An analysis of persistent non-player characters in the first-person gaming genre 1998-2007: a case for the fusion of mechanics and diegetics

This paper describes the results of an analysis of persistent non-player characters (PNPCs) in the first-person gaming genre 1998-2007. Assessing the role, function, gameplay significance and representational characteristics of these critical important gameplay objects from over 34 major releases provides an important set of baseline data within which to situate further research. This kind of extensive, genre-wide analysis is under-represented in game studies, yet it represents a hugely important process in forming clear and robust illustrations of the medium to support understanding. Thus, I offer a fragment of this illustration, demonstrating that many of the cultural and diegetic qualities of PNPCs are a product of a self-assembling set of archetypes formed from gameplay requirements

“MORE JAPANESE THAN JAPANESE”: SUBJECTIVATION IN THE AGE OF BRAND NATIONALISM AND THE INTERNET

Today, modern technologies and the rapid circulation of information across geographic boundaries are said to be making the nation-state less relevant to daily life. In contrast, this dissertation argues that national boundary maintenance is increasingly made more relevant not in spite of such technologies, but precisely because of them. Indeed, processes of circulation are themselves making and re-making such boundaries rather than erasing them, while states simultaneously react to contain the perceived threats of globalization and to capitalize on the sale of their “cultural” commodities through nation branding. For American otaku, or Japan fans, internet technologies and the consumption of Japanese media like videogames and anime are quintessential global flows from within which they first articulate a desire for Japan. Increasingly, some make the very real decision to leave home and settle in Japan, although scholars have suggested otaku are unable to understand the “real” Japan. Once there, however, the Japanese state’s ongoing nation branding policies, along with immigration control and patterns of everyday interactions with Japanese citizens, marginalize even long-term residents as perpetual visitors. Building on the work of Foucault, I seek to understand how notions of national “of courseness,” which fix Japaneseness as naturally homogeneous and impenetrable, subjectivize American fans. Drawing on 12 months of full time participant observation with otaku living in Tokyo, along with 18 months of part time follow-up research, diachronic interviews with Americans in the US and Japan, and extensive textual analysis of all things “Japanese,” this work contrasts the purported deterritorializing promise of online communications and the withering of the relevance of the modern nation-state, with the national boundary making work that these otaku migrants participate in, both online and off. Once in Japan, otaku themselves actively support Japan's nation branding efforts by teaching English and producing the very cultural commodities that motivated their migration in the first place, as they increasingly codify what Japaneseness is for other “foreigners.” At the same time, otaku migrants further reproduce Japanese national identity through accepting and affirming their status as non-Japanese, and through the reinscription of these very boundaries onto other otaku

Application of Multi-Sensor Fusion Technology in Target Detection and Recognition

Application of multi-sensor fusion technology has drawn a lot of industrial and academic interest in recent years. The multi-sensor fusion methods are widely used in many applications, such as autonomous systems, remote sensing, video surveillance, and the military. These methods can obtain the complementary properties of targets by considering multiple sensors. On the other hand, they can achieve a detailed environment description and accurate detection of interest targets based on the information from different sensors.This book collects novel developments in the field of multi-sensor, multi-source, and multi-process information fusion. Articles are expected to emphasize one or more of the three facets: architectures, algorithms, and applications. Published papers dealing with fundamental theoretical analyses, as well as those demonstrating their application to real-world problems

Image Matching across Wide Baselines: From Paper to Practice

We introduce a comprehensive benchmark for local features and robust estimation algorithms, focusing on the downstream task -- the accuracy of the reconstructed camera pose -- as our primary metric. Our pipeline's modular structure allows easy integration, configuration, and combination of different methods and heuristics. This is demonstrated by embedding dozens of popular algorithms and evaluating them, from seminal works to the cutting edge of machine learning research. We show that with proper settings, classical solutions may still outperform the perceived state of the art. Besides establishing the actual state of the art, the conducted experiments reveal unexpected properties of Structure from Motion (SfM) pipelines that can help improve their performance, for both algorithmic and learned methods. Data and code are online https://github.com/vcg-uvic/image-matching-benchmark, providing an easy-to-use and flexible framework for the benchmarking of local features and robust estimation methods, both alongside and against top-performing methods. This work provides a basis for the Image Matching Challenge https://vision.uvic.ca/image-matching-challenge.Comment: Added: KeyNet-SOSNet, AffNet-HardNet, TFeat, MKD from korni

Enhancing curriculum design and delivery with OER

This paper reports on the key findings from the EVOL-OER project which aims to develop a deeper understanding of the reuse of open educational resources (OERs) by academics in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). This paper builds on the JISC OER Impact study by exploring and expanding on the Ratified quadrant of the study’s landscape of reuse framework (White & Manton, 2011). This paper puts forward a different four-quadrant diagram called ‘OER-enhanced curriculum’ to illustrate different approaches adopted by academics to embedding OER into curriculum design and delivery. Key issues in relation to motivation and challenges in reusing OER are discussed