Entertainment Computing - ICEC 2006

Dancing is an entertaining form of taskless interaction. When interacting with a dancing Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA), the lack of a clear task presents the challenge of eliciting an interaction between user and ECA in a different way. In this paper we describe our Virtual Dancer, which is an ECA that invites a user to dance. In our system the user is monitored using global movement characteristics from a camera and a dance pad. The characteristics are used to select and adapt movements for the Virtual Dancer. This way, the user can dance together with the Virtual Dancer. Any interaction patterns and implicit relations between the dance behaviour of the human and the Virtual Dancer should be evoked intuitively without explicit appeal. The work described in this paper can be used as a platform for research into natural animation and user invitation behavior. We discuss future work on both topics.

In this paper we present

eCoology

, an AR edutainment application for children in which emotional and social aspects are taking into consideration to improve flow or optimal experience. Particularly, we investigate the introduction of emotional agents that react and move within the AR environment according to their emotional state. We propose a model for emotional agents and a path finding mechanism with backtracking that allows exploration of different movement alternatives. In this way, virtual entities may exhibit a complex number of emotional movement behaviors within the augmented space.

This paper presents a virtual embodied agent that can conduct musicians in a live performance. The virtual conductor conducts music specified by a MIDI file and uses input from a microphone to react to the tempo of the musicians. The current implementation of the virtual conductor can interact with musicians, leading and following them while they are playing music. Different time signatures and dynamic markings in music are supported.

We explore the possibilities of replacing behaviour-generating code in computer games by real-time behaviour of live animals, and the question of whether one can play computer games against animals. To experience the differences for a human between playing against an animal or against computer code, we experimented with a variant of Pac-Man where the behaviour of virtual game characters is derived from that of live crickets in a real maze. Initial results are described in this paper.

This paper describes a simple psychological experiment to investigate the effects of two aspects of user interactions with message taking artifacts. The first is the effect of the artifacts’ physical appearance, and the other is prior interaction experience. We examined the effect of these two factors on the ability of users to feel comfortable and natural when interacting with the artifacts. Experimental results revealed that prior interaction experience was a much more important factor than the artifacts’ appearance in determining whether participants could leave verbal messages smoothly.

Sadness is a negative emotion, which aims at a deactivated physiological and behavioural state [21] and so this is easy to develop in film experiencing, where the viewer is passively watching and feeling. Interactive storytelling supposes active physiological behaviours and this raises the problematic – how to create sad deactivated moments during interactive sequences. In this paper we intend to develop and present different ways to approach this problematic and methodologies to implement interactive sad moments in virtual environments, as videogames. These moments will be defined as situations of affective attachment supported by virtual body touching, visually represented by virtual gently stroking body parts (shoulders, hands, hair), bear hugs, soft kissing and lying against each other cuddling.

Elaborating on the rapid evolution of mobile internet services in Korea, this paper investigated young consumers’ preferences and attitudes towards mobile entertainment services through person-to-person questionnaires. We tried to find out “how” mobile entertainment services differ from other mobile services from the consumer perspectives: expectation and satisfaction. After careful investigation of what the consumers actually said, it could be said that the speed of services was never met to consumer expectation in mobile entertainment services, while they never really cared about contents aspects of mobile internet services.

The term ‘image quality’ is a subject notion so it is difficult to quantify. However, it can be reasonably quantified by using statistical and psychophysical approaches. Furthermore, it is also possible to model the human perception of image quality. In this paper, large scale psychophysical experiments including pair comparison and categorical judgment were carried out to judge the perception of image quality of photographic images. The evaluation of both image difference and absolute quality was also carried out. Test images were generated by rendering the eight selected original images according to the change of lightness, chroma, contrast, sharpness and noise attributes. Total number of 288 images were used as test images. The experimental results were used to calculate z-scores and colour difference threshold to verify the optimum level for each transform function. User preferred image content can be provided to entertainment, education, etc. when using the result of the study.

