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Now showing 1 - 10 of 11
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    Towards Developing a Digital application for the Five Design-Sheets Methodology
    (The Eurographics Association, 2022) Owen, Aron E.; Roberts, Jonathan C.; Peter Vangorp; Martin J. Turner
    The Five Design-Sheet Methodology is a sketching methodology that helps people ideate different designs; it has been used to develop computer interfaces, games and data visualisations. Traditionally, it is a paper-based process that structures the developer to think about their design solution over five sheets with five sections. However, with the rise of mobile phones and tablets, there is an emerging opportunity to achieve the sketched design ideation process in a digital form. This work investigates the transition of the Five Design-Sheets from a paper-based methodology into a digital sketching application. The paper introduces how we considered the challenge, and have started to develop an application. Currently our application implements the first sheet of the FdS process. We describe the application and present a brief evaluation of the work with designers and developers.
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    Optimising Underwater Environments for Mobile VR
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) Cenydd, Llyr ap; Headleand, Christopher; Vidal, Franck P. and Tam, Gary K. L. and Roberts, Jonathan C.
    Mobile Virtual Reality (VR) has advanced considerably in the last few years, driven by advances in smartphone technology. There are now a number of commercial offerings available, from smartphone powered headsets to standalone units with full positional tracking. Similarly best practices in VR have matured quickly, facilitating comfortable and immersive VR experiences. There remains however many optimisation challenges when working with these devices, as while the need to render at high frame rates is universal, the hardware is limited by both computational power and battery capacity. There is also often a requirement that apps run smoothly across a wide variety of headsets. In this paper, we describe lessons learned in rendering and optimising underwater environments for mobile VR, based on our experience developing the popular aquatic safari application 'Ocean Rift'. We start by analyzing essential best practices for mobile app development, before describing low-cost techniques for creating immersive underwater environments. While some techniques discussed are universal to modern mobile VR development, we also consider issues that are unique to underwater applications.
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    Controlling 3D Visualisations with Multiple Degrees of Freedom
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) Sandoval, Mario; Morris, Tim; Turner, Martin; Vidal, Franck P. and Tam, Gary K. L. and Roberts, Jonathan C.
    In this paper, the two major components of a new multi-layer framework ideal for two-handed interaction in desktop virtual environments called Library for Interactive Settings of User-Mode (LISU) are explained. In addition, we evaluate LISU performance with a group of participants and we report some of our initial results by giving an analysis of user experiences, and interaction speed.
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    Virtual Reality Callouts - Demonstrating Knowledge With Spatial-Related Textual Information
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) Horst, Robin; Degreif, Anika; Mathy, Marvin; Dörner, Ralf; Vidal, Franck P. and Tam, Gary K. L. and Roberts, Jonathan C.
    Virtual (VR) and augmented reality (AR) can bring an added value during the demonstration of knowledge, as for example within an interactive research demo. Callouts are strings of text which are connected by a line to a specific feature of an object. These visual annotations can be used during such demos and can be placed in different kinds of media, such as illustrations, technical drawings, images and videos. Callouts are also used in virtual 3D environments to anchor textual information to a specific point in space. Therefore they can be a valuable tool for virtually demonstrating knowledge. The alignment of callouts in such information rich environments is an elemental factor within the view management of the VR scene. In this paper we propose a concept for interactive microlearning application for knowledge demonstration that uses callouts as a fundamental element. We distinguish three types of interactive callout-representations by their alignment relative to the user, for being static or dynamic in their position and orientation. Within an implementation of the different callout versions we show the feasibility and in a user study we indicate a user-preference towards static positioned callouts.
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    Developing Transitional Activities to Support Student Transition to University: Findings From a Qualitative Co-design Study With University Stakeholders
    (The Eurographics Association, 2022) Threlfall, Danielle; Headleand, Christopher J.; Hicks, Kieran; Miller, Kirsty; Peter Vangorp; Martin J. Turner
    This study utilised a co-design approach to actively engage university stakeholders to explore the challenges of students through the transition to university. The feedback gathered from participants revealed that key transitional issues for students included managing their finances, understanding support services available, and familiarisation with campus navigation. Participants created activities to support these challenges, which, in a future stage, will be added to the Lincoln Island Project, a game being used to determine whether a video game can be used to support students during the transition to university.
