Innovative and effective methods of learning other languages and their benefits

[Abstract]: Human beings' ability to communicate in mother tongue can be easily taken for granted until a situation arises when one uses another language. How should people go about acquiring the necessary skills for learning a new language, in this situation? Can learning a new language complement modern tertiary courses such as Business? This paper discusses why and how human beings learn a new language. It presents innovative methods of learning a new language using the latest technologies and teaching/learning ideas and approaches. The use of emerging technologies such as immersive Virtual Reality is discussed. A number of multimedia language learning environments, which encourage creativity and right brain functions are presented and analyzed. The author draws on his own experience of learning several languages, which includes various branches of the Indo-European group

Artificial Beings Worthy of Moral Consideration in Virtual Environments: An Analysis of Ethical Viability

This article explores whether and under which circumstances it is ethically viable to include artificial beings worthy of moral consideration in virtual environments. In particular, the article focuses on virtual environments such as those in digital games and training simulations – interactive and persistent digital artifacts designed to fulfill specific purposes, such as entertainment, education, training, or persuasion. The article introduces the criteria for moral consideration that serve as a framework for this analysis. Adopting this framework, the article tackles the question of whether including artificial intelligences that are entitled to moral consideration in virtual environments constitutes an immoral action on the part of human creators. To address this problem, the article draws on three conceptual lenses from the philosophical branch of ethics: the problem of parenthood and procreation, the question concerning the moral status of animals, and the classical problem of evil. Using a thought experiment, the concluding section proposes a contractualist answer to the question posed in this article. The same section also emphasizes the potential need to reframe our understanding of the design of virtual environments and their future stakeholders

Sketching-out virtual humans: From 2d storyboarding to immediate 3d character animation

Virtual beings are playing a remarkable role in today’s public entertainment, while ordinary users are still treated as audiences due to the lack of appropriate expertise, equipment, and computer skills. In this paper, we present a fast and intuitive storyboarding interface, which enables users to sketch-out 3D virtual humans, 2D/3D animations, and character intercommunication. We devised an intuitive “stick figurefleshing-outskin mapping” graphical animation pipeline, which realises the whole process of key framing, 3D pose reconstruction, virtual human modelling, motion path/timing control, and the final animation synthesis by almost pure 2D sketching. A “creative model-based method” is developed, which emulates a human perception process, to generate the 3D human bodies of variational sizes, shapes, and fat distributions. Meanwhile, our current system also supports the sketch-based crowd animation and the storyboarding of the 3D multiple character intercommunication. This system has been formally tested by various users on Tablet PC. After minimal training, even a beginner can create vivid virtual humans and animate them within minutes

The Experience Machine: Existential reflections on Virtual Worlds

Problems and questions originally raised by Robert Nozick in his famous thought experiment ‘The Experience Machine’ are frequently invoked in the current discourse concerning virtual worlds. Having conceptualized his Gedankenexperiment in the early seventies, Nozick could not fully anticipate the numerous and profound ways in which the diffusion of computer simulations and video games came to affect the Western world. This article does not articulate whether or not the virtual worlds of video games, digital simulations, and virtual technologies currently actualize (or will actualize) Nozick’s thought experiment. Instead, it proposes a philosophical reflection that focuses on human experiences in the upcoming age of their ‘technical reproducibility’. In pursuing that objective, this article integrates and supplements some of the interrogatives proposed in Robert Nozick’s thought experiment. More specifically, through the lenses of existentialism and philosophy of technology, this article tackles the technical and cultural heritage of virtual reality, and unpacks its potential to function as a tool for self-discovery and self-construction. Ultimately, it provides an interpretation of virtual technologies as novel existential domains. Virtual worlds will not be understood as the contexts where human beings can find completion and satisfaction, but rather as instruments that enable us to embrace ourselves and negotiate with various aspects of our (individual as well as collective) existence in previously-unexperienced guises

Natural Virtual Reality User Interface to Define Assembly Sequences for Digital Human Models

Digital human models (DHMs) are virtual representations of human beings. They are used to conduct, among other things, ergonomic assessments in factory layout planning. DHM software tools are challenging in their use and thus require a high amount of training for engineers. In this paper, we present a virtual reality (VR) application that enables engineers to work with DHMs easily. Since VR systems with head-mounted displays (HMDs) are less expensive than CAVE systems, HMDs can be integrated more extensively into the product development process. Our application provides a reality-based interface and allows users to conduct an assembly task in VR and thus to manipulate the virtual scene with their real hands. These manipulations are used as input for the DHM to simulate, on that basis, human ergonomics. Therefore, we introduce a software and hardware architecture, the VATS (virtual action tracking system). This paper furthermore presents the results of a user study in which the VATS was compared to the existing WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointer) interface. The results show that the VATS system enables users to conduct tasks in a significantly faster way

Time, terror and the technological imagination : Frankenstein's fictional legacy in the scientific age : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

There is a long-standing belief that there is an opposing discourse between science and the humanities in relation to the future of humankind. Attitudes towards the environment have changed radically in the last 200 years from a natural view to one where we dominate and re-order our environment to suit ourselves and to further the material self-interests of human beings, regardless of cultural and ecological consequences. In order for human beings to properly understand what is happening and why, we must begin to restore the balance between our relationship with Nature and our new technological worldview. The Introduction firstly addresses issues relating to the changing relationship between human beings and their environment over the last two centuries, and how literature and film have accurately predicted our collective future. It is my objective to illustrate how Mary Shelley's Frankenstein has remained one of the most potent pieces of literature foreshadowing the future of humankind, and the timeless quality of the theme of the controller out of control. The main text focuses on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and how the novel embodied humankind's growing anxieties and fears about our technological ambivalence, and I give an overview of how Frankenstein has paved the way for further literary and cinematic predictions of our future in artificial and synthesised environments dominated by the new frontier of genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, virtual reality and beyond, and how these technologies will impact on our cultural worldview and the future evolution of humankind

Executable Knowledge Base for Virtual Chat System

A virtual chat system enables the end user to interact with knowledge base by chatting with a virtual assistant. Besides knowledge article, a virtual assistant can also perform automation flows such as restart a virtual machine, reset the password for a PC. In many virtual chat systems, AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) is used to train the virtual agent to interact with human beings. It is also possible to integrate knowledge system and automation flow system with AIML interpreter to quickly empower virtual assistances with various domain knowledge. The disclosure provides a method to convert or link an automation flow to virtual agent understandable and executable format and enable them to perform and interact seamlessly with the users, the knowledge base system and the automation system