While personal devices are often used to connect online with others far away, public media rarely offers opportunities to connect with collocated individuals. We explore novel interaction strategies to enhance opportunistic collocated sociality through technologically augmented daily objects. ThinkCushion is an augmented cushion allowing users to record and playback audio messages either explicitly or implicitly by leaning on it. We deployed ThinkCushion in an open coworking space and gathered quantitative and qualitative data over one month to unveil how individuals discovered it and interacted. We individuate three modes of discovery (serendipitous, spectated and facilitated) and their relations with situated socio-spatial aspects. We discuss the interplay of active and passive interaction modalities for locally accessing and creating content, and how verbal content can be used in either performative or informative ways. We suggest future research on how to design public technologies supporting collocated sociality already from the phase of technological discovery.

Films elicit emotions in viewers by infusing the story they tell with an affective character or tone-in a word, a mood. Considerable effort has been made recently to develop computational methods to estimate affective content in film. However, these efforts have focused almost exclusively on style-based features while neglecting to consider different scene types separately. In this study, we investigated the quantitative determinants of film mood across scenes classified by their setting and use of sounds. We examined whether viewers could assess film mood directly in terms of hedonic tone, energetic arousal, and tense arousal; whether their mood ratings differed by scene type; and how various narrative and stylistic film attributes as well as low- and high-level computational features related to the ratings. We found that the viewers were adept at assessing film mood, that sound-based scene classification brought out differences in the mood ratings, and that the low- and high-level features related to different mood dimensions. The study showed that computational film mood estimation can benefit from scene type classification and the use of both low- and high-level features. We have made our clip assessment and annotation data as well as the extracted computational features publicly available.

This workshop will discuss how different multimedia applications and interaction techniques have been employed to support public sociality---from collocated interactions to social awareness and feeling of community. Participants will discuss recent work and join hands-on design activities to envision new ways for potential users to discover and learn how to use ubiquitous technologies for opportunistic social interactions.

We examined the effects of the emotional facial expressions of a virtual character (VC) on human frontal electroencephalographic (EEG) asymmetry (putatively indexing approach/withdrawal motivation), facial electromyographic (EMG) activity (emotional expressions), and social decision making (cooperation/defection). In a within-subjects design, the participants played the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma game with VCs with different dynamic facial expressions (predefined or dependent on the participant's electrodermal and facial EMG activity). In general, VC facial expressions elicited congruent facial muscle activity. However, both frontal EEG asymmetry and facial EMG activity elicited by an angry VC facial expression varied as a function of preceding interactional events (human collaboration/defection). Pre-decision inner emotional-motivational processes and emotional facial expressions were dissociated, suggesting that human goals influence pre-decision frontal asymmetry, whereas display rules may affect (pre-decision) emotional expressions in human-VC interaction. An angry VC facial expression, high pre-decision corrugator EMG activity, and relatively greater left frontal activation predicted the participant's decision to defect. Both post-decision frontal asymmetry and facial EMG activity were related to reciprocal cooperation. The results suggest that the justifiability of VC emotional expressions and the perceived fairness of VC actions influence human emotional responses.

Films seek to elicit emotions in viewers by infusing the story they tell with an affective character or tone - in a word, a mood. In content-based multimedia analysis, considerable effort has been made to develop methods to estimate film affect computationally. However, results have been hampered by a tendency to classify film scenes either by genre or not at all, while other potentially helpful classification methods have been neglected. In this study, we investigated the quantitative determinants of film mood across different types of scenes. We first collected style and mood ratings for 50 film scenes, which we classified by their location, time of day, and their use of dialogue and music. We then investigated whether the viewers rated the mood (in terms of hedonic tone, energetic arousal, and tense arousal) of various scene types differently, and how well perceptual stylistic attributes as well as low- and high-level computational features correlated with the mood ratings. We found that the mood ratings and their quantitative determinants differed across the scene types. We also found that the energetic arousal ratings were associated with the stylistic attributes and their corresponding low-level features, while hedonic tone and tense arousal were associated with high-level features related to the emotional expression in faces, dialogue, and music. The study contributes to ongoing efforts to estimate film affect computationally in showing that results can be improved by utilizing both low- and high-level features and by considering different scene types separately.

