This paper discusses the concepts, the interaction paradigms, the system design and implementation that have been developed for the interactive dance and music performance The Bow is bent and drawn (composer Nicola Ferrari), presented at Casa Paganini, Genova, Italy, in occasion of the opening concert of the 8th Intl. Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME08), June 4, 2008. The Bow is bent and drawn grounds its bases on current research at Casa Paganini -- InfoMus Lab on social active listening of sound and music content and on analysis and processing of expressiveness in human full-body movement and gesture. In particular, The Bow is bent and drawn exploits our recent system Mappe per Affetti Erranti (literally Maps for Wandering Affects), which enables a novel paradigm for social active experience and dynamic molding of expressive content of a music piece. In Mappe per Affetti Erranti multiple users can physically navigate a polyphonic music piece and can intervene in real-time on the expressive content music performance conveys through their full-body movement and gesture. The research topics addressed in this paper are currently investigated in the EUICT Project SAME (Sound and Music for Everyone, Everyday, Everywhere, Every Way, www.sameproject.eu).
This paper provides a brief description of the interactive film Crossed Lines.
The creation of detailed virtual urban environments is an increasingly common task being faced by both the film and games industries. It is a time-consuming and expensive process that requires artists to model vast amounts of geometric detail, including terrain, roads, buildings and other associated features. We demonstrate a system that allows an artist to rapidly generate 3D cityscapes of arbitrary size, complexity and layout. This is achieved by means of an interactive interface that enables close control over key parameters while the system procedurally generates the required detail in real time. The results can be viewed and edited or exported in a format suitable for use in 3D modelling packages and game engines.
3D virtual environments are increasingly used for education, business and recreation but are often inaccessible to users who are visually impaired, effectively creating a digital divide. Interviews with 8 visually impaired expert users were conducted to guide design proposals, and a review of current research into haptics and 3D sound for auditory displays is presented with suggestions for navigation and feedback techniques to address these accessibility issues. The diversity and volatility of the environment makes Second Life an unusually complex research object, suggesting the applicability of our work for the field of HCI and accessibility in 3D virtual environments.
This paper presents the Virtual Museum of Sculpture (VMS) of Pietrasanta, a permanent Virtual Reality installation enabling users to interactively explore a museographical diffused virtual space. The virtual environment hosts several digital 3D models of sculptures realized by important Italian artists of the XX century, connected for historical and cultural reasons with the town of Pietrasanta, a renowned place near the marble quarries of Alpi Apuane. The VMS is currently being enriched of new content, aimed at promoting local art and culture, with the perspective of developing guidelines for an integrated methodology sharing museological and ICT know-hows, targeted to the design of specific virtual applications and to the qualitative evaluation of their social impact as a novel important means of communication and learning.
Digital artifacts based on physical metaphors strongly benefit from dynamic, realtime reactive sound feedback. Making use of one integral physical model and digital implementation simultaneously for both, macroscopic, visual object behaviour and sonic feedback allows to realise scenarios not achievable in a conventional approach where sound is triggered or controlled in a one-way fashion from a macroscopic simulation. By careful consideration of possible simplifications such an integrated approach may be feasible in realtime implementation and can allow to reach higher levels of synchronicity and sensory integration.
Multimedia content delivery is an important issue in assistive guidance systems for exhibition areas. This paper presents an automatic guidance and multimedia content presentation system utilizing location-based services and their deployment on mobile devices. A prototype installation and experimental usage in a real exhibition environment has provided promising results regarding the system's user acceptance and functionality.
This paper describes Europe 2045, a serious game for high school social science courses, aimed at familiarising students with political, economic, and social issues in contemporary Europe.
The DIVAS system is a content based search engine for locating multimedia fragments in large video repositories mainly found across the Internet. DIVAS performs searching using only audiovisual characteristics, unlike other, metadata-based solutions. Metadata based search methods are used as complementary services to DIVAS, in order to help and refine the overall search procedure, instead of using it as the primary search method. Thus it achieves a totally automated indexing and search scheme. This paper is focused on techniques adopted by DIVAS for analyzing, indexing and searching video content directly on the compressed domain. Significant improvement on search time can be achieved when avoiding decompression of the content which is one of the most time consuming processes when dealing with video processing. The generic DIVAS architecture is also presented in this paper highlighting its modularity and providing to the researcher and the developer the ability to easily add new features and to improve the performance and the accuracy of results.
Office Diva is a simulation of a monstrous ego; whining and writhing as she obsesses over her life. We see her as a fiery homunculus or dripping rain cloud barely holding together. We hear her stream-of-consciousness rant, and it becomes clear that this is a disturbed mind trapped by its own solipsistic and unreal processing of daily events.
This game is focused on the 3D single and multiplayer game possibilities of the J2ME platform. Mobile phones have become a common personal item that is available at all times. The aim is to present a 3D space fighting game utilizing an AI based on autonomous moving agents. This game demonstration will show viewers what is currently possible with J2ME mobile phones as well as foreshadow what is coming. As embedded mobile phone technology further improves, the gap between personal computers and mobile phones decreases. A possible multiplayer component will finally be described.
