated tightly with local customs, aesthetics, philosophy, and natural conditions. As the representative of Chinese courtyard housing, Beijing\u27s style has its unique features including structure, plan layout, and urban form. How to present these features effectively is of great importance to understand Beijing courtyard housing. The current major visualization methods in architecture include physical model, digital imaging, and hand drawing. All of them have two common limitations--small dimensions and non-interaction. As an alternative, VR owns two advantages--immersion and interactivity. In a full-immersive VR environment, such as the C6, users can examine virtual buildings at full-scale and operate models interactively at real-time. Thus, this project attempts to implement an interactive simulation of Beijing courtyard house in C6, and find out if architectural knowledge can be presented through this environment. The methodological steps include VR modeling, interaction planning, and C6 implementation. A four-yard house in Beijing was used as the prototype of VR modeling. By generating the model into six versions with different nodes and textures, it was found that the fewer nodes a model has, the quicker it is in C6. The main interaction mechanism is to demonstrate the main hall\u27s structure interactively through menu selection. The sequence to show the structure is based on its constructional process. Each menu item uses the name of structural components, and by clicking a menu item, the corresponding constructional step is shown in C6. There were five viewers invited to see the simulation and comment on the functionality of full-immersion and interactivity in this product. Overall, the results are positive that the full-immersive and interactive VR environment is potentially effective to present architectural knowledge. A major suggestion from the viewers is that more details can be added in the simulation, such as characters and furniture. Upon the accomplishment of this project, a method to implement architectural simulations efficiently in C6 could be found. In the future, this study could involve more complex interactions such as virtual inhabitants, as a means to show the Chinese culture vividly

Evaluating humanoid embodied conversational agents in mobile guide applications

Evolution in the area of mobile computing has been phenomenal in the last few years. The exploding increase in hardware power has enabled multimodal mobile interfaces to be developed. These interfaces differ from the traditional graphical user interface (GUI), in that they enable a more “natural” communication with mobile devices, through the use of multiple communication channels (e.g., multi-touch, speech recognition, etc.). As a result, a new generation of applications has emerged that provide human-like assistance in the user interface (e.g., the Siri conversational assistant (Siri Inc., visited 2010)). These conversational agents are currently designed to automate a number of tedious mobile tasks (e.g., to call a taxi), but the possible applications are endless. A domain of particular interest is that of Cultural Heritage, where conversational agents can act as personalized tour guides in, for example, archaeological attractions. The visitors to historical places have a diverse range of information needs. For example, casual visitors have different information needs from those with a deeper interest in an attraction (e.g., - holiday learners versus students). A personalized conversational agent can access a cultural heritage database, and effectively translate data into a natural language form that is adapted to the visitor’s personal needs and interests. The present research aims to investigate the information needs of a specific type of visitors, those for whom retention of cultural content is important (e.g., students of history, cultural experts, history hobbyists, educators, etc.). Embodying a conversational agent enables the agent to use additional modalities to communicate this content (e.g., through facial expressions, deictic gestures, etc.) to the user. Simulating the social norms that guide the real-world human-to-human interaction (e.g., adapting the story based on the reactions of the users), should at least theoretically optimize the cognitive accessibility of the content. Although a number of projects have attempted to build embodied conversational agents (ECAs) for cultural heritage, little is known about their impact on the users’ perceived cognitive accessibility of the cultural heritage content, and the usability of the interfaces they support. In particular, there is a general disagreement on the advantages of multimodal ECAs in terms of users’ task performance and satisfaction over nonanthropomorphised interfaces. Further, little is known about what features influence what aspects of the cognitive accessibility of the content and/or usability of the interface. To address these questions I studied the user experiences with ECA interfaces in six user studies across three countries (Greece, UK and USA). To support these studies, I introduced: a) a conceptual framework based on well-established theoretical models of human cognition, and previous frameworks from the literature. The framework offers a holistic view of the design space of ECA systems b) a research technique for evaluating the cognitive accessibility of ECA-based information presentation systems that combine data from eye tracking and facial expression recognition. In addition, I designed a toolkit, from which I partially developed its natural language processing component, to facilitate rapid development of mobile guide applications using ECAs. Results from these studies provide evidence that an ECA, capable of displaying some of the communication strategies (e.g., non-verbal behaviours to accompany linguistic information etc.) found in the real-world human guidance scenario, is not affecting and effective in enhancing the user’s ability to retain cultural content. The findings from the first two studies, suggest than an ECA has no negative/positive impact on users experiencing content that is similar (but not the same) across different locations (see experiment one, in Chapter 7), and content of variable difficulty (see experiment two, in Chapter 7). However, my results also suggest that improving the degree of content personalization and the quality of the modalities used by the ECA can result in both effective and affecting human-ECA interactions. Effectiveness is the degree to which an ECA facilitates a user in accomplishing the navigation and information tasks. Similarly, affecting is the degree to which the ECA changes the quality of the user’s experience while accomplishing the navigation and information tasks. By adhering to the above rules, I gradually improved my designs and built ECAs that are affecting. In particular, I found that an ECA can affect the quality of the user’s navigation experience (see experiment three in Chapter 7), as well as how a user experiences narrations of cultural value (see experiment five, in Chapter 8). In terms of navigation, I found sound evidence that the strongest impact of the ECAs nonverbal behaviours is on the ability of users to correctly disambiguate the navigation of an ECA instructions provided by a tour guide system. However, my ECAs failed to become effective, and to elicit enhanced navigation or retention performances. Given the positive impact of ECAs on the disambiguation of navigation instructions, the lack of ECA-effectiveness in navigation could be attributed to the simulated mobile conditions. In a real outdoor environment, where users would have to actually walk around the castle, an ECA could have elicited better navigation performance, than a system without it. With regards to retention performance, my results suggest that a designer should not solely consider the impact of an ECA, but also the style and effectiveness of the question-answering (Q&A) with the ECA, and the type of user interacting with the ECA (see experiments four and six, in Chapter 8). I found that that there is a correlation between how many questions participants asked per location for a tour, and the information they retained after the completion of the tour. When participants were requested to ask the systems a specific number of questions per location, they could retain more information than when they were allowed to freely ask questions. However, the constrained style of interaction decreased their overall satisfaction with the systems. Therefore, when enhanced retention performance is needed, a designer should consider strategies that should direct users to ask a specific number of questions per location for a tour. On the other hand, when maintaining the positive levels of user experiences is the desired outcome of an interaction, users should be allowed to freely ask questions. Then, the effectiveness of the Q&A session is of importance to the success/failure of the user’s interaction with the ECA. In a natural-language question-answering system, the system often fails to understand the user’s question and, by default, it asks the user to rephrase again. A problem arises when the system fails to understand a question repeatedly. I found that a repetitive request to rephrase the same question annoys participants and affects their retention performance. Therefore, in order to ensure effective human-ECA Q&A, the repeat messages should be built in a way to allow users to figure out how to ask the system questions to avoid improper responses. Then, I found strong evidence that an ECA may be effective for some type of users, while for some others it may be not. I found that an ECA with an attention-grabbing mechanism (see experiment six, in Chapter 8), had an inverse effect on the retention performance of participants with different gender. In particular, it enhanced the retention performance of the male participants, while it degraded the retention performance of the female participants. Finally, a series of tentative design recommendations for the design of both affecting and effective ECAs in mobile guide applications in derived from the work undertaken. These are aimed at ECA researchers and mobile guide designers

