Single view vs. multiple views scatterplots

Among all the available visualization tools, the scatterplot has been deeply analyzed through the years and many researchers investigated how to improve this tool to face new challenges. The scatterplot visualization diagram is considered one of the most functional among the variety of data visual representations, due to its relative simplicity compared to other multivariable visualization techniques. Even so, one of the most significant and unsolved challenge in data visualization consists in effectively displaying datasets with many attributes or dimensions, such as multidimensional or multivariate ones. The focus of this research is to compare the single view and the multiple views visualization paradigms for displaying multivariable dataset using scatterplots. A multivariable scatterplot has been developed as a web application to provide the single view tool, whereas for the multiple views visualization, the ScatterDice web app has been slightly modified and adopted as a traditional, yet interactive, scatterplot matrix. Finally, a taxonomy of tasks for visualization tools has been chosen to define the use case and the tests to compare the two paradigms

Storytelling in the Metaverse: From Desktop to Immersive Virtual Reality Storyboarding

Creatives from the animation and film industries have always been experimenting with innovative tools and methodologies to improve the creation of prototypes of their visual sequences before bringing them to life. In recent years, as realistic real-time rendering techniques have emerged, the increasing popularity of virtual reality (VR) can lead to new approaches and solutions, leveraging the immersive and interactive features provided by 3D immersive experiences. A 3D desktop application and a novel storyboarding pipeline, which can automatically generate a storyboard including camera details and a textual description of the actions performed in three-dimensional environments, have already been investigated in previous work. The aim was to exploit new technologies to improve existing 3D storytelling approaches, thus providing a software solution for expert and novice storyboarders. This research investigates 3D storyboarding in immersive virtual reality (IVR) to move toward a new storyboarding paradigm. IVR systems provide peculiarities such as body-controlled exploration of the 3D scene and a head-dependant camera view that can extend features of traditional storyboarding tools. The proposed system enables users to set up the virtual stage, adding elements to the scene and exploring the environment as they build it. After that, users can select the available characters or the camera, control them in first person, position them in the scene, and perform actions selecting from a list of options, each paired with a corresponding animation. Relying on the concept of state-machine, the system can automatically generate the list of available actions depending on the context. Finally, the descriptions for each storyboard panel are automatically generated based on the history of activities performed. The proposed application maintains all the functionalities of the desktop version and can be effectively used to create storyboards in immersive virtual environments

Prototyping industrial workstation in the Metaverse: a Low Cost Automation assembly use case

Low-cost Automation (LCA) represents a relevant use case that can benefit from a design and prototyping step experienced in Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR). LCA is a technology that automates some activities using mostly standard automation components available off-the-shelf. However, since LCA systems should adapt to existing standard production lines and workstations, workers need to customize standard LCA templates. This adaptation and customization step is usually performed on the real, physical LCA system, thus, it can be very time-consuming, and in case of errors it may be necessary to rebuild many parts from scratch. This paper investigates the usage of an Immersive Virtual Environment (IVE) as a tool for rapid and easy prototyping of LCA solutions. The proposed system loads from a digital library the 3D models of the components and provides users a set of tools to speed up the LCA system creation in a virtual room experienced through an IVR Headset. When the user completes the creation of the LCA system, it is possible to simulate its physical properties using the Unity 3D Physical Engine. Moreover, it is possible to obtain a list of all the pieces needed to build the prototype and their dimensions, to easily reproduce them in the real world. To assess the usability of the proposed system, a LCA building task has been defined, whereas users had to build a LCA solution using a template model for reference. Results show that the system usability has been highly appreciated by both skilled users and inexperienced ones

Commerce Numérique: traffic signals for crossroads between cultures.

Commerce is a French literary journal - founded by Princess Margherita Caetani - which relied on the collaboration of three prestigious writers: Paul Valéry, Léon-Paul Fargue, and Valéry Larbaud. The journal is composed of twenty-nine volumes published between 1924 and 1932. Each volume includes different literary material like poems and novels, written by both well- known and unknown writers, who also translated important authors like Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Pirandello, Ungaretti, Saint-John Perse, Rilke, and Hofmannsthal. Considering the historical, literary, and cultural importance of the journal Commerce, our project “Commerce numérique” aims to digitize and to make the journal contents freely available online to both the general public and the research community. This article describes the way in which the journal was encoded. Particular importance is also given to the encoding of poems present in Commerce. Some poems are in the original language and are accompanied by their French translation, other poems are in the French-translated form without the original text. In order to fully and accurately express the phenomena and their structures, we adopted some aspects of the TEI framework that will be explained in detail. The French translation of a Moroccan Arabic poem from the 13th century is also considered. The original Arabic poem is interesting because it presents aspects of both the Moroccan dialect and the oral text. The study and the encoding of the Arabic poem in parallel to its translation highlight some important structural differences between Arabic poetry and Western poetry