We propose to demonstrate The Emotionally Aware Painting Fool, a novel system that combines a machine vision system able to recognise emotions with a non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) system to automatically produce portraits of the sitter in an emotionally enhanced style. During the demonstration, the vision system records a short video clip of a person showing a basic emotion. The system then analyses this video clip, locating facial features and tracking their motion. Using this tracking data, the system analyses which emotion was expressed and what the temporal dynamics of the expression were. This information is then passed to the NPR software. The detected emotion is used to choose appropriate (simulated) art materials, colour palettes, abstraction methods and painting styles, so that the rendered image may heighten the emotion being expressed. The live demonstration shows how each element of The Emotionally Aware Painting Fool functions and produces a portrait in approximately 7 minutes.
Education is naturally a social process, where knowledge is an experience and information is an environment. Cyberspace is able to create a new multi-participant classroom, where learners are able to compare various forms of delivery and choose one they prefer. Computer-mediated learning can greatly shift traditional modes of knowledge delivery towards a more visually-enhanced experience, which is especially important for exploring scenographic artefacts. New approaches to theatre education and research have already been established through the global use of digital communication technologies. Three dimensional (3D) modelling and navigation techniques proved very efficient in improving the understanding of communicative qualities of set design and accelerating learning. In this paper, I will introduce the first 3D reconstruction of one of the finest examples of unrealized modernist stage design -- The Divine Comedy (1921) by Norman Bel Geddes. The model is integrated within the body of the Set-SPECTRUM educational project, which was created with the intention to enable theatre students and scholars to understand and study this remarkable stage-construction using digital means of presentation This approach to knowledge visualization aims to strengthen the established approach to research, learning, and teaching, but also to transform the passive consumers of digital products into active participants. The paper concludes with a detailed discussion of the social implications of using computer-generated learning environments.
The evolution of the Internet is being leaded by two main threads, one driven by industry through the evolution of networking infrastructures and the other driven by producers of content either in a professional or non professional way. Moreover, due to the explosion of the World Wide Web (which has started as a document repository) and its successful descendants (Semantic Web and Web 2.0), along with the dramatic increase of net-based audiovisual material (networked media) that has been produced by professional and amateur users, Internet is rapidly transforming to a full fledged virtual environment that facilitates services, interaction and communication. Therefore the vision that the Future Internet will be an Internet of Media centered in the user as content consumer and creator is starting now to be a reality. In this context, a series of new technical and social Challenges are emerging in order to enable this vision to thoroughly become true. In this paper, we present some of these Challenges and trends as a result of previous discussions within the User Centric Media Cluster of EU projects on Networked Media.
The presentation of cultural heritage information is typically addressed with the use of web pages eventually integrated with specific visualization of 3d models that complete the textual information. The problem with this type of information is its extent, its complexity and the connection between the various concepts. This paper presents an Information Landscape system for the fruition of this type of information through a virtual environment, available both for desktop and immersive visualizations.
This paper describes Jabberwocky, a digital ink based story writing and reading application for children. Created following an immersive design experience, the Jabberwocky interface, and its underlying algorithms, are motivated and described in the paper. Jabberwocky is novel on several counts; it provides a humorous and fun filled interface to shield users from the ambiguity of its underlying recognition based systems, it allows for the setting of user parameters to respect the different tolerance levels of children, and it features a 'won't work for you' interface to protect children who are not yet able to gain advantage from its use.
In this paper we present the design of graphical user interfaces for end user tools in order for them to be able to configure pervasive awareness applications. These will help them keep in touch with close friends and family. A user-centered analysis was conducted, scenarios were developed and paper prototypes materialized in the form of storyboarding. The prototypes were evaluated by experts and proved that the interaction style and the metaphors used had specific constraints. Finally, conclusions based on this study were drawn.
A mixed reality system where users interact with real and virtual 3D objects in a 3D world controlled by a physics engine is presented. To build the system we propose a hand detection and tracking system that maintains information about the way multiple users move their palms and fingers in 3D space using the feed from two fixed uncalibrated cameras. The complete 3D system can process and renders more than 30 frames per second.
In this contribution, I identify rhetorical figures that are specific to interactive writing: figures of manipulation (meaning gestual manipulation). It's a category on its own, along with figures of diction, construction, meaning and thought. In many computer art works, the artists use the figures of manipulation to introduce a loss of grasp. What is emphasized in such figures is the coupling action/behavior, which could be considered as a basic unit in interactive writing. This coupling can be conceived independently from the medias it relies on. Thus, an a-media approach seems relevant when attempting to define an art of rhetoric in interactive writing.
This paper presents the design and deployment of Polar Defence , an interactive game for a large public display. We designed this display based on a model of "users" and their interactions with large public displays in public spaces, which we derived from prior work. We conducted a four-day user study of this system in a public space to evaluate the game and its impact on the surrounding environment. Our analysis showed that the installation successfully encouraged participation among strangers, and that its design and deployment addressed many of the challenges described by prior research literature. Finally, we reflect on this deployment to provide design guidance to other researchers building large interactive public displays for public spaces.
