Realidade aumentada móvel aplicada na navegação indoor para cadeirantes

Physical deficiency is an obstacle to the afflicted individual, as they are deprived from realizing routine activities, without the help of others. For many, the use of wheelchairs is fundamental to providing mobility and social inclusion. However, these individuals still come up against a series of challenges in order to improve their life quality. Among the many difficulties, one in particular is highlighted: navigation in indoor environments buildings, such as localizing the shortest and best route for arriving at a desired destination. In the context of the Information Society, the use of pervasive computation and intelligent environments have application potential in supporting navigation assisted by mobile devices. In this scenario, it is noted that there exist a sparse quantity of applications capable of attending to the special needs of wheelchair users. Therefore, this study considers the hypothesis that other technologies, such as Mobile Augmented Reality (AR), possess the potential to facilitate the navigation of wheelchair users in indoor environments. In light of the above, the main motive behind this research study is to investigate computational techniques that support the use of indoor navigation based on Mobile AR, especially those which possess total control over their upper limbs. In order to achieve such, this work study proposes an architecture to support the development of these applications. Experiments were performed with wheelchair user volunteers. These interacted with an application via touch or voice commands in order to navigate within a test environment. This environment proposes the use of navigation arrows through use of AR. The features implemented onto the proposed architecture were capable of providing significant benefits for indoor navigation. Especially, when compared to traditional techniques.Tese (Doutorado)A deficiência física é um obstáculo aos portadores, uma vez que os mesmos são privados de realizar atividades rotineiras, sem auxílio de outros. Para muitos, o uso de cadeiras de rodas é fundamental para proporcionar mobilidade e inclusão social. No entanto, cadeirantes ainda enfrentam uma série de desafios para melhorar sua qualidade de vida. Entre as muitas dificuldades, uma em especial se destaca: a navegação em ambientes internos (indoor) de edificações, tais como a localização do menor e melhor caminho para chegar ao seu destino final. No contexto da Sociedade da Informação, o uso de computação pervasiva e de ambientes inteligentes tem potencial de aplicação no apoio à navegação suportada por dispositivos móveis. Neste cenário, observa-se parca quantidade de aplicações capazes de atender as necessidades especiais de cadeirantes. Portanto, este trabalho considera a hipótese de que outras tecnologias como a Realidade Aumentada (RA) Móvel, possui potencial para facilitar a navegação de cadeirantes em ambientes fechados. Diante disso, a motivação principal desta pesquisa é investigar técnicas computacionais que suportem o uso da navegação indoor de cadeirantes, baseada na RA Móvel, especialmente os que possuem total controle dos membros superiores. Para tanto, este trabalho propõe uma arquitetura para suportar o desenvolvimento destas aplicações. Experimentos foram realizados com voluntários cadeirantes. Estes interagiram com a aplicação por meio de comandos de toque ou de voz, para navegar dentro de um ambiente de teste. Este ambiente propõe o uso de setas de navegação com o uso de RA. As características implementadas na arquitetura proposta foram capazes de proporcionar benefícios significativos para navegação indoor de cadeirantes. Principalmente, quando comparado com técnicas tradicionais. Palavras-chave: realidade aumentada móvel, navegação indoor, cadeirantes

Practical, appropriate, empirically-validated guidelines for designing educational games

There has recently been a great deal of interest in the potential of computer games to function as innovative educational tools. However, there is very little evidence of games fulfilling that potential. Indeed, the process of merging the disparate goals of education and games design appears problematic, and there are currently no practical guidelines for how to do so in a coherent manner. In this paper, we describe the successful, empirically validated teaching methods developed by behavioural psychologists and point out how they are uniquely suited to take advantage of the benefits that games offer to education. We conclude by proposing some practical steps for designing educational games, based on the techniques of Applied Behaviour Analysis. It is intended that this paper can both focus educational games designers on the features of games that are genuinely useful for education, and also introduce a successful form of teaching that this audience may not yet be familiar with

Perceptual fail: Female power, mobile technologies and images of self

Like a biological species, images of self have descended and modified throughout their journey down the ages, interweaving and recharging their viability with the necessary interjections from culture, tools and technology. Part of this journey has seen images of self also become an intrinsic function within the narratives about female power; consider Helen of Troy “a face that launched a thousand ships” (Marlowe, 1604) or Kim Kardashian (KUWTK) who heralded in the mass mediated ‘selfie’ as a social practice. The interweaving process itself sees the image oscillate between naturalized ‘icon’ and idealized ‘symbol’ of what the person looked like and/or aspired to become. These public images can confirm or constitute beauty ideals as well as influence (via imitation) behaviour and mannerisms, and as such the viewers belief in the veracity of the representative image also becomes intrinsically political manipulating the associated narratives and fostering prejudice (Dobson 2015, Korsmeyer 2004, Pollock 2003). The selfie is arguably ‘a sui generis,’ whilst it is a mediated photographic image of self, it contains its own codes of communication and decorum that fostered the formation of numerous new digital communities and influenced new media aesthetics . For example the selfie is both of nature (it is still a time based piece of documentation) and known to be perceptually untrue (filtered, modified and full of artifice). The paper will seek to demonstrate how selfie culture is infused both by considerable levels of perceptual failings that are now central to contemporary celebrity culture and its’ notion of glamour which in turn is intrinsically linked (but not solely defined) by the province of feminine desire for reinvention, transformation or “self-sexualisation” (Hall, West and McIntyre, 2012). The subject, like the Kardashians or selfies, is divisive. In conclusion this paper will explore the paradox of the perceptual failings at play within selfie culture more broadly, like ‘Reality TV’ selfies are infamously fake yet seem to provide Debord’s (1967) illusory cultural opiate whilst fulfilling a cultural longing. Questions then emerge when considering the narrative impact of these trends on engendered power structures and the traditional status of illusion and narrative fiction