The uncanny valley (UV) hypothesis, which predicts that almost but not fully humanlike artificial characters elicit negative evaluations, has become increasingly influential. At the same time, the hypothesis has become associated with many computer-animated films that have aimed at high realism. In the present investigation, we tested whether semirealistic animated film characters do in fact elicit negative evaluations. Fifty-four participants were asked to evaluate five matched film excerpts from each of cartoonish, semirealistic, and human-acted films. Mixed model analyses were conducted to reduce the effects of participant and stimulus related confounds. Explicit selections made after the experiment confirmed that participants associated semirealistic film characters correctly with the UV. Semirealistic animated characters also received higher eeriness ratings than the other film characters. In particular, two semirealistic films ‘Beowulf’ and ‘The Polar Express’ were selected the most often explicitly, and ‘Beowulf’ also received higher eeriness ratings than any other film. Somewhat unexpectedly, cartoonish characters received the highest strangeness ratings and (after confound correction) the lowest likability ratings. Taken together, the present findings demonstrate that semirealistic animated film characters are more eerie than cartoonish characters or real actors, and hence provide evidence for the existence of the UV in animated film characters.

This paper presents ATSI, a system for sonic augmentation of physical objects with spatialized sounds and their control by gestural interaction. The implementation combines tracking of the users' hands and head with commodity hardware, and binaural spatialized sound rendering over headphones. The user may attach sounds to common objects and the system maintains the correct spatial auditory perspective inside the augmented scene during the actions of attaching sounds, picking and moving the sounding objects, or exploring the scene. Attention has been given to the binaural rendering of distance cues to support the above actions with perceptual realism in small scale environments and for many objects. Through a user study assessing the localization accuracy that can be achieved with the system, we show that sound rendering performance looks appropriate for applications such as auditory displays for context and object specific information, sonic design for architectural planning and interior design, and music applications.

We investigate consciously controlled pupil size as an input modality. Pupil size is affected by various processes, e.g., physical activation, strong emotional experiences and cognitive effort. Our hypothesis is that given continuous feedback, users can learn to control pupil size via physical and psychological self-regulation. We test it by measuring the magnitude of self evoked pupil size changes following seven different instructions, while providing real time graphical feedback on pupil size. Results show that some types of voluntary effort affect pupil size on a statistically significant level. A second controlled experiment confirms that subjects can produce pupil dilation and construction on demand during paced tasks. Applications and limitations to using voluntary pupil size manipulation as an input modality are discussed.

Upponurkka is an inexpensive immersive display system for public virtual reality installations. It is designed for public places to be robust, wireless, and light-weight. The system consists of two passive stereo screens and optical tracking. In this paper the hardware and software of Upponurkka are briefly presented. In addition, experiences of using the system in a public art exhibition are reported.

A navigation test was carried out in a spatially immersive virtual environment. The test was a gamelike experience where the task of subjects was to find as many gates as possible while they navigated through a track guided by auditory and/or visual cues. The results are presented as a function of the number of found gates, searching times, and normalized path lengths. Audiovisual navigation was clearly the most efficient. Visual navigation was second and the auditory navigation the least efficient. Further analysis of travel paths indicate that auditory cues were utilized in the beginning to locate the next gate; a visual cue was the most important in the final approach to the gate.

Historical background and motivation for ICAD2003 paper is presented. In addition, the research results followed up is briefly overviewed and future work is elaborated.

We have studied the usability and artistic potential of an immersive 3D painting system in its early state. The system allows one to draw lines, meshes and particle clouds using a one-hand wand in a virtual room with stereoscopic display. In its more mature state the software will allow for two-handed interaction with new interaction devices. Ten professional artists participated for two days each in a test, performing both given tasks and free artistic sketching. Their experiences were collected through observation and interviews. At this stage, we found that common technical limitations of virtual environments, such as latency and tracking inaccuracy as well as clumsiness of the hardware devices, may considerably hinder handicraft work. On the other hand, every single participant felt that immersion offers new potential for artistic expression and was definitely willing to continue in the second phase of the test later this year.

