Flavia Sparacino

Structural synthesis of 'parallel' robots generating spatial translation

Presents a tool, based on the mathematical group theory, for the synthesis of new parallel structure robots. By the kinematic principle of displacement subgroups intersection a family of 3 degrees of freedom robots for pure spatial translation movements is conceived. One of the many possible implementations is also given as an example.<<ETX>>

Sto(ry)chastics: A Bayesian Network Architecture for User Modeling and Computational Storytelling for Interactive Spaces

This paper presents sto(ry)chastics, a user-centered approach for computational storytelling for real-time sensor-driven multimedia audiovisual stories, such as those that are triggered by the body in motion in a sensor-instrumented interactive narrative space. With sto(ry)chastics the coarse and noisy sensor inputs are coupled to digital media outputs via a user model, which is estimated probabilistically by a Bayesian network. To illustrate sto(ry)chastics, this paper describes the museum wearable, a device which delivers an audiovisual narration interactively in time and space to the visitor as a function of the estimated visitor type. The wearable relies on a custom-designed long-range infrared location-identification sensor to gather information on where and how long the visitor stops in the museum galleries and uses this information as input to, or observations of, a (dynamic) Bayesian network. The network has been tested and validated on observed visitor tracking data by parameter learning using the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm, and by performance analysis of the model with the learned parameters.

Perceptive spaces for performance and entertainment untethered interaction using computer vision and audition

Bulky head-mounted displays, data gloves, and severely limited movement have become synonymous with virtual environments. This is unfortunate, since virtual environments have such great potential in applications such as entertainment, animation by example, design interface, information browsing, and even expressive performance. In this article, we describe an approach to unencumbered natural interfaces called Perceptive Spaces. The spaces are unencumbered because they utilize passive sensors that do not require special clothing and large format displays that do not isolate the users from their environment. The spaces are natural because the open environment facilitates active participation. Several applications illustrate the expressive power of this approach, as well as the challenges associated with designing these interfaces.

Natural interaction in intelligent spaces: Designing for architecture and entertainment

The rapid evolution of computers’ processing power, progress in projection and display technology, and their low cost, accompanied by recent advances in mathematical modeling, make available to space designers today sophisticated technologies which were once accessible only to research institutions or large companies. Thanks to wireless sensing techniques it is possible to endow a space with perceptual intelligence, and make it aware of how people use it, move in it, or react to it. Intelligent Spaces are relevant for several applications or tasks which range from surveillance to entertainment, from medical rehabilitation to artistic performance, from museum exhibit design to commerce. The author’s work focuses on Narrative Spaces which are storytellers, able to articulate an informative or entertaining audio-visual narration for people interactively. Narrative Spaces communicate by use of large scale coordinated projections, sounds and displays whose contents are choreographed by the natural body movements or physical gestures of the people in them. This paper describes the guiding principles and modeling approaches that, according to the author, enable a robust modeling of user input and communication strategies for digital content presentation in Intelligent Narrative Spaces. It then provides examples of applications built according to the specified criteria.

City of News

“How do we explore the digital box of fragments that pastes together disjunctive arrays of images andsets of data into a seemingly continuous display?” … We “need to develop new modes of perception withwhich to receive, absorb, criticize, and produce new combinations of information ” M. Christine BoyerIn a 1995 article, appeared in “ Le Monde Diplomatique”, the French theorist of technology, Paul Virilio,describes the phenomenon of the loss of orientation experienced by the exponentially increasing crowdwhich is relentlessly enthralled in cyberspace. Virilio observes that the construction of informationsuperhighways, which are globalized and instantaneously updated, presents us with a threat, a menace toour perception of what reality is, of what it means for us to exist, as individuals, here and now. Induced bythe splitting of the sensible world into real andvirtual in parallel with the “invention of theperspective of real-time”, this threat causes ashock, a “mental concussion”, that hooks thehappenings of events to a globalized monorailtrack. We have extended Virilios concern tothe varied world of the Net, and observed thatfor many, the Web is a wasteland ofinformation, a Babel without dictionary, anencyclopaedia with no table of contents, anunstructured territory without a map. Whileweb crawlers and search engines help us locategeneral topics information, even while usingthese tools, we often experience, with Virilio,“information anxiety”, and loose our bearingsin the “flatland” of our regular browsers, underthe vast horizon of the informationsuperhighways. In order for any kind ofinformation to be presented to us in a way which is not fragmented or disruptive of our current activities,for it to become a part of our cognitive space, and be remembered and integrated with the flow of ourmental activities, we need to be able to map, directly or by analogy, some of the real-world architectureback into the computer display. We need to build a display environment, a tailored information landscape,which helps people construct a cognitive map to organize, sort, classify, remember, integrate, the varietyof textual or visual information presented. In accomplishing this task, we have been inspired by theexisting literature in the field of spatial orientation, from a cognitive psychology perspective, as well asthe literature on mnemonics. Our work shows how our knowledge of space can be used not only to findour bearings in cyberspace, but also to memorize and organize information, using space as a memorydevice or technique. As “ spacemakers” [ Walser, 1990], we have therefore undertaken the task to “escapeflatland” [ Tufte, 1990], to design an information browser that organizes information as it fetches it, inreal-time, in a virtual three-dimensional space which anchors our perceptual flow of data to a cognitivemap of a (virtual) place. This place is a city.

Combining Audio and Video in Perceptive Spaces

Virtual environments have great potential in applications such as entertainment, animation by example, design interface, information browsing, and even expressive performance. In this paper we describe an approach to unencumbered, natural interfaces called Perceptive Spaces with a particular focus on efforts to include true multi-modal interface: interfaces that attend to both the speech and gesture of the user. The spaces are unencumbered because they utilize passive sensors that don’t require special clothing and large format displays that don’t isolate the user from their environment. The spaces are natural because the open environment facilitates active participation. Several applications illustrate the expressive power of this approach, as well as the challenges associated with designing these interfaces.

Browsing 3-D spaces with 3-D vision: body-driven navigation through the internet city

This paper presents a computer vision stereo based interface to navigate inside a 3-D Internet city, using body gestures. A wide-baseline stereo pair of cameras is used to obtain 3-D body models of the user’s hands and head in a small desk-area environment. The interface feeds this information to an HMM gesture classifier to reliably recognize the user’s browsing commands. To illustrate the features of this interface we describe its application to our 3-D Internet browser which facilitates the recollection of information by organizing and embedding it inside a virtual city through which the user navigates.

Media actors: characters in search of an author

Interactive experiences benefit from natural interactions, compelling communication, and ease of implementation. We show how, according to these principles, interactive media architectures can be categorized as scripted, responsive, learning, or behavioral, and give examples of applications in each category. We then propose the perceptive architecture based on media actors. We endow media objects-expressive text, photographs, movie clips, audio, and sound clips-with coordinated perceptual intelligence, behaviors and personality. Such media actors are able to engage the public in an encounter with a virtual character which expresses itself through one or more of these agents. The result is a novel method for interactive media modeling which finds applications in multimedia, electronic art, interactive performance and entertainment.