Skyline matching: absolute localisation for planetary exploration rovers

Skyline matching is a technique for absolute localisation framed in the category of autonomous long-range exploration. Absolute localisation becomes crucial for planetary exploration to recalibrate position during long traverses or to estimate position with no a-priori information. In this project, a skyline matching algorithm is proposed, implemented and evaluated using real acquisitions and simulated data. The function is based on comparing the skyline extracted from rover images and orbital data. The results are promising but intensive testing on more real data is needed to further characterize the algorithm

Vanishing Leaves: A Study of Walt Whitman Through Location-Based Mobile Technologies

Vanishing Leaves is a location-based mobile experience (LBME), which employs mobile devices equipped with GPS and high-speed wireless internet capabilities to take users to Brooklyn Heights to learn about the poet Walt Whitman and his connection to the neighborhood where he lived, worked, and published the first edition of his masterwork Leaves of Grass. Through this active first-person immersive learning experience, Vanishing Leaves embraces experimental scholarly methods that extend outside the classroom and off the page in order to engage learners and invite them to create meaningful, personal connections to writers and their literary works. The following white paper details the core concepts and inspiration underlying the development of Vanishing Leaves, including Whitman’s mobile composing practices and the importance influence of walking on his work, as well as ecocomposition theory and its exploration of the dynamic relationship between the writer, their discourse, and the environment. Following this groundwork, a detailed examination of the capabilities of mobile devices relevant to this project is offered. This analysis highlights important research, concepts, and existing projects that illuminate the potential for LBMEs to help us better understand cultural figures, their historical contexts, and the important connection between place and discourse surrounding cultural texts. Finally, an overview of the development of Vanishing Leaves will provide details regarding its methods and objectives, as well as some of the major challenges and lessons learned throughout the process. This white paper, instructions for playing Vanishing Leaves, and access to supplemental materials will be made available online at: http://vanishingleaves.com

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

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

Charting a New Aesthetics for History: 3D, Scenarios, and the Future of the Historian’s Craft

Innovations in computing are presenting historians with access to new forms of expression with the potential to enhance scholars’ capacities and to support novel methods for analysis, expression, and teaching. Computer-generated form can change the way we generate, appropriate, and disseminate content. If these benefits are to be realized, however, the discipline must make room for a new domain of practice-based research. The practices we have for knowledge generation were devised in association with print technology, and historians must now acquire and develop practices that can inform our use of digital forms of representation, as well as the platforms that sustain them. Les innovations informatiques donnent aux historiens l’accès à de nouvelles formes d’expression et offrent la possibilité d’accroître les capacités des universitaires et de favoriser l’émergence de nouvelles méthodes d’analyse, d’expression et d’enseignement. L’ordinateur peut changer notre façon de générer, de nous approprier et de diffuser le contenu. Pour récolter de tels fruits, la discipline doit toutefois faire place à un nouveau domaine de la recherche fondée sur la pratique. Nos pratiques de génération du savoir sont fonction de la technologie de l’imprimé, et les historiens doivent maintenant acquérir et développer des pratiques qui pourront nous aider à maîtriser les formes numériques de la représentation de même que les plateformes qui leur servent d’assise

Tracking visual engagement in mixed reality : a framework for analysing interaction with digital models

Due to technological advances, affordable mixed reality devices, including both virtualreality and augmented reality, are beginning to be used to support participatory planning to better inform stakeholders of design interventions. Stakeholder participation and perception studies often utilize both qualitative interviews and quantitative techniques to gauge how a model can effectively communicate design intentions. In this paper, we examine how mixed reality enables new methods of investigating how users interact with digital models, enhancing existing techniques. We introduce a non-invasive perspective tracking system, to track how a participant explores a 3D model of a landscape intervention through the perspective of their mixed reality device. Our software provides a supplementary technique to better analyse user interaction patterns with digital models, allowing a data-driven approach to support participation studies and enable novel analytical approaches. We introduce the concept of naturally salient perspectives and show that tracking how a user frames a model during free exploration can provide new quantitative insights to support traditional qualitative participation methods