Radio plays have recently regained both popular interest and commercial success. Yet, listeners are not provided with either feedback channels or the ability to actively participate in this medium. The TAPE-Player concept described in the present paper extends the radio play medium by adding interactivity as well as participation to the production process. The user takes the roles of both actor and director, which includes verbal interpretation, recording, and editing the dialogues for the selected role(s) as the play’s script evolves. The creative freedom is supported by TAPE-Player’s underlying hypermedia architecture: audio clips are managed separately and combined dynamically to produce a personalised radio play. The applicability of the concept was corroborated in an empirical study. Specifically, the users welcomed the interaction via TAPE-Player’s easy-to-use interface, the creative freedom, and the substantial influence they had in producing radio plays in a personalised entertainment medium.

For companies, TV commercial is a very important way to introduce and advertise their products. It is expensive to put an advertisement on TV. So these companies generally charge other companies to monitor that their TV commercials are broadcasted properly as contracted. Currently, these monitorings have been done manually. The monitoring company records all the TV programs and their air-times while they are being broadcasted. Then the agent checks the starting-times and the ending-times of TV commercials. Video retrieval and matching techniques can be used to monitor TV commercials automatically. By extracting visual features that can identify commercials, we can measure similarities and identify a target video from thousands of videos. To process all the TV programs of 24 hours a day, feature extraction and matching process must be done in real-time. In this paper, we designed the visual feature DB for real-time processing and implemented real-time TV commercial monitoring system. To construct the DB, we extracted scene change information, block-based dominant colors and edge pattern histograms of TV commercial clips.

Acousmêtre, or the use of offscreen sounds and visual media to stimulate the imagination of the viewers was explored by Fritz Lang or Alfred Hitchcock in cinema. However, it’s full potential is still waiting to be explored in interactive virtual environments. Based on the initial investigation, the inclusion of acousmêtre in a virtual environment effectively elicits suspense and increases the viewer’s engagement. This paper further presents an approach on generating acousmêtre in a virtual storytelling application.

Entertainment computing is central to the leisure activities of many Americans, with a remarkable array of choices now available to the average person. Video and computer games, in particular violent games, are especially popular, even with relatively young children. With this popularity, concern has been raised about possible unintended consequences of participation in interactive violence. Desensitization to violence has been cited as one possible undesirable outcome of video game violence, but there is little evidence for this relationship. This paper presents a conceptual model and supporting data to begin the examination of possible relationships between exposure to violent video games and desensitization. Examining correlates of desensitization including empathy and attitudes towards violence, surveys of children and adolescents have identified a relationship between greater exposure to violent video games, lower empathy, and stronger proviolence attitudes. Additional research is needed to substantiate and to understand the causal implications of these results.

We present an extension of Kansei mediated communication in the field of entertainment. We propose to do so by implementing Cultural Computing concept and enriching it with Kansei Mediated Interaction. We present some inspiration for our approach in terms of culture and then discuss them. We relate our work to the Western and to the Eastern world. Thus we use cultural examples from England, France, Japan and China. Finally, we propose as a new direction for HCI, cultural computing with its related paradigm we call Kansei Mediated Interaction. Finally we propose Kansei Mediated Entertainment as a direction merging of Kansei and entertainment.

We have implemented a conceptual software framework and a story-based game that facilitates generation of rich and vivid narratives in vast geographical areas. An important design challenge in the emergent research area of pervasive gaming is to provide believable environments where game content is matched to the landscape in an evocative and persuasive way. More specificly, our game is designed to generate such an environment tailored to a journey as experienced from the backseat of a car. Therefore, it continuously references common geographical objects, such as houses, forests and churches, in the vicinity within the story; it provides a sequential narrative that fit with the drive; it works over vast areas, and it is possible to interact with the game while looking out of the windows.

