Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

We are exploring an application for a novel direction in humancomputer interaction named ’cultural computing’, which aims to provide a new medium for cultural translation and unconscious metamorphosis. The main objective of this project is to create an interactive experience that encourages people in Western culture to reflect on their self-concept. In Western culture the self-concept is generally based on conscious perception of the self. Over centuries the book ’Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ got continuous attention, and therefore seems to be a promising narrative to address issues like logic, rationality, and self. The user in the role of Alice will go through an interactive experience and meets a Caterpillar, who questions the participant’s whereabouts of his/her self-concept. To determine the effect of this experience, we discuss a method that measures changes in a person’s implicit self-concept for we predict that the experience will have an unconscious effect towards individual metamorphosis. Using the ’implicit association test’ (IAT) we could find a significant effect in the hypothesized direction.

We first point out a problem in the role casting method of a story generation system called OPIATE and then propose a solution to this problem. The existing casting method does not take into account the emotions of a cast non-player character towards actions that it must perform in its role, leading to a miscast. In the proposed casting method, such emotions are considered, besides emotions towards other characters as done in the existing one. Evaluation results, using an online-game simulator, confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method over the existing one with respect to the number of miscasts.

For the production of interactive live TV formats, new content and new productions workflows are necessary. We explain how future content of a parallel multi-stream production of live events may be created from a design and a technical perspective. It is argued, that the content should be arranged by dramaturgical principles taking into account the meaning of the base material. To support the production process a new approach for content recommendation is described which uses semantic annotation from audio-visual material and user feedback.

Interactive storytelling is a rapidly emerging field that tries to reconcile story-like experiences with user control. These forces oppose each other, as story implies predetermination and author intent, and interactivity implies freedom and variability. This paper focuses on unscripted (emergent) narrative and addresses the authoring problem resulting from bringing story development into free form interaction. It discusses the possibility of writing story pieces as input knowledge, portraying both believable character behaviour and interesting story situations. It also discusses how such input knowledge can be a source of inspiration for agents in an emergent narrative simulation to improve its potential for story development.

Scratching with turntables is a popular sound generation technique in today’s music scene, especially in hip-hop culture. A conventional turntable system consists of two turntables (record players) and an audio mixer, but the proposed system requires a computer and a multi-touch sensing device, so it is smaller and portable. Moreover, the proposed system enables the use of various novel scratching techniques that are difficult or impossible to perform on existing systems. In this paper we describe the implementation of the proposed system and introduce some scratching techniques that can be used with it.

This paper presents a panoramic broadcasting system for mobile entertainment using 3G network or WIFI where multiple viewers share an experience but each having full control of what they see independent from other viewers. Our solution involves a compact real-time spherical video recording setup that compresses and transmits data from six digital video cameras to a central host computer, which in turn distributes the recorded information among multiple render- and streaming servers for personalized viewing over 3G mobile networks or the Internet. In addition, using advanced computer vision, tracking and animation features, our architecture introduces the notion of Clickable Content (CC) where each visual element in the image becomes a source for providing further information, educational content or advertising. Therefore the PanoMOBI system offers a low-cost and economical solution for personalized content management and it can serve as a unified basis for novel applications.

This paper proposes a modeling environment that intends to support service collaboration. In this platform, technology independence is a very important goal to be achieved. Model Driven Architecture and metamodels are some of the resources to provide such independence. Based on [1] and [2], this article offers a modified software development process that would leverage MDA, and studies a web application case of conceptual innovation modeling system.

The design goal of the Age Invaders system is to make a mixed reality interaction platform that can facilitate meaningful social interaction with players, from many backgrounds and demographics, at appropriate levels of physical exertion for their age. This paper discusses a multidisciplinary approach to analyzing the user experience and reassessment of the context of use of the Age Invaders system. This paper tests the effectiveness of the system in promoting the intended design goals and the results show strong support for intergenerational interaction using digital technology. Additionally, the results of the study help to focus the refinements of the existing platform and development of further novel games and interactive applications for this mixed reality system, and provide insights into the user in complex mixed reality experiences.

Dynamic textures are representations of such textured surfaces that exhibit certain stationarity properties in time. These include sea-waves, smoke, foliage, whirlwind, dense crowds, and traffic scenes. We address the problem of synthesis which is a natural extending of the state-of-art to the YUV color space by analyzing the intrinsic relationship between the color channels and intensity channel. Our experimental results have shown good performance for the testing examples, which remodel short dynamic texture videos into infinite time domain with similar dynamic behaviors.

Video affective content analysis is a fascinating but seldom addressed field in entertainment computing research communities. To recognize affective content in video, a video affective content representation and recognition framework based on Video Affective Tree (VAT) and Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) was proposed. The proposed video affective content recognizer has good potential to recognize the basic emotional events of audience. However, due to Expectation-Maximization (EM) methods like the Baum-Welch algorithm tend to converge to the local optimum which is the closer to the starting values of the optimization procedure, the estimation of the recognizer parameters requires a more careful examination. A Genetic Algorithm combined HMM (GA-HMM) is presented here to address this problem. The idea is to combine a genetic algorithm to explore quickly the whole solution space with a Baum-Welch algorithm to find the exact parameter values of the optimum. The experimental results show that GA-HMM can achieve higher recognition rate with less computation compared with our previous works.