A Mimetic Strategy to Engage Voluntary Physical Activity In Interactive Entertainment

We describe the design and implementation of a vision based interactive entertainment system that makes use of both involuntary and voluntary control paradigms. Unintentional input to the system from a potential viewer is used to drive attention-getting output and encourage the transition to voluntary interactive behaviour. The iMime system consists of a character animation engine based on the interaction metaphor of a mime performer that simulates non-verbal communication strategies, without spoken dialogue, to capture and hold the attention of a viewer. The system was developed in the context of a project studying care of dementia sufferers. Care for a dementia sufferer can place unreasonable demands on the time and attentional resources of their caregivers or family members. Our study contributes to the eventual development of a system aimed at providing relief to dementia caregivers, while at the same time serving as a source of pleasant interactive entertainment for viewers. The work reported here is also aimed at a more general study of the design of interactive entertainment systems involving a mixture of voluntary and involuntary control.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, ECAG08 worksho

Efficient high quality rendering of point sampled geometry

Botsch M, Wiratanaya A, Kobbelt L. Efficient high quality rendering of point sampled geometry. In: Eurographics Workshop on Rendering. 2002: 53-64

Efficient high quality rendering of point sampled geometry

We propose a highly efficient hierarchical representation for point sampled geometry that automatically balances sampling density and point coordinate quantization. The representation is very compact with a memory consumption of far less than 2 bits per point position which does not depend on the quantization precision. We present an efficient rendering algorithm that exploits the hierarchical structure of the representation to perform fast 3D transformations and shading. The algorithm is extended to surface splatting which yields high quality anti-aliased and water tight surface renderings. Our pure software implementation renders up to 14 million Phong shaded and textured samples per second and about 4 million anti-aliased surface splats on a commodity PC. This is more than a factor 10 times faster than previous algorithms. 1