37,728 research outputs found
Space time pixels
This paper reports the design of a networked system, the aim of
which is to provide an intermediate virtual space that will
establish a connection and support interaction between multiple
participants in two distant physical spaces.
The intention of the project is to explore the potential of the
digital space to generate original social relationships between
people that their current (spatial or social) position can
difficultly allow the establishment of innovative connections.
Furthermore, to explore if digital space can sustain, in time,
low-level connections like these, by balancing between the two
contradicting needs of communication and anonymity.
The generated intermediate digital space is a dynamic reactive
environment where time and space information of two physical
places is superimposed to create a complex common ground where
interaction can take place. It is a system that provides
awareness of activity in a distant space through an abstract
mutable virtual environment, which can be perceived in several
different ways – varying from a simple dynamic background image
to a common public space in the junction of two private spaces or
to a fully opened window to the other space – according to the
participants will.
The thesis is that the creation of an intermediary environment
that operates as an activity abstraction filter between several
users, and selectively communicates information, could give
significance to the ambient data that people unconsciously
transmit to others when co-existing. It can therefore generate a new layer of connections and original interactivity patterns; in contrary to a straight-forward direct real video and sound
system, that although it is functionally more feasible, it
preserves the existing social constraints that limit interaction
into predefined patterns
A survey of real-time crowd rendering
In this survey we review, classify and compare existing approaches for real-time crowd rendering. We first overview character animation techniques, as they are highly tied to crowd rendering performance, and then we analyze the state of the art in crowd rendering. We discuss different representations for level-of-detail (LoD) rendering of animated characters, including polygon-based, point-based, and image-based techniques, and review different criteria for runtime LoD selection. Besides LoD approaches, we review classic acceleration schemes, such as frustum culling and occlusion culling, and describe how they can be adapted to handle crowds of animated characters. We also discuss specific acceleration techniques for crowd rendering, such as primitive pseudo-instancing, palette skinning, and dynamic key-pose caching, which benefit from current graphics hardware. We also address other factors affecting performance and realism of crowds such as lighting, shadowing, clothing and variability. Finally we provide an exhaustive comparison of the most relevant approaches in the field.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Piano Crossing - Walking on a Keyboard
Piano Crossing is an interactive art installation which turns a pedestrian crossing marked with white stripes into a piano keyboard so that pedestrians can generate music by walking over it. Matching tones are generated when a pedestrian is over a particular stripe or key. A digital camera is directed at the crossing from above. A special computer vision application was developed that maps the stripes of the pedestrian crossing to piano keys and which detects over which key is the center of gravity of every pedestrian in the image at any given moment. Special black stripes are added to the crossing, which represent also the black piano keys. The application consists of two parts: (1) initialization, where the model of the abstract piano keyboard is mapped to the image of the pedestrian crossing and (2) the detection of pedestrians on the crossing so that musical tones can be generated according to their locations. The art installation Piano crossing was presented to the public for the first time during the 51st Jazz Festival in Ljubljana in July 2010
GENERATION OF FORESTS ON TERRAIN WITH DYNAMIC LIGHTING AND SHADOWING
The purpose of this research project is to exhibit an efficient method of creating dynamic lighting and shadowing for the generation of forests on terrain. In this research project, I use textures which contain images of trees from a bird’s eye view in order to create a high scale forest. Furthermore, by manipulating the transparency and color of the textures according to the algorithmic calculations of light and shadow on terrain, I provide the functionality of dynamic lighting and shadowing. Finally, by analyzing the OpenGL pipeline, I design my code in order to allow efficient rendering of the forest
Cometary topography and phase darkening
Cometary surfaces can change significantly and rapidly due to the sublimation
of their volatile material. Many authors have investigated this evolution;
Vincent et al. (2017) have used topographic data from all comets visited by
spacecrafts to derive a quantitative model which relates large scale roughness
(i.e. topography) with the evolution state of the nucleus for Jupiter Family
Comets (JFCs). Meanwhile, ground based observers have published measurements of
the phase functions of many JFCs and reported a trend in the phase darkening,
with primitive objects showing a stronger darkening than evolved ones).
In this paper, we use a numerical implementation of the topographic
description by Vincent et al. (2017) to build virtual comets and measure the
phase darkening induced by the different levels of macro-roughness. We then
compare our model with the values published by Kokotanekova et al. (2018)
We find that pure geometric effects like self-shadowing can represent up to
22% of the darkening observed for more primitive objects, and 15% for evolved
surfaces. This shows that although physical and chemical properties remain the
major contributor to the phase darkening, the additional effect of the
topography cannot be neglected
Serious Games in Cultural Heritage
Although the widespread use of gaming for leisure purposes has been well documented, the use of games to support cultural heritage purposes, such as historical teaching and learning, or for enhancing museum visits, has been less well considered. The state-of-the-art in serious game technology is identical to that of the state-of-the-art in entertainment games technology. As a result the field of serious heritage games concerns itself with recent advances in computer games, real-time computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the main strengths of serious gaming applications may be generalised as being in the areas of communication, visual expression of information, collaboration mechanisms, interactivity and entertainment. In this report, we will focus on the state-of-the-art with respect to the theories, methods and technologies used in serious heritage games. We provide an overview of existing literature of relevance to the domain, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the described methods and point out unsolved problems and challenges. In addition, several case studies illustrating the application of methods and technologies used in cultural heritage are presented
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