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    Towards a Tool for the Creation of Micro-visualisations
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) Jackson, James; Ritsos, Panagiotis; Roberts, Jonathan; Vidal, Franck P. and Tam, Gary K. L. and Roberts, Jonathan C.
    As the every day use of mobile and small screen devices becomes more common, it is necessary to explore how we can visualise data effectively in small design spaces. These screens are often used in situations where it is necessary to convey information in a concise, readable, reliable and visually appealing way. Our work focuses on the design and development of a tool to facilitate the creation and manipulation of new micro-visualisations. The results show that the tool is suitable for creating large number of outputs quickly and efficiently.
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    Interactive Visualisation of the Food Content of a Human Stomach in MRI
    (The Eurographics Association, 2022) Spann, Conor; Al-Maliki, Shatha; Boué, François; Lutton, Évelyne; Vidal, Franck; Peter Vangorp; Martin J. Turner
    Most medical imaging studies into human digestion focus on the organs themselves and neglect the content under digestion. Instead, analysing food inside digestive organs and any subsequent motion can provide valuable information about the digestive tract. This study is part of a larger project, with previous work done to automatically detect peas in a human stomach from MRI scans but it produced too many false positives. Our study therefore aims to accurately visualise peas in a human stomach whilst also providing facilities to correct the mistakes made by the previous pea detection. Our solution is a visualisation and correction tool split into 2D and 3D visualisation areas. The 2D areas show three sequential stomach slices with detected peas as green circles and allows the user to correct the pea detection. Peas can be added, removed or marked as unsure. The 3D area shows a Marching Cubes rendering of the stomach with spherical glyphs as the peas. Due to the way the data was acquired, some pea motion was also visualised. Aside from difficulties interpreting the data due to acquisition artefacts, our tool was found to be very easy to use, with some minor improvement suggestions for interacting with the images. Overall, the software achieved its aims of visualising the peas and stomach whilst also providing methods to correct the pea data. Future work will look into improving the pea detection and more work into following the pea motion.
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    Personalised Authentic assessments with Synchronous Learning Activities: a Framework for Teaching Visualisation and Graphics
    (The Eurographics Association, 2022) Roberts, Jonathan C.; Peter Vangorp; Martin J. Turner
    We present an activities framework for learning visualisation and computer graphics. The framework pivots around the academic developing an authentic learning scenario that is personalised for every student, followed by a suite of synchronous learning activities. The authentic assessment helps set the scene and motivate the learners, activities bring the students together to work on an aligned sub-task, while personalising the task enables each student to discuss their work without worrying about plagiarism. We demonstrate how we have applied the structure in two modules; first a third-year degree level module in computer graphics rendering and second an information visualisation masters module. In this paper we present the framework and discuss our experience with using it.
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    Comparing Gestural Interfaces using Kinect and OpenPose
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) Rahman, Aminur; Clift, Louis G.; Clark, Adrian F.; Vidal, Franck P. and Tam, Gary K. L. and Roberts, Jonathan C.
    We describe the implementation of a gesture recognition facility for navigating through virtual reality applications in a shared VR facility. An implementation based around the Microsoft Kinect is described and the fruits of several years' experience are summarized. An alternative implementation based around the OpenPose library is then presented and the two are compared.
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    Recognising Human-Object Interactions Using Attention-based LSTMs
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) Almushyti, Muna; Li, Frederick W. B.; Vidal, Franck P. and Tam, Gary K. L. and Roberts, Jonathan C.
    Recognising Human-object interactions (HOIs) in videos is a challenge task especially when a human can interact with multiple objects. This paper attempts to solve the problem of HOIs by proposing a hierarchical framework that analyzes human-object interactions from a video sequence. The framework consists of LSTMs that firstly capture both human motion and temporal object information independently, followed by fusing these information through a bilinear layer to aggregate human-object features, which are then fed to a global deep LSTM to learn high-level information of HOIs. The proposed approach applies an attention mechanism to LSTMs in order to focus on important parts of human and object temporal information.