In this paper we introduce the concept of ‘Layered Multiple Displays (LMD)’ for visualizing immersive and interactive digital contents. The LMD platform integrates various display technologies into a unified interaction space by providing natural visualization of three-dimensional virtual spaces, especially in terms of depth perception. Each display component complements one another, providing not only natural visualizations of three dimensional spaces but also personalized point of views. We describe our implementation of a prototype LMD platform with a game application, and discuss about its usability issues, and present future research directions.

The computer-generated integral imaging system is a way of showing stereoscopic displays that allows users to see 3D images without wearing any special glasses. In the integral imaging system, the 3D object information is stored as elemental images, which are generated by the image mapping method. This paper reviews the previous image mapping methods, such as PRR (Point Retracing Rendering), MVR (Multi-Viewpoint Rendering), and PGR (Parallel Group Rendering). Then, it explains a new image mapping method called VVR, which shows better performance while generating similar pictures as in MVR. Finally it mentions process of making the integral imaging system, and analyzes performance. Then, it discusses some research directions for the future improvement.

Over recent years, the fall in cost, and increased availability of motion capture equipment has led to an increase in non-specialist companies being able to use motion capture data to guide animation sequences for computer games and other applications. [1] A bottleneck in the animation production process is in the clean-up of capture sessions to remove and/or correct anomalous (unusable) frames and noise. In this paper an investigation is carried out into whether the 2-layer SOM network previously designed [5] and trained on one capture session, can be used to create a neural classifier to be used to classify another separate capture session.

Today, people collect their personal multimedia content on home media servers. In addition to consuming their content on TV sets, people are using mobile multimedia players, PCs and even mobile phones. Since those terminals have various capabilities, it is necessary to adapt the content to a more device specific version. For audio, video, and graphics scalable codecs exist which realize this goal. For multimedia presentations no such scalable coding is available. This paper introduces a multichannel distribution system in home media gateways, this implies that a multimedia presentation can to be created once, and consumed on every possible terminal. The introduced multichannel distribution system is realized by combining MPEG-21 technology with existing device specific presentation languages. This results in a device agnostic Digital Item which can be transformed into a device specific presentation. The resulted presentation takes advantage of the full potential of a terminal.

In this paper we describe a language-driven approach to the development of videogames. In our approach the development process starts with the design of a suitable domain-specific language for building games, along with an abstract syntax for the language and its operational semantics. Next an engine supporting the language is built. Finally games are built using the customized language and they are executed using the engine. This approach is exemplified with the <e-Game> project, which delivers the design of a language and the construction of an engine for the documental development of graphical adventure videogames with educational purposes.

Since three-dimensional computer graphics (3D-CG) technology and interaction technology should be applied to e-learning as well as games, people must be able to easily create interactive contents based on 3D-CG, even if they are not 3D-CG professionals. In this paper, we propose a support system for creating interactive contents that runs on MS Windows and uses Direct X as the file format. By describing a script using two kinds of script files prepared by the system, a content creator can easily create 3D-CG scenes and can also control interactions between a user and the system. As an example of content creation, we present and explain interactive content in which users can enter the virtual world of classic Japanese tales and experience the story development of various types of classic tales for the first time.

The ability customize a players avatar (their graphical representation) is one of the most popular features of online games and graphical chat environments. Though customizing appearance is a common ability in most games, creating tools for customizing a character’s behaviour is still a difficult problem. We propose a methodology, based on direct manipulation, that allows players to specify the type of behaviour they would like in a given context. This methodology is iterative, with the player performing a number of different customizations in different contexts. Players are also able to continue customizing their character during play, with commands that can have long term and permanent effects.

Programmable vertex processing unit increases flexibility and enables customizations of transformation and lighting in the graphics pipeline. Because most embedded systems such as mobile phones and PDA’s have only the fixed-function pipeline, various special effects essential in development of realistic 3D games are not provided. We designed and implemented a programmable vertex processing unit for mobile devices based on the OpenGL ES 2.0 specification. It can be used as a development platform for 3D mobile games. Also, assembly instruction set and encoding scheme are examples of standard interface to high-level shading languages.