Virtual Heritage: new technologies for edutainment

Cultural heritage represents an enormous amount of information and knowledge. Accessing this treasure chest allows not only to discover the legacy of physical and intangible attributes of the past but also to provide a better understanding of the present. Museums and cultural institutions have to face the problem of providing access to and communicating these cultural contents to a wide and assorted audience, meeting the expectations and interests of the reference end-users and relying on the most appropriate tools available. Given the large amount of existing tangible and intangible heritage, artistic, historical and cultural contents, what can be done to preserve and properly disseminate their heritage significance? How can these items be disseminated in the proper way to the public, taking into account their enormous heterogeneity? Answering this question requires to deal as well with another aspect of the problem: the evolution of culture, literacy and society during the last decades of 20th century. To reflect such transformations, this period witnessed a shift in the museum’s focus from the aesthetic value of museum artifacts to the historical and artistic information they encompass, and a change into the museums’ role from a mere "container" of cultural objects to a "narrative space" able to explain, describe, and revive the historical material in order to attract and entertain visitors. These developments require creating novel exhibits, able to tell stories about the objects and enabling visitors to construct semantic meanings around them. The objective that museums presently pursue is reflected by the concept of Edutainment, Education + Entertainment. Nowadays, visitors are not satisfied with ‘learning something’, but would rather engage in an ‘experience of learning’, or ‘learning for fun’, being active actors and players in their own cultural experience. As a result, institutions are faced with several new problems, like the need to communicate with people from different age groups and different cultural backgrounds, the change in people attitude due to the massive and unexpected diffusion of technology into everyday life, the need to design the visit by a personal point of view, leading to a high level of customization that allows visitors to shape their path according to their characteristics and interests. In order to cope with these issues, I investigated several approaches. In particular, I focused on Virtual Learning Environments (VLE): real-time interactive virtual environments where visitors can experience a journey through time and space, being immersed into the original historical, cultural and artistic context of the work of arts on display. VLE can strongly help archivists and exhibit designers, allowing to create new interesting and captivating ways to present cultural materials. In this dissertation I will tackle many of the different dimensions related to the creation of a cultural virtual experience. During my research project, the entire pipeline involved into the development and deployment of VLE has been investigated. The approach followed was to analyze in details the main sub-problems to face, in order to better focus on specific issues. Therefore, I first analyzed different approaches to an effective recreation of the historical and cultural context of heritage contents, which is ultimately aimed at an effective transfer of knowledge to the end-users. In particular, I identified the enhancement of the users’ sense of presence in VLE as one of the main tools to reach this objective. Presence is generally expressed as the perception of 'being there', i.e. the subjective belief of users that they are in a certain place, even if they know that the experience is mediated by the computer. Presence is related to the number of senses involved by the VLE and to the quality of the sensorial stimuli. But in a cultural scenario, this is not sufficient as the cultural presence plays a relevant role. Cultural presence is not just a feeling of 'being there' but of being - not only physically, but also socially, culturally - 'there and then'. In other words, the VLE must be able to transfer not only the appearance, but also all the significance and characteristics of the context that makes it a place and both the environment and the context become tools capable of transferring the cultural significance of a historic place. The attention that users pay to the mediated environment is another aspect that contributes to presence. Attention is related to users’ focalization and concentration and to their interests. Thus, in order to improve the involvement and capture the attention of users, I investigated in my work the adoption of narratives and storytelling experiences, which can help people making sense of history and culture, and of gamification approaches, which explore the use of game thinking and game mechanics in cultural contexts, thus engaging users while disseminating cultural contents and, why not?, letting them have fun during this process. Another dimension related to the effectiveness of any VLE is also the quality of the user experience (UX). User interaction, with both the virtual environment and its digital contents, is one of the main elements affecting UX. With respect to this I focused on one of the most recent and promising approaches: the natural interaction, which is based on the idea that persons need to interact with technology in the same way they are used to interact with the real world in everyday life. Then, I focused on the problem of presenting, displaying and communicating contents. VLE represent an ideal presentation layer, being multiplatform hypermedia applications where users are free to interact with the virtual reconstructions by choosing their own visiting path. Cultural items, embedded into the environment, can be accessed by users according to their own curiosity and interests, with the support of narrative structures, which can guide them through the exploration of the virtual spaces, and conceptual maps, which help building meaningful connections between cultural items. Thus, VLE environments can even be seen as visual interfaces to DBs of cultural contents. Users can navigate the VE as if they were browsing the DB contents, exploiting both text-based queries and visual-based queries, provided by the re-contextualization of the objects into their original spaces, whose virtual exploration can provide new insights on specific elements and improve the awareness of relationships between objects in the database. Finally, I have explored the mobile dimension, which became absolutely relevant in the last period. Nowadays, off-the-shelf consumer devices as smartphones and tablets guarantees amazing computing capabilities, support for rich multimedia contents, geo-localization and high network bandwidth. Thus, mobile devices can support users in mobility and detect the user context, thus allowing to develop a plethora of location-based services, from way-finding to the contextualized communication of cultural contents, aimed at providing a meaningful exploration of exhibits and cultural or tourist sites according to visitors’ personal interest and curiosity

