Interactive toon shading using mesh smoothing

Toon shading mimics the style of few colour bands and hence offers an effective way to convey the cartoon-style rendering. Despite an increasing amount of research on toon shading, little research has been reported on generation of toon shading style with more simplicity. In this paper, we present a method to create a simplified form of toon shading using mesh smoothing from 3D objects. The proposed method exploits the Laplacian smoothing to emphasise the simplicity of 3D objects. Motivated by simplified form of Phong lighting model, we create non-photorealistic style capable of enhancing the cartoonish appearance. An enhanced toon shading algorithm is applied on the simple 3D objects in order to convey more simple visual cues of tone. The experimental result reveals the ability of proposed method to produce more cartoonish simplistic effects

Walking away from VR as ‘empathy-machine’: peripatetic animations with 360-photogrammetry

My research partakes in an expanded documentary practice that weaves together walking, immersive technologies, and moving image. Two lines of enquiry motivate the research journey: the first responds to the trope of VR as 'empathy-machine' (Milk, 2015), often accompanied by the expression 'walking in someone else's shoes'. Within a research project that begins on foot, the idiom’s significance demands investigation. The second line of enquiry pursues a collaborative artistic practice informed by dialogue and poetry, where the bipedals of walking and the binaries of the digital are entwined by phenomenology, hauntology, performance, and the in-betweens of animation. My practice-as-research methodology involves desk study, experimentation with VR, AR, digital photogrammetry, and CGI animation. Central to my approach is the multifaceted notion of Peripatos ̶ as a school of philosophy, a stroll-like walk, and the path where the stroll takes place ̶ manifested both corporeally and as 'playful curiosity'. The thread that interweaves practice and theory has my body-moving in the centre; I call it the ‘camera-walk’: a processional shoot that documents a real place and the bodies that make it, while my hand holds high a camera-on-a-stick shooting 360-video. The resulting spherical video feeds into photogrammetric digital processing, and reassembles into digital 3D models that form the starting ground for still images, a site-specific installation, augmented reality (AR) exchanges, and short films. Because 360-video includes the body that carries the camera, the digital meshes produced by the ‘camera-walk’ also reveal the documentarian during the act of documenting. Departing from the pursuit of perfect replicas, my research articulates the iconic lineage of photogrammetry, embracing imperfections as integral. Despite the planned obsolescence of my digital instruments, I treat my 360-camera as a ‘dangerous tool’, uncovering (and inventing) its hidden virtualities, via Vilém Flusser. Against its formative intentions as an accessory for extreme sports, I focus on everyday life, and become inspired by Harun Farocki’s ‘another kind of empathy’. Within the collaborative projects presented within my thesis, I move away from the colonialist-inspired ideal of ‘walking in someone else’s shoes’, and ‘tread softly’ along the footsteps of my co-walkers

Games and Time

Video games are a medium uniquely immersed in time. While the topic of time and games has been broached by many in the field of game studies, its centrality to both how games function and the experience of playing games remains underexamined. Reading games as literary texts, this holistic study uses queer and social theories to survey the myriad of ways games play with time. I argue games are time machines, each idiosyncratically allows players to experience time differently from traditional linear time. Beyond games with literal time machines, this dissertation examines games which structure themselves around labyrinthine and existential loops. It also considers real-time, or games competitively organized around time and those which change over time, in a sense, aging. Regardless of the subject, this dissertation seeks to illuminate the complexities of games and time, and argues that, despite their many conflicting messages about the topic, they all have something meaningful to say about the human experience of time