Digital marketing in the metaverse and its effect on E-commerce

Treball Final de Grau en Administració d'Empreses. Codi: AE1049. Curs 2022/2023The concept of the metaverse has its origins in futuristic literature, with the development of the internet allowing the video game industry to create virtual worlds for entertainment, which later with the entry of mass online gamers influenced the creation of protometaverses and the first metaverses operating today. Today, it is the technology companies that are investing large sums of money to drive the full development of the metaverse. However, there is still no concrete definition of what this virtual world will be, but it is clear that it will require the development of a set of technologies to make its ecosystem decentralised and immersive. On the other hand, the development of marketing in the metaverse depends on the emergence of a community of consumers. Protagonists who need virtual worlds for their development. Awakening their interest in interacting in these virtual worlds through their avatars, which allow them to perform various activities. Creating in them the need to obtain greater virtual experiences such as the acquisition of assets in the metaverse, a sector that captures the attention of companies to invest and explore new virtual markets. Marketing is the connection that allows brands to know and satisfy their needs, create new consumer experiences, and understand that the metaverse is a new digital marketing channel. In this context, brands are experimenting with new marketing practices that influence the creation of new business and e-commerce opportunities in virtual worlds, but in order to make commerce happen, it is necessary to clarify the means of payments that effect the buying and selling of virtual assets. It is clear that the development of e-commerce must be linked to decentralisation and that it plays an important role in the future economy of the metaverse. For this reason, this research seeks to provide the reader with knowledge of the digital marketing practices that are being carried out in the metaverse. Practices that allow the creation and reinvention of new business models in the third dimension. Giving the opportunity for e-commerce to evolve and adapt to the new demands and needs of consumers, who increasingly demand more real and innovative shopping experiences and personalised attention