This paper aims to analyse the state-of-the-art of somaesthetics, describing the scientific and philosophic basis of the discipline, in order to devise how to implement a soma-based design. The goal is to apply the somaesthetics approach to the design of multisensory interactive systems for the purpose of creating novel technology designs for people with disabilities that can foster their participation and improve their daily life and overall well-being. Somatics can be intended as a set of instrumental values to increase bodily awareness. It allows us to get in touch with our own inner states, which can lead to a personal evaluative dimension for the designer, which can be used to integrate existing methods for evaluating experiences. Paying attention to one's own bodily states is key as it can turn such states in desing material. This concept was further developed with Shusterman's somaesthetics, a theoretical framework for aesthetic experiences. In the paper, we present examples of somaesthetics approaches to the design of interfaces (e.g. the SomaMat, that uses heat stimuli to guide the user attention to different parts of his/her body and can be a support for exercising or a tool to increase the body awareness). Moreover, we illustrate existing practices to design such as Embodied Sketching or Moving and Making Strange that are based on the body as the starting point of the design process, usually preceded by techniques such as defamiliarization or Feldenkrais exercises. Then, we move on to our forthcoming research, aimed at applying a somaesthetics approach to create a system for two possible groups of users: (1) children who are patients at the Giannina Gaslini Institute (a pediatric hospital) and (2) visually impaired and blind people members of Unione Italiana Ciechi (an Italian association of blind people). The system will help users move together, to increase interaction between them as well as involve them in educational and creative activities. The work will be carried out under the PNRR RAISE project (Robotics and AI for Socio-economic Empowerment; https://www.raiseliguria.it/ ).
In sports games, the excitement and suspense felt by the spectators are essential to their entertainment experience. The level of excitement and suspense is linked to the spectators' reasoning about the probability of winning or losing. In tennis, as in many other sports, spectators' predictions of winning probabilities largely hinge on the scores. Given tennis's hierarchical scoring system, its probabilistic reasoning is multifaceted and complex. This research examines the winning probabilities across various scoring scenarios, using data from thousands of professional tennis matches and comparing them with theoretical models generally aligned with spectators' common beliefs. The analysis reveals that the theoretical model makes accurate probability predictions at the macro level but inaccurate predictions at the micro level, pointing to possible biases in micro-level probabilistic reasoning. A recent behavioral economic theory may help explain the causes of such biases. Biases are generally seen as undesirable errors, but this study offers a counterargument that biases in micro-level probabilistic reasoning actually enhance the enjoyment of tennis matches by creating expectations, anxiety, and surprises.
This paper develops the strategic quotient construct and its measure, the Strategic Quotient (SQ), a test to assess actual strategic competencies. While the developmental and refinement work is still in progress, here we document the process of rethinking the foundations of the test and the concepts it is based on, in order to design a novel version of the SQ, the "multiple choice Strategic Quotient" (mcSQ).
This paper offers an easy introduction of Video Game Artificial intelligence (VGAI), i.e. the set of computational techniques embedded inside Non-Playable Characters (NPCs) that populate a video game and simulates the idea of playing against rational individuals. The two main pillars of VGAI will be briefly presented, namely pathfinding and decision-making, alongside an introduction and an explanation of the difference between academic AI research and video game AI. In summary, this paper delivers a solid but easy-to-understand introductory guide to this interesting and long-running research and industrial field without sacrificing mathematical formalism but not going into every detail, as the most industry-used books and academic references will be provided.
In the field of football analytics, the goal is to improve (in terms of prediction performance) one of the emerging tools: the expected goal (xG) model. With this final aim, data from different sources have been merged: tracking data, match event data and some players' performance composite indicators obtained using a Partial Least Squares - Structural Equation Model (PLS-SEM) approach. Using a sample of match data relying to season 2019/2020 of the Italian Serie A, composed by 1 outcome variable (i.e. the GOAL) and 22 features, a logistic regression model was applied on different scenarios for sample balanced techniques. Results seem to be interesting in terms of sensitivity, F1 and AUC metrics, compared with a benchmark. In addition, some original performance composites and tracking variables introduced are significant for the classification model.