A primary requirement for practical augmented reality systems is a method of accurate and reliable camera tracking. In this paper, we propose a fast and stable camera matchmoving method aimed for real-time augmented reality application. A known marker is used for the fast detection and tracking of feature points. From the feature tracking of one of three different types of markers on a single frame, we estimate the camera position and translation parameters. The entire pose estimation process is linear and initial estimates are not required. As an application of the proposed method, we implemented a video augmentation system that replaces the marker in the image frames with a virtual 3D graphical object during the marker tracking. Experimental results showed that the proposed camera tracking method is robust and fast enough to interactive video-based applications.

This paper describes a novel interaction technique that recognizes a finger flicking gesture for power adjustment input for a sports game, such as golf swing or hitting. Our system measures speed of the finger motion and direction of the gesture by using a high-speed camera and a high frame rate image processing technique. By using this system, users can adjust power and angle intuitively. We developed a 3D golf game using this interaction technique to provide an intuitive golf swing input.

In this paper, we present the Smart Dice Cup, a novel interaction device aimed at gaming applications in smart home environments. The Smart Dice Cup is used in a similar way as a traditional leather dice cup to generate random numbers. Integrated accelerometers relate the shaking of the device to the resulting rolls of the dice. In addition to an autonomous stand-alone mode, where the Smart Dice Cup serves as self-sustained gaming system, the device is also capable of communicating with its surrounding environment serving as an input device for other pervasive gaming applications.

Context-aware and location-based information systems with conventional or AR visualization are a well-proven means for enhancing the experience of a tourist visiting a cultural heritage site. A less explored way for achieving immersion in the spatial environment is provided by location-based games which offer the additional advantage of being entertaining. In this paper we describe a subclass of location-based games, Geogames, which are characterized by a specific spatio-temporal structuring of the game events. We show that the spatio-temporal structuring permits to easily integrate educational content into the course of the game, making Geogames an ideal medium for edutainment. We report on our experiences with using the game GeoTicTacToe for teaching school children. Furthermore, we present a didactical workflow and four example didactical patterns that permit to exploit the edutainment potential of Geogames. The outcome of two empirical case studies indicates that enriching Geogames with educational content does not take the fun out of the game.

This paper presents a tutoring system aimed at teaching how to compile Java into the language of the Java Virtual Machine, and, at the same time, promotes a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms of object-oriented programming. The interaction with the systems takes the form of a 3D videogame where the student must compete to provide the right machine instructions, collect resources needed by the instructions and use her knowledge about Java compilation to find the best strategy.

Digital Koguryo is a virtual reality reconstruction of a Koguryo mural tumulus, Anak No. 3, designed to help educate visitors in the cultural background and life style of the ancient Koguryo. The focus of Digital Koguryo was to give users an interactive, entertaining experience and to feel engaged in the activity of finding the life aspects of the Koguryo culture and enjoy the spectacle of historical events. This paper presents the findings and lessons learned from the development and public demonstration of Digital Koguryo in the creation of a virtual heritage.

On-line games are becoming more popular lately as the Internet becomes popular, game platforms become diverse and a ubiquitous game environment is supported. Therefore, distributed game server technology is required to support large numbers of concurrent game users simultaneously. Especially, while game users are playing games, many unpredictable problems can arise, such as a certain server handles more server loads than recommended because many game users crowded into a specific region of a game world. These kinds of situations can lead to whole game server instability. In this paper, global dynamic load balancing model and distributed MMOG(Massive Multiplayer Online Game) server architecture are proposed to apply our load balancing algorithm. Many different experiments were carried out to test for efficiency. Also an example of applying real MMOG application to our research work is shown.

