On Distant Speech Recognition for Home Automation

The official version of this draft is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16226-3_7International audienceIn the framework of Ambient Assisted Living, home automation may be a solution for helping elderly people living alone at home. This study is part of the Sweet-Home project which aims at developing a new home automation system based on voice command to improve support and well-being of people in loss of autonomy. The goal of the study is vocal order recognition with a focus on two aspects: distance speech recognition and sentence spotting. Several ASR techniques were evaluated on a realistic corpus acquired in a 4-room flat equipped with microphones set in the ceiling. This distant speech French corpus was recorded with 21 speakers who acted scenarios of activities of daily living. Techniques acting at the decoding stage, such as our novel approach called Driven Decoding Algorithm (DDA), gave better speech recognition results than the baseline and other approaches. This solution which uses the two best SNR channels and a priori knowledge (voice commands and distress sentences) has demonstrated an increase in recognition rate without introducing false alarms

Is it in the Game? Reconsidering play spaces, game definitions, theming and sports videogames

From the very first days of digital gaming, sport-themed videogames have been a constant and ever-popular presence. However, compared with many other genres of games, sports-themed videogames have remained relatively under-research. Using the case of ‘sports videogames’ this paper advocates a critical and located approach to understanding videogames and gameplay. Unlike many existing theorisations of gameplay, such as the ‘magic circle’ (Huizinga 1949 [1938]), which theorise play as a break from ordinary life, this paper argues for a consideration of play as a continuation of ‘the control of the established order’ (Lefebvre (1991 [1974]: 383). It argues that many videogames, and in particular sports videogames, can be understood as ‘themed’ spaces; which share similarities to other themed locations, such as fast-food restaurants and theme parks. These are ‘non-places’ (Augé 1995) themed to provide a sense of individuality, control and escape in a society that increasingly offers none

Pelimekaniikat osana ansaintalogiikkaa – Miten pelisuunnittelulla luodaan kysyntää

Selling virtual goods has become one of the main revenue models for online game operators. However, the business model differs from flat-fee models in that the value for the sold value offerings is, for the most part, derived from the structures built into the game and thus requires game developers to integrate business planning into game design. The paper analyses common game mechanics in MMO-games that are harnessed for creating demand for virtual goods. The results provide a new perspective to game design with interesting implications for developers. Moreover, they also suggest a radically new perspective to marketers of ordinary goods and services: viewing marketing as a form of game design.</p

The Introduction of Computer and Video Games in Museums – Experiences and Possibilities

Part 7: Celebrating Nostalgia for Games - And Its Potential as Trojan HorseInternational audienceComputers and other digital devices have been used for gaming since the 1940s. However, the growth in popularity of commercial videogames has only recently been witnessed in museums. This paper creates an overview of how digital gaming devices have been introduced in museum exhibitions over the last fifteen years. The following discussion will give examples of exhibitions from different countries and provide answers to the following questions: Can digital games and gaming devices be used as promotional gimmicks for attracting new audiences to museums? How can mainframe computers be taken into account in digital game related exhibitions? How has the difference between cultural-historical and art museum contexts affected the methods for introducing digital games? Is there still room for general exhibitions of digital games or should one focus more on special theme exhibitions? How are museum professionals, researchers and computer hobbyists able to collaborate in exhibition projects