Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Dancing is an entertaining form of taskless interaction. When interacting with a dancing Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA), the lack of a clear task presents the challenge of eliciting an interaction between user and ECA in a different way. In this paper we describe our Virtual Dancer, which is an ECA that invites a user to dance. In our system the user is monitored using global movement characteristics from a camera and a dance pad. The characteristics are used to select and adapt movements for the Virtual Dancer. This way, the user can dance together with the Virtual Dancer. Any interaction patterns and implicit relations between the dance behaviour of the human and the Virtual Dancer should be evoked intuitively without explicit appeal. The work described in this paper can be used as a platform for research into natural animation and user invitation behavior. We discuss future work on both topics.

In this paper we present , an AR edutainment application for children in which emotional and social aspects are taking into consideration to improve flow or optimal experience. Particularly, we investigate the introduction of emotional agents that react and move within the AR environment according to their emotional state. We propose a model for emotional agents and a path finding mechanism with backtracking that allows exploration of different movement alternatives. In this way, virtual entities may exhibit a complex number of emotional movement behaviors within the augmented space.

This paper presents a virtual embodied agent that can conduct musicians in a live performance. The virtual conductor conducts music specified by a MIDI file and uses input from a microphone to react to the tempo of the musicians. The current implementation of the virtual conductor can interact with musicians, leading and following them while they are playing music. Different time signatures and dynamic markings in music are supported.

We explore the possibilities of replacing behaviour-generating code in computer games by real-time behaviour of live animals, and the question of whether one can play computer games against animals. To experience the differences for a human between playing against an animal or against computer code, we experimented with a variant of Pac-Man where the behaviour of virtual game characters is derived from that of live crickets in a real maze. Initial results are described in this paper.

This paper describes a simple psychological experiment to investigate the effects of two aspects of user interactions with message taking artifacts. The first is the effect of the artifacts’ physical appearance, and the other is prior interaction experience. We examined the effect of these two factors on the ability of users to feel comfortable and natural when interacting with the artifacts. Experimental results revealed that prior interaction experience was a much more important factor than the artifacts’ appearance in determining whether participants could leave verbal messages smoothly.

Sadness is a negative emotion, which aims at a deactivated physiological and behavioural state [21] and so this is easy to develop in film experiencing, where the viewer is passively watching and feeling. Interactive storytelling supposes active physiological behaviours and this raises the problematic – how to create sad deactivated moments during interactive sequences. In this paper we intend to develop and present different ways to approach this problematic and methodologies to implement interactive sad moments in virtual environments, as videogames. These moments will be defined as situations of affective attachment supported by virtual body touching, visually represented by virtual gently stroking body parts (shoulders, hands, hair), bear hugs, soft kissing and lying against each other cuddling.

Elaborating on the rapid evolution of mobile internet services in Korea, this paper investigated young consumers’ preferences and attitudes towards mobile entertainment services through person-to-person questionnaires. We tried to find out “how” mobile entertainment services differ from other mobile services from the consumer perspectives: expectation and satisfaction. After careful investigation of what the consumers actually said, it could be said that the speed of services was never met to consumer expectation in mobile entertainment services, while they never really cared about contents aspects of mobile internet services.

The term ‘image quality’ is a subject notion so it is difficult to quantify. However, it can be reasonably quantified by using statistical and psychophysical approaches. Furthermore, it is also possible to model the human perception of image quality. In this paper, large scale psychophysical experiments including pair comparison and categorical judgment were carried out to judge the perception of image quality of photographic images. The evaluation of both image difference and absolute quality was also carried out. Test images were generated by rendering the eight selected original images according to the change of lightness, chroma, contrast, sharpness and noise attributes. Total number of 288 images were used as test images. The experimental results were used to calculate z-scores and colour difference threshold to verify the optimum level for each transform function. User preferred image content can be provided to entertainment, education, etc. when using the result of the study.

Radio plays have recently regained both popular interest and commercial success. Yet, listeners are not provided with either feedback channels or the ability to actively participate in this medium. The TAPE-Player concept described in the present paper extends the radio play medium by adding interactivity as well as participation to the production process. The user takes the roles of both actor and director, which includes verbal interpretation, recording, and editing the dialogues for the selected role(s) as the play’s script evolves. The creative freedom is supported by TAPE-Player’s underlying hypermedia architecture: audio clips are managed separately and combined dynamically to produce a personalised radio play. The applicability of the concept was corroborated in an empirical study. Specifically, the users welcomed the interaction via TAPE-Player’s easy-to-use interface, the creative freedom, and the substantial influence they had in producing radio plays in a personalised entertainment medium.

For companies, TV commercial is a very important way to introduce and advertise their products. It is expensive to put an advertisement on TV. So these companies generally charge other companies to monitor that their TV commercials are broadcasted properly as contracted. Currently, these monitorings have been done manually. The monitoring company records all the TV programs and their air-times while they are being broadcasted. Then the agent checks the starting-times and the ending-times of TV commercials. Video retrieval and matching techniques can be used to monitor TV commercials automatically. By extracting visual features that can identify commercials, we can measure similarities and identify a target video from thousands of videos. To process all the TV programs of 24 hours a day, feature extraction and matching process must be done in real-time. In this paper, we designed the visual feature DB for real-time processing and implemented real-time TV commercial monitoring system. To construct the DB, we extracted scene change information, block-based dominant colors and edge pattern histograms of TV commercial clips.