Camera is becoming more common in mobile phones and it is commonly used for exchanging photos between people. The photos could be used for other purposes as well, such as gaming. This paper presents Assassin, a mobile multiplayer game using camera and photos as the main form of player-to-player interaction. The goal in the game is to catch other players in the game without them noticing this. The game is meant to be running in the background of the people’s main activity, such as a working day, and not be played intensively all the time. The game was evaluated with 29 persons in four games organized during the participants’ working days. The results suggest the camera is a very suitable game mechanics for gaming, and the participants in general did not find the game to be a violation of their privacy.

Based on data collected through 40 in-depth interviews, it is found that (a) the balance between perceived challenges and skills, and (b) the types of in-game social interactions can both facilitate and impede the enjoyment of game playing. Through these two factors, a conclusive link was also found between game enjoyments and a gamer’s engagement level. Engaged gamers experience optimal enjoyment more frequently and value the importance of social interactions more than non-engaged gamers. In addition, game enjoyment can be enhanced through game design and it can also be adversely affected by real world contextual factors and technical difficulties. More importantly, the study underlines the importance of social interaction. Social interaction is the key factor that determines the level of engagement of gamers. For engaged gamers, social interaction is essential in this gaming experience. For non-engaged gamers, social interaction is not important and they have little tolerance of negative social interaction within the game.

Motion capture techniques play an important role in computer animation. Because the cost of motion capture data is relatively high and the virtual environment changes frequently in actual applications, researchers in this area focus their work on developing algorithms for editing the capture motion data, and synthesizing new motions from available motion database. Although abundant work has been done on motion editing and synthesis, few of them obviously take motion styles into consideration. Meanwhile, existing style editing algorithms either need an obvious definition of “style”, or need a time-consuming training process. In this paper, we propose a fast and convenient algorithm for human-motion style editing. We define the style of motion as statistic properties of mean and standard variance of joint quaternions in 4D unit sphere space. The proposed algorithm can transfer the style of a motion to another by transferring these properties. Experiment results demonstrate that our approach has the advantages of fast execution, low memory occupation, and easy implementation. It can be widely applied to various real-time entertainment-computing applications, such as gaming and digital movie producing.

This paper presents an efficient technique to enhance the realism of character animation by adding muscle dynamics. Focusing on the isometric contraction of muscles, the proposed algorithm takes normal mesh and clenched mesh, and uses the disparity between them to simulate the skin vibration. The skin simulation algorithm is integrated with an example-based skinning, and shows real-time performance. The proposed approach proves to be useful for animating popping dance.

Understanding of users is an important key to keep an online game fascinating to them. In this paper, we discuss a heuristic that associates relationship between users with co-occurrence of words uttered by them in a given period. An experiment is conducted using Ragnarok Online logs in the client-side of one human subject, which confirms the effectiveness of the proposed method based on this heuristic.

Over the last decade the importance of network games has seen a tremendous growth. A large part includes the size reduction of the handheld devices. Mobile gaming in a wireless environment and the availability to play games at any place is receiving major importance. Thus more and more games are released in this section (including a huge number of different mobile phone games).Thus, the mobile market offers a wide variety of devices, such as the new handhelds like Nintendo DS and Sony PSP. With the increase in opportunities one must first look at the user behavior to understand how to improve current problems. This paper gives an introduction into the differences of current mobile gaming platforms and their capabilities. Furthermore it features a user survey about individual preferences and social coefficients with unexpected results. The current survey system features a database to handle the huge amount of answers (the predecessor used a polling system). Concluding the results of the previous inquiry, this paper contains a lobby tool based on J2ME and C# to increase the matching mechanisms in a local environment.

In this paper we propose a model for the representation of stories in a story database. The use of such a database will enable computational story generation systems to learn from previous stories and associated user feedback, in order to create believable stories with dramatic plots that invoke an emotional response from users. Some of the distinguishing characteristics of our proposal are the inclusion of what we call ‘narratological concepts’ and user feedback in the story database.

