A Palette of Deepened Emotions: Exploring Emotional Challenge in Virtual Reality Games

Recent work introduced the notion of ‘emotional challenge’promising for understanding more unique and diverse player experiences (PX). Although emotional challenge has immediately attracted HCI researchers’ attention, the concept has not been experimentally explored, especially in virtual reality (VR), one of the latest gaming environments. We conducted two experiments to investigate how emotional challenge affects PX when separately from or jointly with conventional challenge in VR and PC conditions. We found that relatively exclusive emotional challenge induced a wider range of different emotions in both conditions, while the adding of emotional challenge broadened emotional responses only in VR. In both experiments, VR significantly enhanced the measured PX of emotional responses, appreciation, immersion and presence. Our findings indicate that VR may be an ideal medium to present emotional challenge and also extend the understanding of emotional (and conventional) challenge in video games

The generic mapping tools version 6

The Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) software is ubiquitous in the Earth and ocean sciences. As a cross-platform tool producing high-quality maps and figures, it is used by tens of thousands of scientists around the world. The basic syntax of GMT scripts has evolved very slowly since the 1990s, despite the fact that GMT is generally perceived to have a steep learning curve with many pitfalls for beginners and experienced users alike. Reducing these pitfalls means changing the interface, which would break compatibility with thousands of existing scripts. With the latest GMT version 6, we solve this conundrum by introducing a new "modern mode" to complement the interface used in previous versions, which GMT 6 now calls "classic mode." GMT 6 defaults to classic mode and thus is a recommended upgrade for all GMT 5 users. Nonetheless, new users should take advantage of modern mode to make shorter scripts, quickly access commonly used global data sets, and take full advantage of the new tools to draw subplots, place insets, and create animations.Funding Agency National Science Foundation (NSF) Appeared in article as U.S. National Science Foundation MSU Geological Sciences Endowmentinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Experimental study on discretely modulated continuous-variable quantum key distribution

We present a discretely modulated continuous-variable quantum key distribution system in free space by using strong coherent states. The amplitude noise in the laser source is suppressed to the shot-noise limit by using a mode cleaner combined with a frequency shift technique. Also, it is proven that the phase noise in the source has no impact on the final secret key rate. In order to increase the encoding rate, we use broadband homodyne detectors and the no-switching protocol. In a realistic model, we establish a secret key rate of 46.8 kbits/s against collective attacks at an encoding rate of 10 MHz for a 90% channel loss when the modulation variance is optimal.Comment: 7 pages,6 figure

Reversible Embedding to Covers Full of Boundaries

In reversible data embedding, to avoid overflow and underflow problem, before data embedding, boundary pixels are recorded as side information, which may be losslessly compressed. The existing algorithms often assume that a natural image has little boundary pixels so that the size of side information is small. Accordingly, a relatively high pure payload could be achieved. However, there actually may exist a lot of boundary pixels in a natural image, implying that, the size of side information could be very large. Therefore, when to directly use the existing algorithms, the pure embedding capacity may be not sufficient. In order to address this problem, in this paper, we present a new and efficient framework to reversible data embedding in images that have lots of boundary pixels. The core idea is to losslessly preprocess boundary pixels so that it can significantly reduce the side information. Experimental results have shown the superiority and applicability of our work