Abstract Until recently, sound has been given little attention in computer graphics and related domains of computer animation and virtual environments, although sounds which are properly synchronized to motion provide a great deal of information about events in the environment. Sounds are often not properly synchronized because the sounds and the phenomena that caused the sounds are not considered in an integrated way. In this paper, we present an integrated approach to motion and sound as it applies to computer animation and virtual environments. The key to this approach is synchronization by mapping the motion parameters to sound parameters so that the sound changes as a result of changes in the motion. This is done by representing sounds using a technique for functional composition analogous to the ‘shade trees’ which we calltimbre trees.These timbre trees are used as a part of a sound description language that is analogous to scene description languages such as RenderMan. Using this methodology, we have produced convincing sound effects for a wide variety of animated scenes including the automatic generation of background music.

We present a general methodology to produce synchronized soundtracks for animations.A sound world is modeled by associating a characteristic sound for each object in a scene.These sounds can be generated from a behavioral or physically-based simulation.Collision sounds can be computed from vibrational response of elastic bodies to the collision impulse.Alternatively, stereotypic recorded sound effects can be associated with each interaction of objects.Sounds may also be generated procedurally, The sound world is described with a sound event file, and is rendered in two passes.First the propagation paths from 3D objects to each microphone are analyzed and used to calculate sound transformations according to the acoustic environment.These effects are convolutions, encoded into two essential parameters, delay and attenuation of each sound.Timeciependency of these two parameters is represented with key frames, thus being completely independent of the original 3D animation script.In the second pass the sounds associated with objects are instantiated, modulated by interpolated key parameters, and summed up to the final soundtrack.The advantage of a modular architecture is that the same methods can be used for all types of animations, keyframed, physically-based and behavioral.We also discuss the differences of sound and light, and the remarkable similarities in their rendering processes.

A system-theoretic approach to the computer aided design (CAD) process is presented. Dependency network among objects, consisting of design operations - transactions - is formed automatically during design. The derivation process of an object, its history, can be extracted as a metalevel macro object and further edited with metadesign operations. Both top-down and bottom-up strategies are supported with this "design-by-example" method. The process-oriented methodology applies to the configuration of graphics systems also, as demonstrated with the METAVIEWS user interface.

The Boundary Representation (BR) scheme for solid modelling is reconsidered and generalized in the paper. It is pointed out that the topological data, though usually represented separately, is derivable from the geometric data, and that there are fundamental inconsistencies between these two. The topological data structures are unnecessary or even harmful in practice as they restrict the modelling domain. New BR methodology without explicit topology is demonstrated by algorithms, which manipulate a stream of separate polygons as a solid model.

A view is taken on geometric modelling systems as abstract data types. Having this frame of reference, the Device Independent Segment Storage of standard graphics is considered, and found to possess useful capability of modelling. The unused potential can be benefit simply by adding a few new inquiry functions, which give the application program an access to the individual primitives stored in segments. Even more advantage can be got i f semantics other than just grouping of items can be assigned to the segments. For example, in 3D graphics, a group of polygons can be labeled to mean a solid. A flexible framework (AGX) is built for experiments, and the feasibility of the concepts presented here is demonstrated by practical applications.

The Geometric workbench (GWB), an experimental. geometric modeling system, is described. It is based on a hybrid representation scheme, where solids are represented by CSG volume trees and boundary representations. Boundary representations are described with so called Euler operators. The operators used in GWB guarantee topological and a wide class of geometric validity constraints for the solid. upon Euler operators, sweep operators and parametrized shapes have been implemented. Representations may be stored into a data base in a procedural format. Based on the model, line figures may be drawn and volume properties of the solids may be calculated. GWB is based on a general infrastructure (workbench) approach of system construction. The beneficiance of this approach is demonstrated.