Animating Predator and Prey Fish Interactions

Schooling behavior is one of the most salient social and group activities among fish. They form schools for social reasons like foraging, mating and escaping from predators. Animating a school of fish is difficult because they are large in number, often swim in distinctive patterns that is they take the shape of long thin lines, squares, ovals or amoeboid and exhibit complex coordinated patterns especially when they are attacked by a predator. Previous work in computer graphics has not provided satisfactory models to simulate the many distinctive interactions between a school of prey fish and their predator, how does a predator pick its target? and how does a school of fish react to such attacks? This dissertation presents a method to simulate interactions between prey fish and predator fish in the 3D world based on the biological research findings. Firstly, a model is described by representing a school of fish as a complex network information flow with structural properties. Using this model, a predator fish targeting isolated peripheral fish is simulated. Secondly, the escape behavior state machine model and escape maneuvers exhibited by fish schools are described. The escape maneuvers include compact, avoid, fast avoid, skitter, fountain, flash, ball, split, join, herd, vacuole, and hourglass are identified in the biological studies. This proposed escape behavior animation model can free an animator from dealing with the low-level animations but instead, control the fish behavior on a higher level by modifying a state machine and a small set of system parameters. With the state machine and relatively few system parameters, the proposed system is stable, predictable, and easy to tune, which represent important properties for animators to control the outcome. This system is developed in Unity (3D). In addition, a plug-in is also developed for full-fledged graphics tool Blender software to simulate escape maneuvers. The animator has to simply select escape maneuvers, adjust parameters and work on animating predator using keyframe method. It does not deal with the state machine model. The proposed model is useful not only in generating group behaviors but also in scientific visualization tool for studying fish behavior

Underwater Vehicles

For the latest twenty to thirty years, a significant number of AUVs has been created for the solving of wide spectrum of scientific and applied tasks of ocean development and research. For the short time period the AUVs have shown the efficiency at performance of complex search and inspection works and opened a number of new important applications. Initially the information about AUVs had mainly review-advertising character but now more attention is paid to practical achievements, problems and systems technologies. AUVs are losing their prototype status and have become a fully operational, reliable and effective tool and modern multi-purpose AUVs represent the new class of underwater robotic objects with inherent tasks and practical applications, particular features of technology, systems structure and functional properties

Interactive control of multi-agent motion in virtual environments

With the increased use of crowd simulation in animation, specification of crowd motion can be very time consuming, requiring a lot of user input. To alleviate this cost, we wish to allow a user to interactively manipulate the many degrees of freedom in a crowd, whilst accounting for the limitation of low-dimensional signals from standard input devices. In this thesis we present two approaches for achieving this: 1) Combining shape deformation methods with a multitouch input device, allowing a user to control the motion of the crowd in dynamic environments, and 2) applying a data-driven approach to learn the mapping between a crowd’s motion and the corresponding user input to enable intuitive control of a crowd. In our first approach, we represent the crowd as a deformable mesh, allowing a user to manipulate it using a multitouch device. The user controls the shape and motion of the crowd by altering the mesh, and the mesh in turn deforms according to the environment. We handle congestion and perturbation by having agents dynamically reassign their goals in the formation using a mass transport solver. Our method allows control of a crowd in a single pass, improving on the time taken by previous, multistage, approaches. We validate our method with a user study, comparing our control algorithm against a common mouse-based controller. We develop a simplified version of motion data patches to model character-environment interactions that are largely ignored in previous crowd research. We design an environment-aware cost metric for the mass transport solver that considers how these interactions affect a character’s ability to track the user’s commands. Experimental results show that our system can produce realistic crowd scenes with minimal, high-level, input signals from the user. In our second approach, we propose that crowd simulation control algorithms inherently impose restrictions on how user input affects the motion of the crowd. To bypass this, we investigate a data-driven approach for creating a direct mapping between low-dimensional user input and the resulting high-dimensional crowd motion. Results show that the crowd motion can be inferred directly from variations in a user’s input signals, providing a user with greater freedom to define the animation

The Egyptian landscape and tourism: a study of the Red Sea coastal planning process

