WHAT?: Visual Interpretations of the Miscommunication Between the Hearing and Deaf

This thesis visualizes the communication challenges both latent and obvious of my daily life as a hard of hearing individual. By focusing on a variety of experiences and examples I demonstrate the implications of a hard of hearing individual’s life. The prints, objects and videos that I have created for my visual thesis aim to enrich the understanding of a broader public on issues regularly faced by Deaf people. At the heart of my work my goal is to generate mutual empathy between the hearing and the Deaf

Interactive animated storybook based on Korean folk tale

The intended purpose of my project was to develop an interactive animated storybook for children based on a Korean folk tale. Unlike a traditional storybook, I created an interactive computer program for children with diverse interactive animations. I wanted to explore how multimedia design can be entertaining and educational simultaneously

Equipoise: An Animated Short Film About Positiveness and Negativity.

Equipoise is an animated short about positiveness, negativity and the opposite but complementary relationship between them. The two opposite attitudes of an individual’s personality not only affect but also establish emotions, decisions and behaviors. Positiveness reinforces positive thinking while pessimistic assumptions and hardship are driven by negativity. A person who has an imbalanced mind may live in pain or lead to high risks. To have a great mental condition, both positiveness and negativity have to be involved to establish the balance. However, the importance of negativity, in one case, pessimism was frequently ignored as a result of education that focuses on positiveness or optimism for most of the time. The animated short Equipoise depicts the complementarity of two forces and introduces the concept of balance from an objective standpoint. The two forces are balancing for different circumstances and no matter who is leading, the other is always supporting

Automated Conversion of Music Videos into Lyric Videos

Musicians and fans often produce lyric videos, a form of music videos that showcase the song's lyrics, for their favorite songs. However, making such videos can be challenging and time-consuming as the lyrics need to be added in synchrony and visual harmony with the video. Informed by prior work and close examination of existing lyric videos, we propose a set of design guidelines to help creators make such videos. Our guidelines ensure the readability of the lyric text while maintaining a unified focus of attention. We instantiate these guidelines in a fully automated pipeline that converts an input music video into a lyric video. We demonstrate the robustness of our pipeline by generating lyric videos from a diverse range of input sources. A user study shows that lyric videos generated by our pipeline are effective in maintaining text readability and unifying the focus of attention

A Game-Based Learning Model

The purpose of this research is to design a conceptual model and develop an implementation as a proof of concept of game-based learning (GBL)to support linguistic skills acquisition. Our model lays the foundations of game-based learning by defining methods, processes, and procedures to support the development of game-based learning systems. Integration of learning and gameplay raises various issues, among them the learning process, learning content, and game characteristics. Language competency is fundamental to academic and social success. Vocabulary acquisition is a primary basis for language competency. Word lists and dictionaries have been used as a resource to enrich vocabulary. The general trend in dictionary development is towards the introduction of interactivity and visualization. Not only do they effectively capture the traditional didactic concepts, modern e-dictionaries provide structures and functions that support and encourage learning. To a certain extent, they can be viewed as a scaled down version of game-based learning, in which we see effective alternatives to acquire linguistic skills, specifically in the context of the Arabic language. GBL supports a multi-modal learning environment and various forms of learning strategies, such as exploration, interactivity, and active participation. A basic issue we are facing is the definition of a model of GBL. To delimit the progress in GBL modeling, we review some existing Arabic games intended for education of children. We found that there are very few games for learning Arabic dedicated to children. We analyzed several games for learning Arabic in terms of the nature and organization of the contents, gameplay, interactivity, graphics and assessment. Generally, they are simplistic and tend to revolve around the same trivial idea. Overall, there is a lack of quality in the presentation in terms of graphics, animation, colors, and voice-over. None of these Arabic games shows a systematic design process. Moreover, to synthesize the dominant features and trends, we conducted a comparison of current dictionaries features in different viii languages. We selected some representative English and French dictionaries available on the Web, which provides many features like searching (by image and by category) and finding detailed descriptions. For comparison purposes, an Arabic dictionary was also included. This study was intended to identify possible features that enhance the ease of learning a new language within a GBL context

Navigating the space of your music

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (p. 121-124).Navigating increasingly large personal music libraries is commonplace. Yet most music browsers do not enable their users to explore their collections in a guided and manipulable fashion, often requiring them to have a specific target in mind. MusicBox is a new music browser that provides this interactive control by mapping a music collection into a two-dimensional space, applying principal components analysis (PCA) to a combination of contextual and content-based features of each of the musical tracks. The resulting map shows similar songs close together and dissimilar songs farther apart. MusicBox is fully interactive and highly flexible: users can add and remove features from the included feature list, with PCA recomputed on the fly to remap the data. MusicBox is also extensible; we invite other music researchers to contribute features to its PCA engine. A small user study has shown that MusicBox helps users to find music in their libraries, to discover new music, and to challenge their assumptions about relationships between types of music.by Anita Shen Lillie.S.M

Patina : layering a history-of-use on digital objects

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 1998.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 57-59).by Ansel Arjan Schütte.S.M