Networks of Experience: Interactive Digital Art in the 21st Century

Networks of Experience: Interactive Digital Art in the 21st Century considers interactivity in digital art practices. Emerging technologies advance so quickly that artworks using such technologies are not fully understood. Digital artworks are susceptible to unprecedented threats, including technology obsolescence, file incompatibility, and software updates that might considerably alter the artwork in a matter of months. However, immaterial characteristics such as interactivity are often overlooked in the panic of preserving physical technologies. Software and hardware do not always indicate how interactive a work should be, if it involves one or many participants at once, or how exhibition space should facilitate interaction. In this dissertation, I establish a framework to quantify and prioritize the many ways in which participants interact with artworks that make use of digital technologies. I propose a three-part typology – individual interactive experience, collective interactive experience, and distributed interactive experience – as illustrated with case studies including the VR artwork The Chalkroom (2017) by Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang, the immersive digital exhibition Continuity (2021-2022) by the Japanese “ultratechnologist” collective teamLab, and the social media performance Excellences & Perfections (2013) by Amalia Ulman. The project offers clarity to the nature of interactivity, with an eye to long-term preservation when digital artworks are on display, on loan, or acquired in museum collections

The Ephemeral City : Songs for the Ghost Quarters

The towers of the Stockholm skyline twine with radio transmissions, flying out over the city, drifting down through the streets and sinking into the underground telephone system below. Stockholm has buildings that have been there for centuries, but is also full of modern and contemporary architectures, all jostling for their place in parallel collective memory. In taking the city up as a subject, this artistic PhD project in music expands allegories to these architectural instruments into the world of the mechanical and the electrical. By taking up and transforming the materials of the cityscape, this project spins ephemeral cities more subtle than the colossal forces transforming the cityscape. The aim is to empower urban dwellers with another kind of ownership of their city.The materials in the project are drawn around themes of urban memory and transformation, psychogeography and the ghosts of the imagined city. There are three questions the artistic works of this project reflect on and address. The first is about the ability of city-dwellers to regain or create some sense of place, history or belonging through the power of their imaginations. The second reflects on the possibility for imagined alternatives to re-empower a sense of place for the people who encounter them. The third seeks out the points where stories, memories, or alternative futures are collective, at what point are they wholly individual, and how the interplay between them plays out in listening.There is an improvisatory practice in how we relate to urban environments: an ever-transforming inter-play between the animate and inanimate. Each individual draws phantoms of memory and imagination onto the cityscape, and this yields subtle ways people can be empowered in their surroundings. The artistic works of this project are made to illuminate those subtleties, centering around a group of compositions, improvisations, artistic collaborations and sound installations in music and sound, utilizing modular synthesizers, field recordings, pipe organs, multi-channel settings; PureData and SuperCollider programs, string ensembles with hurdy-gurdy and nyckelharpa or violin, and sound installations. This choice of instruments is as an allegory to the architecture of Stockholm. The final result is a collection of music and sound works, made to illuminate the imagined city. Taken as a whole, the works of the project create an imaginary city–The Ephemeral City–in order to argue that this evocation of ephemeral space is a way to empower urban dwellers through force of imagination, immune to the vast forces tearing through the fabric of Stockholm life by virtue of the ghostly, transitory and mercurial, as compelling to the inner eye as brick and mortar to the outer life

Proceedings of the 9th international conference on disability, virtual reality and associated technologies (ICDVRAT 2012)

The proceedings of the conferenc

Data and the city – accessibility and openness. a cybersalon paper on open data

This paper showcases examples of bottom–up open data and smart city applications and identifies lessons for future such efforts. Examples include Changify, a neighbourhood-based platform for residents, businesses, and companies; Open Sensors, which provides APIs to help businesses, startups, and individuals develop applications for the Internet of Things; and Cybersalon’s Hackney Treasures. a location-based mobile app that uses Wikipedia entries geolocated in Hackney borough to map notable local residents. Other experiments with sensors and open data by Cybersalon members include Ilze Black and Nanda Khaorapapong's The Breather, a "breathing" balloon that uses high-end, sophisticated sensors to make air quality visible; and James Moulding's AirPublic, which measures pollution levels. Based on Cybersalon's experience to date, getting data to the people is difficult, circuitous, and slow, requiring an intricate process of leadership, public relations, and perseverance. Although there are myriad tools and initiatives, there is no one solution for the actual transfer of that data