The aim of this thesis is to introduce and place the Egyptian landscape and its relevance to tourism within the modern Egyptian planning process, and to examine the competence of this process by example, in a study of the development of the Egyptian Red Sea coast.Presentation of the thesis is in Seven Chapters: Chapter One deals with the general features of the Egyptian landscape with relevance to its tourism attraction; Chapter Two is an inventory of the Red Sea region landscape; in Chapter Three the question of defining the "coastal zone" is considered, and followed by a description of the Red Sea coastal ecosystems, their function and how they may be affected by the human activities taking place on the Red Sea coast; Chapter Four discusses aspects of tourism in a broad sense, as well as showing the various impacts of tourism on developing countries, and concludes with a description of the Tourism Development Plan by the government for Egypt in general and the Red Sea coast in particular; the next Chapter deals with the coastal planning process, emphasising international attempts in applying coastal management plans and demonstrating their success and failure with relevance to the Egyptian Red Sea coastal development process; Chapter Six presents a case study examining the impacts of tourism development schemes on the natural environment of the city of Hurghada, on the Red Sea coast. The tourism planning process for the Red Sea Region in general and for Hurghada in particular was shown to be greatly lacking in strategy and principle, as well as in balance with the surrounding natural environment. The final Chapter suggests a set of recommendations for the planning system to overcome its deficiencies, and a draft set of planning and design guidelines aiming to integrate development activities with the surrounding ecosystems, at a regional scale and also at the local scale of tourist centre

Science-based restoration monitoring of coastal habitats, Volume Two: Tools for monitoring coastal habitats

Healthy coastal habitats are not only important ecologically; they also support healthy coastal communities and improve the quality of people’s lives. Despite their many benefits and values, coastal habitats have been systematically modified, degraded, and destroyed throughout the United States and its protectorates beginning with European colonization in the 1600’s (Dahl 1990). As a result, many coastal habitats around the United States are in desperate need of restoration. The monitoring of restoration projects, the focus of this document, is necessary to ensure that restoration efforts are successful, to further the science, and to increase the efficiency of future restoration efforts

The Amphibious Public: A historical geography of municipal swimming and bathing New York City, 1870 - 2013

Since 1870, the city of New York has engaged in a project of building and maintaining enclosed sites for municipal bathing, including building floating `river baths\u27 (1870 - 1942), indoor municipal baths (1901 - 1975), eleven enormous outdoor pools built with WPA funds (1936 - present), and outdoor pools of various sizes built under the Lindsay administration (1968 - present). This dissertation explores the changing rationale, over almost 150 years, for the municipal construction of public bathing places in New York City, and the ways in which the physical structures have taken on new social goals, meanings and ideals, both for patrons and for agents of municipal government over time. Each bathhouse and pool is a physical site that belongs to an infrastructural network, and is also bound up in its relationship to reigning ideas about what public space should encompass and for whom it should provide. Throughout, water has been attributed particular characteristics in order to mediate social life in public space, through programs of building, teaching and regulating. These are theorized in terms of public space and the public life that bring them together as a material, technological, symbolic whole. The municipal bathing project has resulted in corporeal publics over time, which produce public social life through the bodies of users, both real and ideal, through infrastructures that integrate materials, water, capital and political will. Contests over who belongs to the corporeal public and how it should be managed, based on race, gender and sexuality, class, and age, are mediated through shifting notions of hygiene and wellness in the urban setting. Research methods include archival research in New York City since 1870, including municipal records, other local archives, newspaper sources, and secondary histories; observation (and some participation) and interviews with the Harlem Honeys and Bears, an African-American senior citizen synchronized swim team; and comparative ethnography of outdoor pools in the summer, including extended participant observation at Kosciuszko Pool and McCarren Pool in Brooklyn, as well as interviews with Parks Department officials

Academic Catalog Volume 9: 1979-80 to 1981-82

https://digitalcommons.esf.edu/acadcat/1009/thumbnail.jp

Undergraduate and Graduate Course Descriptions, 2023 Spring

Wright State University undergraduate and graduate course descriptions from Spring 2023