60 research outputs found
Designing a New Tactile Display Technology and its Disability Interactions
People with visual impairments have a strong desire for a refreshable tactile interface that can provide immediate access to full page of Braille and tactile graphics. Regrettably, existing devices come at a considerable expense and remain out of reach for many. The exorbitant costs associated with current tactile displays stem from their intricate design and the multitude of components needed for their construction. This underscores the pressing need for technological innovation that can enhance tactile displays, making them more accessible and available to individuals with visual impairments. This research thesis delves into the development of a novel tactile display technology known as Tacilia. This technology's necessity and prerequisites are informed by in-depth qualitative engagements with students who have visual impairments, alongside a systematic analysis of the prevailing architectures underpinning existing tactile display technologies. The evolution of Tacilia unfolds through iterative processes encompassing conceptualisation, prototyping, and evaluation. With Tacilia, three distinct products and interactive experiences are explored, empowering individuals to manually draw tactile graphics, generate digitally designed media through printing, and display these creations on a dynamic pin array display. This innovation underscores Tacilia's capability to streamline the creation of refreshable tactile displays, rendering them more fitting, usable, and economically viable for people with visual impairments
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The Child in Games: From the Meek, to the Mighty, to the Monstrous
Drawing across game studies, childhood studies, and childrenâs literature studies, this thesis catalogues and critiques the representation of children in contemporary video games.
It poses two questions:
1) How are children represented in contemporary video games?
2) In what ways do the representations of children in video games affirm or
challenge dominant Western beliefs about the figure of the child?
To answer these questions, I combine a large-scale content analysis of over 500 games published between 2009 and 2019 with a series of autoethnographic close readings. My content analysis is designed to provide a quantitative snapshot of the representation of children in games. I use statistical analysis to assemble data points as meaningful constellations. I use the axes of race, gender, and age, as well as genre, age-rating, and publication year, to identify patterns in representation. I distil my findings as a set of seven archetypes: The Blithe Child, The Heroic Child, The Human Becoming, The Child Sacrifice, The Side Kid, The Waif, and The Little Monster. This typology is not intended to work against the granular detail of the information recorded in the dataset, but to draw attention to patterns of coherence and divergence that occur between particular examples, as well as to intersections with representational tropes about children identified in other media.
I select four of these seven archetypes to structure my autoethnographic close readings. While content analysis is a useful tool for documenting the presence, absence, and dominant function of child-characters in games, close reading allows for a more intersectional approach that can attend to the nuances of representation across identity markers, creating opportunities to examine internal contradictions, ironies, and the polysemy generated through interpretive gaps. I develop my own close reading method building on the autoethnographic approaches of Carr (2019), Vossen (2020), McArthur (2018), and Jennings (2021), which I call critical ekphrasis. Chapter one argues that the Blithe Child triangulates âchildrenâ, âtoysâ, and âpaidiaâ. It suggests that both childhood and play can be conceptualised as a âmagic circleâ, and that the immateriality of the Blithe Child implies childhood can be a mode of being unconnected to anatomical markers or chronological age. Chapter two explores how the Heroic Child challenges the apparent affinity between video games and traditional hero
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narratives. It argues that the dependence of the childly protagonist undermines dualistic thinking and instead celebrates cooperation, compromise, and connection. Chapter three compares the Child Sacrifice to the woman-in-the-refrigerator trope, arguing that it functions to justify aggressive, hypermasculine, militarised violence. The final chapter compares the Little Monster and the Waif to examine how the uncanny child raises metareferential questions about autonomy in interactive media and agency in intergenerational relationships.
My research project concludes by suggesting that virtual children in simulated worlds point to the active construction and delimitation of âthe childâ in society and can reveal that much of what is assumed to be natural, obvious, and universal about the figure of âthe childâ is in fact ideological. It hints at the possibility that just as virtual children are used as rhetorical figures to explain and justify the rules, mechanics, and moral systems of a digital game, so too is the figure of âthe childâ used to routinise and vindicate the rules, workings, and moral systems of Euro-American culture.AHR
Archaeological 3D GIS
Archaeological 3D GIS provides archaeologists with a guide to explore and understand the
unprecedented opportunities for collecting, visualising, and analysing archaeological
datasets in three dimensions.
With platforms allowing archaeologists to link, query, and analyse in a virtual, georeferenced
space information collected by different specialists, the book highlights how
it is possible to re-think aspects of theory and practice which relate to GIS. It explores
which questions can be addressed in such a new environment and how they are going
to impact the way we interpret the past. By using material from several international
case studies such as Pompeii, ĂatalhöyĂŒk, as well as prehistoric and protohistoric sites
in Southern Scandinavia, this book discusses the use of the third dimension in support
of archaeological practice.
