Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Chinese opera, a heritage performance art with many different styles and of great popularity in the mid 20th century is undergoing a major decline in recent times. There are ongoing efforts initiated by the Chinese government to document this heritage of humanity based on photographs and audio records of renowned master artists. All these efforts are based on the use of technologies for still and video imaging, with their own serious difficulties, as enunciated by the project leaders. With rapid and tremendous advances in 3D graphics, use of 3D virtual humans is an exciting new medium of documentation. In this paper we discuss our efforts towards this approach. Our documentation proposal makes use of 3D body scanning technology for capture of facial expressions for combining it with the well established motion capture technology for capturing body movements from young artists, along with audio from master artists. Our initial efforts have been devoted to facial expression capture and synthesis using 3D scan data. The paper brings out major issues, problems and some of our proposed solutions in using this approach for documentation.

Motivated by the requirements of the present archaeology, we are developing an automated system for archaeological classification and reconstruction of ceramics. This paper shows different acquisition techniques in order to get 3D data of pottery and to compute the profile sections of fragments. With the enhancements shown in this paper, archaeologists get a tool to do archaeological documentation of pottery in a computer assisted way.

The presentation at VSMM’06 will consider concepts related to the participatory culture that is developing throughout the Internet. It will also look at some of the ways in which CHIN has been taking up participatory applications to further the goals of its 1200 member institutions and respond to public expectations. With online projects such as the Virtual Museum of Canada (VMC), Community Memories, Agora and the Knowledge Exchange come new challenges that question established business models, learning patterns, the public sphere and collective memory.

Auguste Rodin is the most celebrated sculptor of the 19th century. His works, such as The Gates of Hell, The Thinker, and The Burghers of Calais, are famous worldwide. To our knowledge, no art historians have analyzed three-dimensional data of Rodin’s work. This paper describes our project to fill this need by digitally archiving the bronze statue, The Burghers of Calais. First, we scanned the geometrical shape of the sculpture by using a laser range sensor. After that, we analyzed the resulting three-dimensional data using expert knowledge in the field of art history and technology developed in the fields of computer vision and graphics.

In recent years, 3D and virtual reality have emerged as areas of extreme interest as methods for visualizing digital museum artefacts in context, and particularly over the Internet. The technology associated with these new visualization techniques has until now been very expensive. The advent of cheap computing and graphics cards coupled with increasing Internet ‘broadband’ access has made possible the implementation of effective virtual museums both online and within the museum. Virtual museums are valuable for the end-user for efficient and remote learning about their local heritage in a diverse multimodal manner. Multimodal access to museum artefacts can help the user to better understand and appreciate the objects and stories that the museum brings forward, but also creates a closer psychological bond between the user and his past. If we now couple cheap computing technologies, 3D and virtual reality with appropriate 3D interaction techniques based on formal usability evaluations, museums are able to implement high fidelity exhibitions that are intuitive for the museum visitor. This paper reports on the latest technological additions to the EPOCH Multimodal Interface, which is used as an interaction interface that can be implemented as part of a virtual museum interactive system.

Due to preservation and conservation issues, manuscripts are normally kept in research libraries far from public gaze. On rare occasions, visitors can see these priceless objects, typically separated from them by a sealed case, with only a fixed double page spread visible from a manuscript that may contain hundreds of folios. This restricts the amount of knowledge offered by these books. This paper proposes the creation of virtual manuscripts as exhibits in their own right in a museum context, and as part of a web-based virtual learning environment offering visitors the unique opportunity of engaging with the manuscripts, providing further possibilities for accessing the heritage and cultural information contained in them. A database supplying information about and from the manuscripts, held in a virtual environment, creates the illusion of their “real” presence and materiality. ‘Living Manuscripts’ aims to stimulate and encourage engagement with vulnerable materials via an innovative virtual experience.

This study presents a novel system which supports nurses in note-taking by providing a digital pen and character-recognition system laying stress on user interface. The system applies characteristics of a digital pen for improving the efficiency of tasks related to nursing records. The system aims at improving the efficiency of nursing activities and reducing the time spent for tasks for nursing records. In our system, first, notes are written on a check sheet using a digital pen along with a voice that is recorded on a voice recorder; the pen and voice data are transferred to a PC. The pen data are then recognized automatically as characters, which can be viewed and manipulated with the application. We conducted an evaluation experiment to improve efficiency and operation of the system, and its interface. The evaluation and test operations used 10 test subjects. Based on the test operation and the evaluation experiment of the system, it is turned out that improvement for urgent situations, enhancement of portability, and further use of character recognition are required.

This paper reports on the development of a mobile robot system for operation within a house equipped with a ubiquitous sensor network. Human robot interaction is achieved through the combination of on-robot laser range sensing and ultrasonic sensors mounted in the ceiling of the ubiquitous environment. Places, objects or inhabitants within the environment are tagged with ultrasonic transmitters from which approximate location can be estimated. Fusing these position estimates with on-robot sensor information, the robot can navigate to the transmitter location, approach the target and await further interaction.

A constitution method of a distributed virtual environment using haptic devices is shown. In recent years, the force-feedback devices have been developed and they have gotten a lot of attentions to realize a new interaction modality between human begins and computer systems. The haptic channels, however, are more sensitive to the network QoS (quality of service) such as delays and packet losses than the visual and acoustic channels. Therefore, we propose a new constitution method for realizing an effective virtual environment even in the low-quality network. The proposed method adopts a hybrid approach using the client-server and peer-to-peer models. In this paper, we describe our proposed method, an implemented system, and the results of a preliminary experiment to evaluate the scalability of the proposed architecture.

Humans cognize images of events by perceiving through senses the stimuli generated by events. VR started the idea to let an artifact event generate the stimulation equal to that generated by the original event. For further generalization, we investigated the possibility of letting a human cognize an equivalent image from non-equal stimulation. In the experiment, variable integral stimuli of force, visual, and auditory senses are presented to a subject and integral cognition is compared in the measure of integral intensity. This will hopefully lead to a broader region of cognition possible using limited equipment for presenting stimulation.