Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

In today’s China, a growing number of people have the opportunity to have their own cars. This creates tremendous requirement of training of new drivers. At the same time, recent advances in Computer Graphics and Virtual Reality system have brought the new opportunities for the development of driving simulation. This paper describes a driving simulator named TODS which is the acronym of training oriented driving simulator, developed for rigorous driving training and for Computer Graphics study. TODS is designed under the human-in-the-loop real-time simulation mode providing 120°horizontal FOV(Field of View) and realistic visual feedback to give the driver a realistic feeling of immersion similar to the feeling in a real moving vehicle. TODS utilizes state-of-the-art real-time rendering techniques in Vertex Shader and Pixel Shader [1] to make it more flexible to implement more real-time rendering algorithms in GPU (Graphic Processing Unit) so as to enhance the system function. TODS’s scene model is designed and constructed according to the “Driving Test Specification” of China to meet the demands of rigorous driving training. And a kind of modular construction method is used in the work of scene authoring in TODS.

The progress of handheld devices has encouraged many researchers to make efforts to use handheld devices as an augmented reality platform. However, one of the important problems is a lack of immersion and reality due to small display. To overcome this problem, we introduce dynamic environment which consists of some movable structures and their controller that enable changes of virtual world to affect the real world. It has an effect on expanding the user’s view limited by the small display of the handheld device. We have also developed the game content, ’Ghost Hunter’, which is suitable for this platform.

In the past, many tabletop systems have used the traditional table augmented with digital technologies to enhance collaborative works such as face-to-face or remote meeting and working. In this paper, we describe the Tea Table Mediator, a multimodal ambient tabletop display designed for five senses convergence experience combined with tea drinking. This ambient display enhances a traditional tea table with multimodal interfaces forintimate small group interaction. This paper describes the design considerations, the details on system implementation, and the discussion of a preliminary user evaluation.

Game playing in immersive projection environments such as caves and domes is assumed to offer an enhanced experience but there is little quantitative research that measures this. This paper reports on a study of user performance statistics while playing a computer game projected onto a planetarium dome and compares these with similar measurements taken in a conventional projected flat screen environment. A survey of users’ subjective impressions of immersion was also taken and used to compare these display modes. Analysis of users in each mode revealed differences in user experience and some aspects of performance. It was confirmed that dome projection enhanced the player’s sense of immersion when compared with flat projection. Navigation speed was found to decline in the dome while other performance metrics showed no significant difference between the environments.

Interactive media not only should enhance human-to-human communication, but also human-to-animal communication. We promote a new type of media interaction allowing human users to interact and play with their small pets (like hamsters) remotely via Internet through a mixed-reality-based game system “Metazoa Ludens”. To examine the system’s effectiveness: Firstly, the positive effects to the hamsters are established using Body Condition Score study. Secondly, the method of Duncan is used to assess the strength of preference of the hamsters towards Metazoa Ludens. Lastly, the effectiveness of this remote interaction, with respect to the human users as an interactive gaming system with their pet hamsters, is examined based on Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow theory [1]. Results of these studies have shown positive remote interaction between human user and their pet friends. This paper provides specific experimental results on the implemented research system, and a framework for human-to-animal interactive media.

In this paper, identification with a game character is discussed as mechanism of computer game enjoyment. Identification is explicated in terms of players’ altered self-perception during game play: When identifying with a character or role offered by the game, players change their self-concept by adopting relevant attributes of the character, for instance, they perceive themselves as more courageous, heroic, and powerful during identification with a soldier. Theoretical arguments for the enjoyable quality of such temporary changes of the self-concept are introduced. Computer game interactivity is proposed as important facilitator of strong identification. Subsequently, a pilot experiment with players of “Battlefield 2” supports the assumptions on the relationships between interactivity, identification, and game enjoyment. Implications of the identification concept for research and applications in entertainment computing are discussed.

Based on our experience using active learning methods to teach object-oriented software design we propose a game-based approach to take the classroom experience into a virtual environment.

The different pedagogical approaches that our active method supports, have motivated us to tailor an architecture that supports the creation of different variations of role-play environments, ranging from open-ended trial and error approaches to highly constrained settings where students can not get very far from the solution. We also describe a prototype that instantiates this architecture called ViRPlay3D2.

Recently many studies have attempted to implement intelligent characters for fighting action games. They used genetic algorithms, neural networks, and evolutionary neural networks to create intelligent characters. This study quantitatively compared the performance of these three AI techniques in the same game and experimental environments, and analyzed the results of experiments. As a result, neural network and evolutionary neural network showed excellent performance in the final convergence score ratio while evolutionary neural network and genetic algorithms showed excellent performance in convergence speed. In conclusion, evolutionary neural network which showed excellent results in both the final convergence score ratio and the convergence score is most appropriate AI technique for fighting action games.

Shadow mapping has been extensively used for real-time shadow rendering in 3D computer games, though it suffers from the inherent aliasing problems due to its image-based nature. The aliasing errors in shadow mapping consist of perspective aliasing error and projection aliasing error. In this paper, we propose a novel shadow-map reparameterization to reduce perspective aliasing for varying viewer and/or light. This reparameterizing technique keeps the perspective aliasing distribution optimal in possible general cases. Our experiments have shown the enhanced shadow quality using our algorithm in dynamic scenes.

We introduce and describe the concept of Kansei Game as the implementation of Kansei Mediated Entertainment. In our current approach we translate the classical Zen story of ten Ox herding pictures into a game. We describe the features of such a game and we propose some guidelines for its design and development.