This book will be essential for researchers and scholars who focus on archaeology and
spatial analysis, and is designed and structured to serve as a textbook for GIS and digital
archaeology courses
Multi-Sensory Interaction for Blind and Visually Impaired People
This book conveyed the visual elements of artwork to the visually impaired through various sensory elements to open a new perspective for appreciating visual artwork. In addition, the technique of expressing a color code by integrating patterns, temperatures, scents, music, and vibrations was explored, and future research topics were presented. A holistic experience using multi-sensory interaction acquired by people with visual impairment was provided to convey the meaning and contents of the work through rich multi-sensory appreciation. A method that allows people with visual impairments to engage in artwork using a variety of senses, including touch, temperature, tactile pattern, and sound, helps them to appreciate artwork at a deeper level than can be achieved with hearing or touch alone. The development of such art appreciation aids for the visually impaired will ultimately improve their cultural enjoyment and strengthen their access to culture and the arts. The development of this new concept aids ultimately expands opportunities for the non-visually impaired as well as the visually impaired to enjoy works of art and breaks down the boundaries between the disabled and the non-disabled in the field of culture and arts through continuous efforts to enhance accessibility. In addition, the developed multi-sensory expression and delivery tool can be used as an educational tool to increase product and artwork accessibility and usability through multi-modal interaction. Training the multi-sensory experiences introduced in this book may lead to more vivid visual imageries or seeing with the mindâs eye
BCE KSZI Reader 2022
A kötet oktatĂĄsi cĂ©lokat szolgĂĄl. A szöveggyƱjtemĂ©nyben szereplĆ tanulmĂĄnyok mĂĄsodközlĂ©sek, azokra hivatkozni az eredeti megjelenĂ©si helyĂŒkön kell
Multimodality in VR: A survey
Virtual reality (VR) is rapidly growing, with the potential to change the way we create and consume content. In VR, users integrate multimodal sensory information they receive, to create a unified perception of the virtual world. In this survey, we review the body of work addressing multimodality in VR, and its role and benefits in user experience, together with different applications that leverage multimodality in many disciplines. These works thus encompass several fields of research, and demonstrate that multimodality plays a fundamental role in VR; enhancing the experience, improving overall performance, and yielding unprecedented abilities in skill and knowledge transfer
The matrix revisited: A critical assessment of virtual reality technologies for modeling, simulation, and training
A convergence of affordable hardware, current events, and decades of research have advanced virtual reality (VR) from the research lab into the commercial marketplace. Since its inception in the 1960s, and over the next three decades, the technology was portrayed as a rarely used, high-end novelty for special applications. Despite the high cost, applications have expanded into defense, education, manufacturing, and medicine. The promise of VR for entertainment arose in the early 1990\u27s and by 2016 several consumer VR platforms were released. With VR now accessible in the home and the isolationist lifestyle adopted due to the COVID-19 global pandemic, VR is now viewed as a potential tool to enhance remote education. Drawing upon over 17 years of experience across numerous VR applications, this dissertation examines the optimal use of VR technologies in the areas of visualization, simulation, training, education, art, and entertainment. It will be demonstrated that VR is well suited for education and training applications, with modest advantages in simulation. Using this context, the case is made that VR can play a pivotal role in the future of education and training in a globally connected world
Assessing the structure and function of the posterior visual pathway in eye disease
This thesis examines the consequences of partial vision loss, namely macular disease (MD), on both the structure and function of the posterior visual pathway. Using both cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses we explored how the anatomy of MD patients may change differently than in those aging naturally. The patient group showed reduced cortical thickness, which appears to largely impact the anatomical representation of central vision. However, they also showed reduced fractional anisotropy of the underlying white matter; but both the fiber bundles projecting to central and peripheral representations in early visual cortex were affected, suggesting broader deficits emerge in visual white matter. Our longitudinal assessments identified continued decline in cortical thickness and myelin density, even in long-standing vision loss, but individual case studies indicate the greatest changes in cortex likely emerge early in the disease following functional vision loss. We next assessed how partial vision loss may impact functional connectivity between striate and extrastriate cortex and found a selective reduction in functional connectivity between striate and the fusiform face area patients with central field loss. Finally, we used transient retinal lesions to test for responses in a âsimulated lesion projection zoneâ (sLPZ) in sighted participants, providing some evidence that peripheral visual stimulation can produce âpatient-likeâ responses in central representations in some individual controls while performing a task. This suggests LPZ responses - often deemed the âsignature of reorganization of visual processingâ - may be driven by unmasked top-down feedback. Collectively, our findings add to growing evidence for atrophy in the posterior visual pathway in MD. Given that the viability of the visual brain may limit the success of visual restoration, development of neuroprotective strategies will benefit from a better understanding of the time scale and magnitude of changes observed in the brain following MD
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