Object Relations in the Museum: A Psychosocial Perspective

This article theorises museum engagement from a psychosocial perspective. With the aid of selected concepts from object relations theory, it explains how the museum visitor can establish a personal relation to museum objects, making use of them as an ‘aesthetic third’ to symbolise experience. Since such objects are at the same time cultural resources, interacting with them helps the individual to feel part of a shared culture. The article elaborates an example drawn from a research project that aimed to make museum collections available to people with physical and mental health problems. It draws on the work of the British psychoanalysts Donald Winnicott and Wilfred Bion to explain the salience of the concepts of object use, potential space, containment and reverie within a museum context. It also refers to the work of the contemporary psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas on how objects can become evocative for individuals both by virtue of their intrinsic qualities and by the way they are used to express personal idiom

The Internet of Hackable Things

The Internet of Things makes possible to connect each everyday object to the Internet, making computing pervasive like never before. From a security and privacy perspective, this tsunami of connectivity represents a disaster, which makes each object remotely hackable. We claim that, in order to tackle this issue, we need to address a new challenge in security: education

The Whole World in Your Hand: Active and Interactive Segmentation

Object segmentation is a fundamental problem in computer vision and a powerful resource for development. This paper presents three embodied approaches to the visual segmentation of objects. Each approach to segmentation is aided by the presence of a hand or arm in the proximity of the object to be segmented. The first approach is suitable for a robotic system, where the robot can use its arm to evoke object motion. The second method operates on a wearable system, viewing the world from a human's perspective, with instrumentation to help detect and segment objects that are held in the wearer's hand. The third method operates when observing a human teacher, locating periodic motion (finger/arm/object waving or tapping) and using it as a seed for segmentation. We show that object segmentation can serve as a key resource for development by demonstrating methods that exploit high-quality object segmentations to develop both low-level vision capabilities (specialized feature detectors) and high-level vision capabilities (object recognition and localization)

The Forum Selection Defense

The central goal of this thesis is creating and testing technology toproduce embodied interaction experiences. Embodied interaction is thesense that we inhabit a digital space with our minds operating on it asif it were our physical bodies, without conscious thought, but as naturalas reaching out with your ngers and touching the object in front of you.Traditional interaction techniques such as keyboard and mouse get in theway of achieving embodiment. In this thesis, we have created an embodiedperspective of virtual three-dimensional objects oating in front of a user.Users can see the object from a rst-person perspective without a headsupdisplay and can change the perspective of the object by shifting theirpoint of view. The technology and aordances to make this possible in aunobtrusive, practical and ecient way is the subject of this thesis.Using a depth sensor, Microsoft's Kinect [7], we track the user's positionin front of a screen in real-time, thus making it possible to changethe perspectives seen by each of the user's eyes to t their real point ofview, in order to achieve a 3D embodied interaction outside the screen.We combined the rst-person perspective into an embodied sculptingproject that includes a wireless haptic glove to allow the user to feel whentouching the model and a small one-hand remote controller used to rotatethe object around as the user desires when pressing its single button.We have achieved what we call Embodied Perspective, which involves anoutside-screen stereoscopic visualization, which reacts to body interactionas if the visualization was really where the user perceives it, thanks to thedata from the depth sensor. This method does not block the user's viewof their own body, but ts and matches their brain's perception.When applied to virtual sculpting (embodied sculpting), it gives theuser the ability to feel and understand much better their actions; wherethey are touching/sculpting and how they should move to reach wherethey want, since the movements are the same one would perform withtheir body in a real-world sculpting situation.A further study of the viability of this method, not only on singleperson interaction but on group visualization of a single user perspective,is discussed and proposed

A Modal Logic for Subject-Oriented Spatial Reasoning

We present a modal logic for representing and reasoning about space seen from the subject\u27s perspective. The language of our logic comprises modal operators for the relations "in front", "behind", "to the left", and "to the right" of the subject, which introduce the intrinsic frame of reference; and operators for "behind an object", "between the subject and an object", "to the left of an object", and "to the right of an object", employing the relative frame of reference. The language allows us to express nominals, hybrid operators, and a restricted form of distance operators which, as we demonstrate by example, makes the logic interesting for potential applications. We prove that the satisfiability problem in the logic is decidable and in particular PSpace-complete

Co-ordination of actions, visual perception, and inhibition in human and non-human primate development

The originality of Langer's approach to cognitive development (Langer, 1980, 1986) lies in the study of the pragmatic components (actions, object manipulations) of protologicomathematical and protophysical cognition before the age of 2. This perspective falls in line with Piaget's constructive psychology