In the 2020–2021 academic year, the 'videogame design' topic has been introduced in the 'Mobile Software Development' bachelor degree course. Consequently, it has been proposed to students a related project theme in addition to apps oriented towards productivity and mobile services. The ArkanApp project concerned the re-design and the introduction of specific features into an Arkanoid game clone; the other proposed apps were related to safe meeting organization, documents and project data management and a free-theme app. The exploration of data collected during the main part of the academic year related to student preferences and projects delivery, highlighted how leaving the choice about the theme, as well as the introduction of the videogame one, involved the majority of students to finish the project before the starting of the new course edition. Moreover, it also emerged that ArkanApp featured the highest female participation.
Online cybersecurity competitions have gained significant traction in the community for educational and evaluative purposes because they offer dynamic environments for learning intricate technical concepts in an engaging, non-traditional, and interactive manner. While such competitions are increasingly popular and frequently held, organizing them is not straightforward. Developers must design challenges that are both innovative and balanced in difficulty, ensuring an enjoyable learning experience. Concurrently, effective hosting, configuring, and managing the online infrastructure that underpins these games are technical challenges demanding informed decisions. Unfortunately, no comprehensive resource exists to guide organizers in choosing suitable hosting architecture and tools based on their technical proficiency and event scale. This paper contributes to addressing this gap by examining prevalent architectures for hosting Capture The Flag (CTF) competitions and evaluating them using criteria encompassing several factors. These factors include environment setup, deployment, configuration, and updates of vulnerable services, system maintenance, and security mechanisms. Each criterion is qualitatively assessed with an associated numeric score. Finally, the paper puts forward recommendations on architecture and tools based on event size and organizer skills.
There is currently a surge of interest in graph representation learning, with researchers increasingly focusing on methods and applications involving graph neural networks (GNNs). However, traditional GNN models for static graph data analysis have limitations in their ability to extract evolutionary patterns from dynamic graphs, which are more commonly observed in real-world data. Additionally, existing dynamic GNN models tend to prioritize low-frequency information while neglecting high-frequency information. To address these limitations, we introduce a dynamic graph neural network model that leverages graph framelet transforms, capitalizing on the benefits of traditional wavelets in multi-resolution analysis. The initial step involves constructing the graph framelet transform based on graph wavelet research, subsequently implementing multi-resolution graph convolution with both low-pass and high-pass filtering. Then, we incorporate the convolution operation into a long short-term memory (LSTM) network. As a result, we develop a dynamic GNN model founded on the graph framelet transform, which effectively uncovers the evolutionary information embedded within dynamic graphs. In our experiment evaluation, we compare our model with 11 widely used dynamic graph representation learning algorithms across three public datasets of discrete dynamic graph representation learning tasks (encompassing six groups of experimental data). Our model outperforms the alternatives in terms of accuracy on the majority of the datasets.
Human skeleton motion recognition, notable for its lightweight, interference-resistant, and resource-saving properties, plays a crucial role in human motion recognition and has found widespread applications. The common approach to capture motion features from human skeleton videos involves extracting skeleton features temporally or spatially using Graph Convolution Networks (GCN) or their improved variants. Nevertheless, existing extraction methods encounter two primary limitations: variability in the number of actors involved in an action and disconnected subgraphs representing multiple actors' actions, resulting in a loss of inter-subgraph features. To overcome these challenges, we propose Human Mirror and Human Link strategies, which replicate diverse human data to fill and interlink multiple subgraphs. Empirically, our proposed methods applied to the NTU RGB+D 120 dataset significantly enhanced the performance of the base model MSG3D, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach in handling multi-actor scenarios.
Creatives in the animation and film industries constantly explore new and innovative tools and methods to enhance their creative process, especially in pre-production. As realistic, real-time rendering techniques have emerged in recent years, 3D game engines, modeling, and animation tools have been exploited to support storyboarding and movie prototyping. This research proposes a 3D storyboarding tool to improve existing storytelling approaches. A novel storyboarding pipeline is proposed, which can automatically generate a storyboard including camera details and a textual description of the events occurring in each scene. Users create storyboards by selecting actors, performing available actions, positioning the camera in the 3D scene, and taking screenshots to save a vignette of the storyboard; the corresponding description is generated based on the actors' actions and their status. A software implementation of the proposed pipeline has also been developed in the guise of a 3D desktop application aimed at expert and novice storyboarders. The system has been tested to evaluate its usability. Preliminary results confirm that the users have appreciated the application.