Challenges of the Human Right to Water in federal States: the case of Argentina

Este trabajo abordará la problemática existente en los Estados organizados bajo un sistema federal, para dar efectivo cumplimiento a las obligaciones internacionales surgidas a partir del reconocimiento del Derecho Humano al agua (DHA), tomando como objeto de estudio el caso de la República Argentina. La distribución de competencias en estos Estados implica un equilibrio entre el Estado nacional (Soberano) y los Estados locales o provinciales (autónomos). La situación se torna especialmente compleja en aquellos Estados que han federalizado el aprovechamiento de sus recursos naturales, ejemplo de ello es el caso argentino, conforme lo establece el art. 124 de la Constitución Nacional de la República Argentina (CNA). El Estado nacional no puede ampararse en la distribución de competencias internas para evadir el cumplimiento de sus obligaciones internacionales. Se analizarán los posibles instrumentos con que cuenta el Estado nacional para garantizar el cumplimiento de sus obligaciones internacionales en torno al DHA, teniendo en cuenta que debe respetar el sistema federal que ha otorgado a las provincias el dominio de sus recursos naturales.This work will develop the current problems the States under a federal system are confronted with, in order to effectively comply with the international obligations arising from the acknowledgment of the Human Right to Water and Sanitation (HRWS), taking the case of the Argentine Republic as the subject of study. The distribution of faculties in these States implies a balance between the National State (Sovereign) and the local or provincial States (autonomous). The situation is considered especially complex for those States with a federal exploitation of their natural resources, such as the case of Argentina. The National State cannot rely on the internal distribution of faculties, in order to avoid the fulfillment of the international obligations. Therefore, the possible instruments of the National State to ensure the fulfillment of its international obligations in relation to the HRWS will be analyzed, taking into account the compliance of the federal system which has granted the provinces the ownership of their natural resources.Facultad de Ciencias Jurídicas y Sociale

Augmented Reality in Industry 4.0

Since the origins of Augmented Reality (AR), industry has always been one of its prominent application domains. The recent advances in both portable and wearable AR devices and the new challenges introduced by the fourth industrial revolution (renowned as industry 4.0) further enlarge the applicability of AR to improve the productiveness and to enhance the user experience. This paper provides an overview on the most important applications of AR regarding the industry domain. Key among the issues raised in this paper are the various applications of AR that enhance the user's ability to understand the movement of mobile robot, the movements of a robot arm and the forces applied by a robot. It is recommended that, in view of the rising need for both users and data privacy, technologies which compose basis for Industry 4.0 will need to change their own way of working to embrace data privacy

Harmonize: a shared environment for extended immersive entertainment

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) applications are very diffuse nowadays. Moreover, recent technology innovations led to the diffusion of commercial head-mounted displays (HMDs) for immersive VR: users can enjoy entertainment activities that fill their visual fields, experiencing the sensation of physical presence in these virtual immersive environments (IEs). Even if AR and VR are mostly used separately, they can be effectively combined to provide a multi-user shared environment (SE), where two or more users perform some specific tasks in a cooperative or competitive way, providing a wider set of interactions and use cases compared to immersive VR alone. However, due to the differences between the two technologies, it is difficult to develop SEs offering a similar experience for both AR and VR users. This paper presents Harmonize, a novel framework to deploy applications based on SEs with a comparable experience for both AR and VR users. Moreover, the framework is hardware-independent and it has been designed to be as much extendable to novel hardware as possible. An immersive game has been designed to test and to evaluate the validity of the proposed framework. The assessment of the system through the System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire and the Game Experience Questionnaire (GEQ) shows a positive evaluation

Enhancing cultural tourism by a mixed reality application for outdoor navigation and information browsing using immersive devices

In this paper a mixed reality application is introduced; this application runs on Microsoft Hololens and has been designed to provide information on a city scale. The application was developed to provide information about historical buildings, thus supporting cultural outdoor tourism. The huge amount of multimedia data stored in the archives of the Italian public broadcaster RAI, is used to enrich the user experience. A remote application of image and video analysis receives an image flow by the user and identifies known objects framed in the images. The user can select the object (monument/building/artwork) for which augmented contents have to be displayed (video, text audio); the user can interact with these contents by a set of defined gestures. Moreover, if the object of interest is detected and tracked by the mixed reality application, also 3D contents can be overlapped and aligned with the real world

A Comparison of Three Different NeuroTag Visualization Media: Brain Visual Stimuli by Monitor, Augmented and Virtual Reality Devices

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) proved to overcome some limitations of other input modes (e.g., gestures, voice, haptic, etc.). BCIs are able to detect the brain activity, thus identifying searched patterns. When a specific brain activity is recognized, a well-defined action can be triggered, thus implementing a human-machine interaction paradigm. BCIs can be used in different domains ranging from industry to services for impaired people. This paper considers BCIs that can be designed and developed by the NextMind, which is a small and ergonomics device to capture the activity of the visual cortex. Objects called NeuroTags can be inserted in both 2D and 3D scenes; these objects act like switches when the user is able to focus on them. The aim of this work is to evaluate different NeuroTag configurations (varying in terms of size and distance) as well as different visualization devices: a monitor, a virtual reality head-mounted display, and an augmented reality head-mounted display. User tests outline that the best tradeoff between robustness and selection speed is obtained by medium-size and medium-spaced NeuroTags; on the other hand, monitor visualization outperforms the AR solution, whereas it is not possible to identify statistically significant differences between monitor-VR and AR-VR

An Evaluation of Game Usability in Shared Mixed and Virtual Environments

Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies are increasingly becoming more pervasive and important in the information technology area. Thanks to the technological improvements, desktop interfaces are being replaced by immersive VR devices that offer a more compelling game experience. AR games have started to draw attention of researchers and companies for their ability to exploit both the real and virtual environments. New fascinating challenges are generated by the possibility of designing hybrid games that allow several users to access shared environments exploiting the features of both AR and VR devices. However, the user experience and usability can be affected by several parameters, such as the field of view (FoV) of the employed devices or the realism of the scene. The work presented in this chapter aims to assess the impact of the FoV on the usability of the interfaces in a first-person shooter game. Two players, interacting with AR (first player) and VR (second player) devices, can fight each other in a large game environment. Although we cannot ascertain that different FoVs have affected the game usability, users considered the narrow FoV interfaces to be less usable, even though they could freely move around the real environment