Water rendering is one of the most computationally demanding task in computer graphics. Because of its computational complexity, real-time water rendering requires high-end hardwares. In this paper, we present a new algorithm for real-time rendering of large bodies of water such as open seas and oceans which results in an improved efficiency. Using interactive frustum, water surface can be fluidly calculated as a function of height given and interaction with another player in games. This results in an efficient yet realistic method for rendering large bodies of water without requiring as much computational power.

We have developed a prototype guide system, which was named The Forbidden City Explorer. This system has real-time information sharing functions including image data, chatting, and mutual location information. It gives priority to shared images and chats, supporting a friendly user interface and simple operation methods, especially creating shared images to be used by general people. We applied the system twice to the Forbidden City in Beijing. Users were Chinese. The results of the experiments are as follows: (1) The evaluation of the image data sharing function was timely. (2) With a simple operation, many shared images and chat messages were created.

In this paper, we investigate reinforcement learning (RL) of intelligent characters, based on neural network technology, for fighting action games. RL can be either on-policy or off-policy. We apply both schemes to

tabula rasa

learning and adaptation. The experimental results show that (1) in

tabula rasa

leaning, off-policy RL outperforms on-policy RL, but (2) in adaptation, on-policy RL outperforms off-policy RL.

This paper introduces a statistical approach for capturing enter-tainment in real-time through physiological signals within interactive playgrounds inspired by computer games. For this purpose children’s heart rate (HR) signals and judgement on entertainment are obtained from experiments on the innovative Playware playground. A comprehensive statistical analysis shows that children’s notion of entertainment correlates highly with their average HR during the game.

While psychologists analyze network game-playing behavior in terms of players’ social interaction and experience, understanding user behavior is equally important to network researchers, because how players act determines how well systems, such as MMORPGs, perform. To gain a better understanding of patterns of player interaction and their implications for game design, we analyze a 1,356-million-packet trace of

ShenZhou Online

, a mid-sized commercial MMORPG. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to put forward architectural design recommendations for online games based on analysis of player interaction.

We find that the dispersion of players in a virtual world is heavy-tailed, which implies that static and fixed-size partitioning of game worlds is inadequate. Neighbors and teammates tend to be closer to each other in network topology. This property is an advantage, because message delivery between the hosts of interacting players can be faster than between those of unrelated players. In addition, the property can make game playing fairer, since interacting players tend to have similar latencies to their servers. We also find that participants who have a higher degree of social interaction tend to play much longer, and players who are closer in network topology tend to team up for longer periods. This suggests that game designers could increase the “stickiness” of games by supporting, or even forcing, team playing.

Recently, due to the widespread use of computers, text-based communication methods, such as e-mail and chat, have attracted a great deal of attention. If pianists can apply their musical expressions to the text input, they can input texts with their own emotion richly. Therefore, the goal of our study is to construct TEMPEST (TExt input and Musical PErforming SysTem) that is a text input system to input texts with various musical expressions using a clavier. Since this system provides text input methods considering musical artistry, a performer can input texts like playing music.

Enjoyment and experience-based activities are important in today’s society. The purpose of this paper is to explore and better understand how experiences can be enhanced using IS in such experience-based enterprises. The research is based on a case study conducted in collaboration with a Swedish regional museum, where a location-aware auditory museum application for experience enhancement is being designed. The results include design approach recommendations, enhancement strategies and a model for estimating the potential benefits related to enhancements features of the system design.

In action games, the computer’s behavior lacks diversity and human players are able to learn how the computer behaves by playing the same game over and over again. As a result, human players eventually grow tired of the game. Therefore, this paper proposes a method of imitating the behavior of human players by creating profiles of players from their play data. By imitating what many different players do, a greater variety of actions can be created.

The electronic treasure hunt developed this time uses location information and operates avatar. The participant competes for the point looking for the treasure arranged virtually. The feature of this game is that the treasure cannot be obtained if two people do not cooperate. From the experiments the following points became clear that participants evaluated highly the avatar operation system that used GPS location information. The cooperation system by which each player’s position became a point allowed location information to be used well.