In recent years, touchless (mid-air, hands-free) haptic interactive concepts with machines have gained popularity due to their health benefits and accessible feedback in everyday items. In particular, touchless haptics are particularly effective in creating realistic virtual environments. This paper examines the performance and user experience of touchless haptics for manipulating virtual objects. A comparative study involving seven participants was conducted to evaluate the efficacy of a touch controller versus a touchless haptic system (Ultraleap). Participants tested three interaction techniques in a virtual environment, performing a range of control actions on various virtual objects, including adjusting the size and spatial position of geometric volumes and manipulating a lever. Results indicate that while the touch controller remains the preferred tool for simpler tasks due to its ease of learning, touchless haptics reveals nearly as effective when a virtual representation of the user's hands, as visual reference, is incorporated into the immersive environment. Under these conditions, both systems demonstrate comparable effectiveness for specific command and resizing tasks.
The perceived Origin of full-body human Movement (OoM), i.e., the part of the body that is perceived by an external observer as the joint from which movement originates, represents a relevant topic for movement analysis. Indeed, its automated detection is important to contribute to the automated analysis of full-body emotions and of non-verbal social signals, and has potential applications, among others, in dance and music teaching, cognitive and motor rehabilitation, sport, and entertainment. In this work, we further develop a recently proposed algorithm for the automated detection of the perceived OoM, by improving the visualization of its output. Specifically, the core of that algorithm relies on clustering a skeletal representation of the human body based on the values assumed by a movement-related feature on all its vertices, then finding those vertices that are at the boundary between any two resulting clusters. In the work, we improve the visualization of the clusters generated by that algorithm in successive frames, by “colouring” them by means of the resolution of a sequence of minimum cost bipartite matching subproblems. Finally, based on a real-world dataset, we show that the proposed modification of the algorithm provides, indeed, a better visualization of the clusters than its original version.
Crossword puzzles are one of the most popular word games, played in different languages all across the world, where riddle style can vary significantly from one country to another. Automated crossword resolution is challenging, and typical solvers rely on large databases of previously solved crosswords. In this work, we extend WebCrow 2.0, an automatic crossword solver, to French, making it the first program for crossword solving in the French language. To cope with the lack of a large repository of clue-answer crossword data, WebCrow 2.0 exploits multiple modules, called experts, that retrieve candidate answers from heterogeneous resources, such as the web, knowledge graphs, and linguistic rules. We compared WebCrow's performance against humans in two different challenges. Despite the limited amount of past crosswords, French WebCrow was competitive, actually outperforming humans in terms of speed and accuracy, thus proving its capabilities to generalize to new languages.
This experimental research aimed to investigate the use of a board game for improving argumentation and counter-argumentation skills related to the 2030 Agenda in middle school students. The study involved two different classroom conditions, one where a board game was used, and another where a frontal lesson was held using slides. Pre-test and post-test questionnaires were administered to investigate the students' interest and knowledge of the 2030 Agenda before and after the experience. Each student was then asked to write an argumentative essay, about their favorite topic of the 2030 Agenda, illustrating the reasons why it was important for them. The results showed that the board game condition led to higher interest and better learning outcomes than the frontal lesson condition, but both conditions showed significant improvement in interest and knowledge of the 2030 Agenda. This highlights the importance of developing argumentative and counter-argumentative skills in middle school students and the potential of games as practical tools to make learning more engaging and effective. The findings also suggest that there should be a synergy between traditional teaching approaches and innovative approaches such as games to improve learning outcomes. Future research could explore the long-term effects of such interventions and the potential of games for improving other soft skills in students. Overall, this study contributes to the growing literature on the effectiveness of games for education and highlights the importance of incorporating innovative approaches in education to improve learning outcomes.
Playing board games is commonly recognized as an effective way to promote the integration and socialization of their participants. However, visually impaired people may encounter accessibility issues when playing online versions of board games, for instance, because such versions may have been designed having initially sighted people in mind. Given this premise, the aim of this work is to design an interface aimed to help visually impaired people play board games online, via an improved interaction with a normal or touch screen. This goal is achieved by means of automatic recognition of the portion of the screen one’s finger or the cursor is pointing to, its classification via machine learning, and the use of either textual or audio feedback. In this way, a visually impaired person could explore the screen in quite a natural way, obtaining information, e.g., about the positions of the various pieces on the board. As a case study, a preliminary version of the interface is developed to address accessibility of the online version of a carefully selected pure strategy abstract board game, namely “Quantik” from Gigamic.