Augmented reality (AR) for surgical robotic and autonomous systems: State of the art, challenges, and solutions

Despite the substantial progress achieved in the development and integration of augmented reality (AR) in surgical robotic and autonomous systems (RAS), the center of focus in most devices remains on improving end-effector dexterity and precision, as well as improved access to minimally invasive surgeries. This paper aims to provide a systematic review of different types of state-of-the-art surgical robotic platforms while identifying areas for technological improvement. We associate specific control features, such as haptic feedback, sensory stimuli, and human-robot collaboration, with AR technology to perform complex surgical interventions for increased user perception of the augmented world. Current researchers in the field have, for long, faced innumerable issues with low accuracy in tool placement around complex trajectories, pose estimation, and difficulty in depth perception during two-dimensional medical imaging. A number of robots described in this review, such as Novarad and SpineAssist, are analyzed in terms of their hardware features, computer vision systems (such as deep learning algorithms), and the clinical relevance of the literature. We attempt to outline the shortcomings in current optimization algorithms for surgical robots (such as YOLO and LTSM) whilst providing mitigating solutions to internal tool-to-organ collision detection and image reconstruction. The accuracy of results in robot end-effector collisions and reduced occlusion remain promising within the scope of our research, validating the propositions made for the surgical clearance of ever-expanding AR technology in the future

Representations of the city in video games

This research strives to characterize the means by which video game players experience and understand the space of the game city during the course of play. Three-dimensional video game cities are neither static environments nor stationary views; rather, they are experienced through movement, action, and play. Our experiences of new places are not developed at a glance. Instead, they are cultivated through use over time. This work utilizes games that take place in constructed versions of New York City as a case study. By focusing on the ways players navigate spaces, we can understand how they construct spatial awareness and how this space is transformed into a meaningful place of play. In order to come to this understanding, this study asks a series of questions: How are these spaces arranged? How does the player move through the space and how does the game teach spatial navigation? What actions are performed in the space and how is gameplay adapted for the city environment? And how do of narrative environments contribute to a player's identification with the space? These questions are examined within a framework of urban, cultural, and game studies. I examine techniques that are employed by video game city designers to help players navigate space and make it meaningful. Additionally, this research poses areas for future expansion and experimentation with game cities.M.S.Committee Chair: Pearce, Celia; Committee Member: Do, Ellen Yi-Luen; Committee Member: Knoespel, Kenneth; Committee Member: Nitsche, Michae

Presence and Absence: The World Trade Center in Film Before and After Sept. 11, 2001

This thesis traces the changing visual significance of the World Trade Center (WTC) in fiction film, from its completion in 1973, to its haunting afterlife since September 11, 2001. This study gathers and critically assembles various representations of this financial icon in order to find new meaning for the representation of the towers in film prior to 2001, along with the significance that they acquired in light of their material destruction. To do so, this study relies on a textual analysis of selected films in which the towers appear, while utilizing a stylistic and formal analysis to dissect their visual and narrative treatment. It locates the towers as a crucial node within global transnational capitalism and draws from a number of critical texts, methods, and traditions, including those of Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin, particularly, the conceptualization of the image as a ruin of its profilmic moment, and the afterlife of the image. Essentially,this thesis reconsiders the towers’ status as traces in photographic media and audiovisual culture,and examines how they have resisted a totalizing meaning. Retrospectively returning to moving images, viewers notice objects, and events that escaped their notice upon first viewing, which is the case with the Twin Towers in film post-2001 as they affect the viewer’s response in new ways