The purpose of this study is to develop a game system that uses biofeedback to provide an attractive entertaining game. In general, negative biofeedback is used for relaxing users; however, in our game system positive biofeedback is used for arousing them. We assumed that the latter biofeedback method could affect the users’ emotional states effectively; that is why we call it positive biofeedback. We used skin conductance response (SCR) as a biofeedback signal in our game system because SCR can effectively reflect the mental agitation of users. Therefore, we developed a teddy bear robot to be the motion media for providing feeding back the measured SCR information to users. When the value user SCR increases during interaction with this robot, the robot starts moving its arms and head in relation to the transition of SCR values so that it appears to be agitated. We then conducted two experiments to measure the participants’ SCR transitions. From the results of these experiments, we can state that the users’ emotional attachment to the robot and the robot’s behaviors in reaction to user biological signals are important cues that create positive biofeedback.

This paper proposes Social Landscapes, a visual interface which supports exploring by visually displaying histories of user and interrelations between users in a social networking site. Social Landscapes visualizes the activities of each user through diary postings and the access status to online services, and the number of comments to the diary as landscape scenery. We describe a case study that did not emphasize the analysis of the total social network structure or for user search, but rather emphasized a visualized interface for improving the user’s recognition of other users and friends in SNS.

In this paper, we propose a natural and intuitive bare hand interface for wearable augmented reality environment using the video see-through HMD. The proposed methodology automatically learned color distribution of the hand object through the template matching and tracking the hand objects by using the Meanshift algorithm under the dynamic background and moving camera. Furthermore, even though users are not wearing gloves, extracting of the hand object from arm is enabled by applying distance transform and using radius of palm. The fingertip points are extracted by convex hull processing and assigning constraint to the radius of palm area. Thus, users don’t need attaching fiducial markers on fingertips. Moreover, we implemented several applications to demonstrate the usefulness of proposed algorithm. For example, “AR-Memo" can help user to memo in the real environment by using a virtual pen which is augmented on the user’s finger, and user can also see the saved memo on his/her palm by augmenting it while moving around anywhere. Finally, we experimented performance and did usability studies.

Several attempts have been made to broaden the traditional focus on the efficient achievement of goals and incorporate a fuller understanding of additional aspects of the user experience. These approaches are especially interesting for the area of entertainment computing, where the efficient completion of tasks is not the main focus. The presented research project investigates the role of non-instrumental aspects as hedonics and aesthetics and their interplay with emotions in shaping the user experience. After introducing an integrative model, a first application of the approach in a study of user experience with digital audio players is described. The findings show that this approach offers a wealth of insights that can be used to improve product design from a user perspective.

This paper presents an interactive, collaborative virtual heritage system that employs tangible interfaces to make learning experience more interesting and effective. The system is designed for a group of users collaboratively play games to learn a Korean cultural heritage site, the ‘Moyang’ castle. While most virtual heritage applications focus on the reconstruction of objects or places, it aims to encourage the visitors to get more involved with the activities and increase social interaction to develop collaborative learning experiences. This paper describes an overview of cultural meanings behind the ‘Moyang’ castle and some details in the system design and implementation for interactive education.

To keep an online game interesting to its users, it is important to know them. In this paper, in order to characterize user characteristics, we discuss clustering of online-game users based on their trails using Self Organization Map (SOM). As inputs to SOM, we introduce transition probabilities between landmarks in the targeted game map. An experiment is conducted confirming the effectiveness of the presented technique.

Communities play a vital role in online gaming world for promoting sustainability, and with the increasing popularity of multiplayer online games, they are becoming internationalized. While most online games allow players to communicate and collaborate with virtually any people in the world throughout the game related activities, little has been discussed on the communication support among the players speaking different languages. In this paper, we analyze the communication methods that can be used to facilitate various types of interactions in world wide online game communities, and suggest possible enhancements of them.

In this paper, we discuss why Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG) need to attract both

hardcore

and

casual

players and study the evolution of MMOG features for this purpose.

