Animal Crossing is an online multiplayer game that supports social communication and collaboration. Its recent version, New Horizons, is immensely popular having sold over 32 million copies worldwide, with many players attracted to the opportunities it provides to remotely socialize during the COVID-19 pandemic. To understand players' increased positive emotions and social interactions, we surveyed 119 of them betweenMay and December 2020 and conducted remote interviews with 25 respondents. We identified the social dynamics among players and with non-player characters (NPCs), and analyzed how positive social interactions were facilitated under player-generated narratives and game-determined narratives. Based on our empirical analyses, we have extended our understanding of how to create positive, safe, and friendly interactions: (1)the design of mood-improving game worlds with flexible game tasks, (2) implementation of game-determined activities with social implications, (3) provision of player rewards to reinforce their social interactions, and (4)creation of opportunities to integrate NPCs' game-determined narratives into player-generated narratives.

No abstract available.

No abstract available.

As ecological awareness increases there has been a shift towards more integrated forest management. Accurate modeling of future states of forested landscapes will allow better planning for safeguarding our forest resource for future generations. We present an initial exploration into providing visual access to information generated by SELES (Spatially Explicit Landscape Event Simulator). We explore the application of our visual access distortion technique to a block of temporal data created from a sequence of landscape event based information. This type of access extends the possibilities of visual exploration for temporal and spatial interrelations in a data set.

A fundamental issue in user interface design is the effective use of available screen space, commonly referred to as the screen real estate problem.This paper presents a new distortion-based viewing tool for exploring large information spaces through the use of a three-dimensional pliable surface.Arbitrarily-shaped regions (foci) on the surface may be selected and pulled towards or pushed away from the viewer thereby increasing or decreasing the level of detail contained within each region.Furthermore, multiple foci are smoothly blended together such that there is no loss of context.The manipulation and blending of foci is accomplished using a fairly simple mathematical model based on gaussian curves.The significance of this approach is that it utilizes precognitive perceptual cues about the three-dimensional surface to make the distortions comprehensible, and allows the user to interactively control the location, shape, and extent of the distortion in very large graphs or maps.

The investigation of mechanisms responsible for the morphogenesis of complex biological organisms is an important area in biology. P. patens is an especially suitable plant for this research because it is a rather simple organism, facilitating its observation, yet it possesses developmental phenomena analogous to those which occur in higher plants, allowing the extrapolation of hypotheses to more complex organisms. The visualization consists of three components: biological data collection, computer-modelling (using L-systems), and model verification. The simulated developmental process is quite realistic and provides an excellent means for verifying the underlying hypotheses of morphogenesis.

As part of an inter-disciplinary effort, we are visually exploring a current problem in philosophical logic related to information processing. Given a set of inconsistent sentences or inputs, a processor cannot unambiguously infer any specific consequence. Traces represent subsets of possible consequences which can be inferred classically from partitions of the set of inputs. We are interested in the relationship between a given set of Boolean inputs and its respective trace(s). We have developed a visualization paradigm which allows us to view and explore this relationship effectively.

In the process of archaeological excavation, a vast amount of data, much of it three-dimensional in nature, is recorded. In recent years, computer graphics techniques have been applied to the task of visualizing such data. In particular, data visualization has been used to accomplish the virtual reconstruction of site architecture and to enable the display of spatial data distributions using three-dimensional models of site terrain. In the case we present here, these two approaches are integrated in the modeling of a prehistoric pithouse. In order to better visualize artifact distributions in the context of site architecture, surface data is displayed as a layer in a virtual reconstruction viewable at interactive rates. This integration of data display with the architectural model has proven valuable in identifying correlations between distributions of different artifact categories and their spatial proximity to significant architectural features.>