The incorporation of different types of media promotes a multimodal approach to the dissemination, communication and exploitation of Cultural Heritage in Museums. By utilizing digital technologies allows new forms of interactions with cultural content. Cultural spaces such as museums have been integrating new digital tools, presenting their audiences immersive, interactive, and multisensory experience that is not possible in traditional exhibitions. Withing these approaches a new term of Extended Reality (XR) is emerging and increasing its role in these cultural spaces. XR is the umbrella that englobes all forms of immersion and interaction such as Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR) and Virtual Reality (VR). This article aims to provide a comprehensive state of the art of XR experiences for Cultural Heritage in Museums. To support this goal, a systematic review of the peer-reviewed articles was gathered from the Scopus and Web of Science databases. Results are analyzed and the case studies are presented in this paper.
Studies concerning the usage of 'science fiction' in computer science research are scarce and rely mostly on anecdotal evidence and scattered oral accounts. For this reason, we present a content analysis of a random sample of 500 publications, retrieved from the IEEE Xplore Digital Library via a faceted, full-text search for 'science fiction'. We analyze the type of research paper and the contextual usage of the science fiction referral and show that science fiction, in the grand scheme of things, is a niche topic in computer science research. Furthermore, results demonstrate that science fiction referrals appear primarily in opinion-type contributions, largely with the purpose of drawing inspiration and innovation into the research paper. The implications of this study can guide computer scientists to consciously utilize science fiction in their research and scholarship and therefore, contribute to innovative HCI and computer science research and application.
Our relationship to and use of media is predicated on it helping us develop a sense of self within the context of our society. This is both a technological and ontological issue. If we turn to media theory, we can start to understand how the development of various media leads us to different types of engagement. Some are more intellectual; some merely diversion and others are deeply personal. What is not looked at is how does the form of the medium contribute to a more resonant and personal media experience. In order to answer this question, we need to look at our relationship with media through the filters of media form and how it determines personal experience. With the understanding that a mediated experience has the potential to be as formative as a lived experience. Primarily through creating a relationship to the world through otherness. Different media will present such an experience to greater or lesser extent. Here I would like to look at various media from photography through to gaming and mixed-reality and analyze them through a framework defined by Roland Barthes stadium and punctum as well as Marshall McLuhan's idea of hi and low-definition media (hot and cold). By doing this we will be looking at the idea of interaction in a different manner, moving away from reaction as a definition of interaction to one where the work becomes a space of personal memory or emotion.
Nowadays, mental illness also called mental health disorders was becoming the most common illness among people. Many people who suffer from mental illness having difficulties in expressing their feeling and commit suicide because they normally do not or cannot open up in verbal communication such as traditional therapy. Interactive art therapy has the potential to decrease mental health among people. The main objective of this paper is to introduce an interactive art called Interactive Art Therapy (IAT) for people who are suffering from mental health that is needed non-verbal communication. The completed IPT application has been successfully developed by using Microsoft Kinect and Touchdesigner software which utilizing visual and audio elements for their interactivity. Based on the results from the usability testing, most of the respondents are agreed that this application is effective and usable for everyone especially those who are suffering from mental illness.
It is clear from the beginning that video games are no cure for anything, like books and movies, they are often used in an antisocial way. Games clearly are a way of seeing reality differently through a person's eyes, and mostly nowadays, the games commonly come with violence and sometimes with abusive themes. Critics say that the things people learn from playing video games are not often the things that they expect. However, even the crudest critics agree with the ways we learn something from video games. Above the multibillion-dollar industry, higher than a fascinating toy for both children and adults or more than a passage to computer proficiency, the video game is highly profitable in ways that let people engage in a new world. It allows the player to think, speak, and act in a new way. Unquestionably, players come to possess roles that are unapproachable to them. This paper presents a comprehensive review of games and the impact of video games on them. Also, we will point out the qualities of Virtual Reality and its history. We will also point out the importance of development, which gives birth to new technology.