Virtual reality techniques have been introduced to propose the intuitive interface in virtual entertainment environments. We introduce the intuitive and natural interaction interface supporting the high-precision hand operations. In this paper, we describe the novel sensing mechanism of finger tracking with fast refresh rate and high resolution.

This paper proposes a GPU-based approach to real-time skinning animation of large crowds, where each character is animated independently of the others. In the first pass of the proposed approach, skinning is done by a pixel shader and the transformed vertex data are written into the render target texture. With the transformed vertices, the second pass renders the large crowds. The proposed approach is attractive for real-time applications such as video games.

This paper presents a barehanded interaction method for augmented reality games based on human hand gestures. Point features are tracked from input video frames and the motion of moving objects is computed. The moving patterns of the motion trajectories are used to determine whether the motion is an intended gesture. A smooth trajectory toward one of virtual objects or menus is classified as an intended gesture and the corresponding action is invoked. To prove the validity of the proposed method, we implemented two simple augmented reality applications: a gesture-based music player and a virtual basketball game. The experiments for three untrained users indicate that the accuracy of menu activation according to the intended gestures is 94% for normal speed gestures and 84% for fast and abrupt gestures.

In this paper, we propose to design an easy to use physics application programming interface (PHI) with support for pluggable physics library. The goal is to create physically realistic 3D graphics environments and integrate real-time physics simulation into games seamlessly with advanced features, such as interactive character simulation and vehicle dynamics. The actual implementation of the simulation was designed to be independent, interchangeable and separated from the user interface of the API. We demonstrate the utility of the middleware by simulating versatile vehicle dynamics and generating quality reactive human motions.

We developed an advertising system that enables users to interact with advertisements on a large display wall without any physical contact. The system recognizes positions of bodies or hands of users in front of the display by stereo cameras. The system recognizes a distance between a user and the display as the user’s interests in the advertisement, and changes two display modes according to the distance. One of the modes shows advertisements as many as possible to attract interests of passers-by. The other allows a user to interact with the advertisement on the display by recognizing a gesture of the user.

This paper focuses on interactive applications design. We consider that interactive applications’ acceptability can be improved by enhancing their genre dimension, which is inherent in any communication activity. Moreover, we notice that human cognitive predisposition to follow principles of verbal interactions can be helpful to structure the interactions that occur between a user and an interactive application. This paper presents design elements derived from the two former theories and illustrates how these elements are used to describe interactions of a ludo-educative application.

In this paper, we present a new method for creating shadow texture atlas with which we can represent the self-shadow. Shadow texture atlas is a texture atlas with shadow information in each texel. Shadow texture is effective to represent high-quality shadow using the graphics hardware because it stores shadow information as color unlike shadow map which stores depth. However, it cannot represent the self-shadow and it takes a long time to create a shadow texture. To overcome these problems we present shadow texture atlas method. Shadow texture atlas can also represent self-shadow information. Moreover, we use shadow map to create shadow texture atlas instead of drawing all shadow casters. Our experimental result shows that our method performs at linear time and its speed is similar to the traditional shadow map method. Furthermore in comparison with shadow map method, our method can use mipmap filtering which is hard to achieve with shadow map method.

In this paper, we describe the development of a SKKU glove, a wearable computing device for entertainment and games that can be used in wireless environments. The glove is equipped with chording keyboard mechanism for natural and flexible input and control of games, and a set of accelerator sensors for gathering information from hand gestures. Since the glove can be worn and used only in one hand, it not only provide a natural way to access games, but also helps the gamers with disabilities, particularly those who can use only one hand. The system configuration and the interface for input and control for the glove are presented.

From the results of two Human behavior studies in small group interactions we constructed iteratively a Collaborative Virtual Environment named “VIRSTORY”. This system is a digital storytelling with speech and 3D gesture recognition technologies using like input devices. It includes several modules: multimodal interaction module, behavior module to animate autonomous expressive characters, etc.