An observational study of children interacting with an augmented story book

We present findings of an observational study investigating how young children interact with augmented reality story books. Children aged between 6 and 7 read and interacted with one of two story books aimed at early literacy education. The books pages were augmented using animated virtual 3D characters, sound, and interactive tasks. Introducing novel media to young children requires system and story designers to consider not only technological issues but also questions arising from story design and the design of interactive sequences. We discuss findings of our study and implications regarding the implementation of augmented story books

Ways of making: producing artworks in the studio in response to experiential walking

This thesis includes a body of paintings, drawings and assembled objects that have been made in response to the Crossing England walks (2014 - 2018). This body of work is entitled The English Diagrams (2018). The research draws upon the varied perspectives of Fine Art, Performance Studies and Cultural Geographies, to examine the relationship between the activities of walking as art, and making in the studio. Drawing from experiential phenomenology, I set out a model for rigorous, reflexive, creative practice and map the looping affiliations between the embodied world of the walked landscape, the subjective terrain of the practitioner, and the fabrication of paintings, drawings and assemblage within the studio. This interdisciplinary study takes a neo-vitalist approach, tracking a series of walks on a single route across England. Artist and terrain are explored as integrated, the boundaries between them fluid or porous, Autobiographical story, personal mythology, and sediments of collective memory interred within the earth are drawn out by the sensory, somatic rhythms of walking, and through selection of specific materials found along the way. Through studying bodily, psychical and material fluxes and flows within the studio, the thesis considers optimal conditions for flow in practice, and scrutinizes interrelations between the space of the studio and the body/mind of the practitioner, during the production of drawings, paintings and assemblage. It explores how the fields, gaps, lines and folds of the landscape can be translated into a bricolage of visual and painterly languages that is as heterogeneous as the terrain it refers to. The research shows how a sustained and looping threefold process of walking, reflective writing and making can lead not just to new ways of fabricating, but of surveying and plotting human experience. This renewed, unified sensibility, is subsequently conveyed back outside to the landscape during new walks, offering altered perceptions and new readings of the landscape. This is a study with potential to be of interest for creative practitioners from a variety of disciplines, and to theorists and scholars of artistic process

An Evaluation of Virtual Lenses for Object Selection in Augmented Reality

This paper reports the results of an experiment to compare three different selection techniques in a tabletop tangible augmented reality interface. Object selection is an important task in all direct manipulation interfaces because it precedes most other manipulation and navigation actions. Previous work on tangible virtual lenses for visualisation has prompted the exploration of how selection techniques can be incorporated into these tools. In this paper a selection technique based on virtual lenses is compared with the traditional approaches of virtual hand and virtual pointer methods. The Lens technique is found to be faster, require less physical effort to use, and is preferred by participants over the other techniques. These results can be useful in guiding the development of future augmented reality interfaces

Self-perception and the one- and two-sided argument : a study of self-immunization.

Dept. of Psychology. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis1977 .B544. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 40-07, page: . Thesis (M.A.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 1977

The depression of quartz in sulphide flotation

The flotation of sulphide minerals from siliceous and calcareous gangue minerals always gives a concentrate that is contaminated to a greater or lesser degree with the gangue minerals, even though the collectors used do not show any appreciable collecting properties for the gangue minerals when they are treated alone. In an effort to reduce the amount of undesirable gangue mineral floated with the concentrate it is the practice to add arbitrary amounts of various reagents such as quebracho, alkali hydroxides, carbonates, silicates, sulphides, phosphates, fluorides, and sulphuric acid which have been found to be advantageous. The mechanism of depression is in general not clear, although a number of possibilities are recognised such as, (i) prevention of activation resurfacing by soluble salts present in the pulp, (ii) closure of surfaces against collector reactions, (iii) destruction or nullification of collector coatings, (iv) dispersion, (v) resurfacing to produce water avidity. In any given case one or more of these possible mechanisms may be operative. The use of sodium silicate as a conditioning agent in flotation pulps for the depression of gangue is widespread, and it is desirable that the mechanism of the depressant action be elucidated to allow close control of the flotation process to be obtained. Two probable mechanisms for sodium silicate depression of gangue have been postulated, viz. (i) surface closure of gangue mineral surfaces by silicate ions by mass action effect, and (ii) dispersion of gangue minerals by adsorption of either silicate ions or sodium ions on the surface of the gangue minerals. An effort has been made in the work to be described to determine which of the ions, silicate or sodium, is the effective ion in producing dispersion and hence depression of the gangue minerals in the flotation of sulphides from an artificial pyrite-quartz mixture --Introduction, pages 1-2

Fluorine Chemistry at Extreme Conditions: Possible Synthesis of Hgf4

By irradiating a pressurized mixture of a fluorine-bearing compound (XeF2XeF2) and HgF2HgF2 with synchrotron hard x-rays ... (See full text for complete abstract

Handheld AR for Collaborative Edutainment

Handheld Augmented Reality (AR) is expected to provide ergonomic, intuitive user interfaces for untrained users. Yet no comparative study has evaluated these assumptions against more traditional user interfaces for an education task. In this paper we compare the suitability of a handheld AR arts-history learning game against more traditional variants. We present results from a user study that demonstrate not only the effectiveness of AR for untrained users but also its fun-factor and suitability in environments such as public museums. Based on these results we provide design guidelines that can inform the design of future collaborative handheld AR applications

Local Descriptor by Zernike Moments for Real-time Keypoint Matching

This paper presents a real-time keypoint matching algorithm using a local descriptor derived by Zernike moments. From an input image, we find a set of keypoints by using an existing corner detection algorithm. At each keypoint we extract a fixed size image patch and compute a local descriptor derived by Zernike moments. The proposed local descriptor is invariant to rotation and illumination changes. In order to speed up the computation of Zernike moments, we compute the Zernike basis functions in advance and store them in a set of lookup tables. The matching is performed with an Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) method and refined by a RANSAC algorithm. In the experiments we confirmed that videos of frame size 320×240 with the scale, rotation, illumination and even 3D viewpoint changes are processed at 25~30Hz using the proposed method. Unlike existing keypoint matching algorithms, our approach also works in realtime for registering a reference image