Francisco José Serón Arbeloa

TimeMesh: Producing and Evaluating a Serious Game

Serious Games are specifically designed to develop mental abilities and skills such as strategy, mental calculation and decision making but the acquisition of deep knowledge with Serious Games is less well understood. To improve this understanding, a game called TimeMesh, as well as the needed graphic engine, called TimeMesh engine, -a multi-player graphical adventure engine inspired by the 90s graphic adventures created by LucasArts- have been developed. Time--Mesh has been designed to impart knowledge and competences in the area of History and Geography. To test the acquisition of knowledge with Time-mesh a complete process of evaluation was designed, divided in three parts, always with user intervention: first, with the game developers, then with teachers and lastly, but most importantly with students. In this paper we present our experience in designing, implementing and evaluating TimeMesh and formulate the conclusions of this study.

Modeling flocks with perceptual agents from a dynamicist perspective

Computational simulations of flocks and crowds have typically been processed by a set of logic or syntactic rules. In recent decades, a new generation of systems has emerged from dynamicist approaches in which the agents and the environment are treated as a pair of dynamical systems coupled informationally and mechanically. Their spontaneous interactions allow them to achieve the desired behavior. The main proposition assumes that the agent does not need a full model or to make inferences before taking actions; rather, the information necessary for any action can be derived from the environment with simple computations and very little internal state. In this paper, we present a simulation framework in which the agents are endowed with a sensing device, an oscillator network as controller and actuators to interact with the environment. The perception device is designed as an optic array emulating the principles of the animal retina, which assimilates stimuli resembling optic flow to be captured from the environment. The controller modulates informational variables to action variables in a sensory‐motor flow. Our approach is based on the Kuramoto model that describes mathematically a network of coupled phase oscillators and the use of evolutionary algorithms, which is proved to be capable of synthesizing minimal synchronization strategies based on the dynamical coupling between agents and environment. We carry out a comparative analysis with classical implementations taking into account several criteria. It is concluded that we should consider replacing the metaphor of symbolic information processing by that of sensory‐motor coordination in problems of multi‐agent organizations. Copyright

A parsimonious model for locomotor in virtual agents based on dynamical coupling with the environment

In the domain of virtual agents modeling, computationalist approaches tend to predominate. The lack of plausibility of the rules in nature provides models with a low capacity to generalize and a very limited insight into behavioral phenomena. An alternative view is that behavior could emerge as a whole from the basic principles of non‐linear dynamics that underlie such behavior in the environment. This paper presents a dynamic agent endowed with a sensing device, a controller and actuators to interact with the environment. The control architecture is based on ordinary differential equations with the function of modulating the stimulus signals to action signals under a sensory‐motor flow. The parameter values are defined in an evolutionary process depending on the task to be performed. A series of experiments are presented to illustrate certain qualities of our model such as the adaptability to change, a highly intuitive and flexible design methodology, and a high degree of individual autonomy, among others. We think this kind of modeling is useful in the animation world for modeling flocks, crowds, and swarms as a valid alternative to other less parsimonious techniques.In the domain of virtual agents modeling, computationalist approaches tend to predominate. The lack of plausibility of the rules in nature provides models with a low capacity to generalize and a very limited insight into behavioral phenomena. An alternative view is that behavior could emerge as a whole from the basic principles of non-linear dynamics that underlie such behavior in the environment. This paper presents a dynamic agent endowed with a sensing device, a controller and actuators to interact with the environment. The control architecture is based on ordinary differential equations with the function of modulating the stimulus signals to action signals under a sensory-motor flow. The parameter values are defined in an evolutionary process depending on the task to be performed. A series of experiments are presented to illustrate certain qualities of our model such as the adaptability to change, a highly intuitive and flexible design methodology, and a high degree of individual autonomy, among others. We think this kind of modeling is useful in the animation world for modeling flocks, crowds, and swarms as a valid alternative to other less parsimonious techniques.

Sgraffito simulation through image processing

This paper presents a tool for simulating the traditional Sgraffito technique through digital image processing. The tool is based on a digital image pile and a set of attributes recovered from the image at the bottom of the pile using the Streit and Buchanan multiresolution image pyramid. This technique tries to preserve the principles of artistic composition by means of the attributes of color, luminance and shape recovered from the foundation image. A couple of simulated scratching objects will establish how the recovered attributes have to be painted. Different attributes can be painted by using different scratching primitives. The resulting image will be a colorimetric composition reached from the image on the top of the pile, the color of the images revealed by scratching and the inner characteristics of each scratching primitive. The technique combines elements of image processing, art and computer graphics allowing users to make their own free compositions and providing a means for the development of visual communication skills within the user-observer relationship. The technique enables the application of the given concepts in non artistic fields with specific subject tools.