AMUSEVR: A Virtual Reality Authoring Environment for Immersive Mulsemedia Applications

To meet the demand for mulsemedia (multiple sensorial media) content production, numerous tools exist, among which many present the currently typical approach providing 2D content organized in timelines. However, when it comes to 360° content where 3D spatial positioning is necessary, neither consensus on authoring methodology nor widely-adopted approaches to design exist. In order to fulfll this gap, we propose AMUSEVR, a virtual-reality environment for mulsemedia application development. In addition to supporting various media and sensory effect types, AMUSEVR allows authors to create and visualize content dynamically using VR technology. We evaluated AMUSEVR with an authoring experiment with users, using UEQ questionnaires, and obtained promising results.

First-person Cinematographic Videogames

We present and explore the fruitfulness of “first-person cinematographic videogames,” a game model we have devised for the promotion of cultural, environmental, and territorial heritage. To support and foster the development of these type of games, we have developed a Web-based user-friendly authoring environment, extensively presented in the article. While employing standard first-person point-and-click game mechanics, the game model's distinctive feature is that the game environment is not based on a digital reconstruction (3D model) of the real-world settings but on cinematographic techniques combining videos and photos of existing places, integrating videoclips of mostly practical effects to obtain the interactivity typical of the first-person point-and-click adventure games. Our goal with such a game model is to mobilise mechanisms of engendering affection for real-world places when they become settings of the game world, arousing in the player forms of affection, attachment, and desire to visit them.

A Chatbot Architecture for Promoting Youth Resilience

E-health technologies have potential to provide scalable and accessible interventions for youth mental health. As part of an ecosystem of e-screening and e-therapy tools for New Zealand young people, a dialog agent, Headstrong, has been designed to promote resilience with methods grounded in cognitive behavioral therapy and positive psychology. This paper describes the architecture underlying the chatbot. The architecture supports a range of over 20 activities delivered in a 4-week program by relatable personas. The architecture provides a visual authoring interface to its content management system. In addition to supporting the original adolescent resilience chatbot, the architecture has been reused to create a 3-week ‘stress-detox’ intervention for undergraduates, and subsequently for a chatbot to support young people with the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, with all three systems having been used in field trials. The Headstrong architecture illustrates the feasibility of creating a domain-focused authoring environment in the context of e-therapy that supports non-technical expert input and rapid deployment.

Representation and Presentation of Culinary Tradition as Cultural Heritage

This paper presents a knowledge representation framework and provides tools to allow the representation and presentation of the tangible and intangible dimensions of culinary tradition as cultural heritage including the socio-historic context of its evolution. The representation framework adheres to and extends the knowledge representation standards for the Cultural Heritage (CH) domain while providing a widely accessible web-based authoring environment to facilitate the representation activities. In strong collaboration with social sciences and humanities, this work allows the exploitation of ethnographic research outcomes by providing a systematic approach for the representation of culinary tradition in the form of recipes, both in an abstract form for their preservation and in a semantic representation of their execution captured on-site during ethnographic research.

Bite-Sized Virtual Reality Learning Applications: A Pattern-Based Immersive Authoring Environment

Bite-sized learning is a current educational trend in which educators divide content into relatively small, easily comprehensible chunks, called nuggets. In this paper, we introduce an authoring toolkit that relies on VR implementation of nuggets and show that a nugget-based approach is also facilitating the authoring of VR learning content. In particular, we present Immersive Nugget Tiles (IN-Tiles), a novel authoring toolkit aimed at authors who are not experts in VR. With IN-Tiles, manipulating VR nuggets and authoring VR learning content can be directly accomplished within a virtual environment allowing authors to immediately experience the results of their authoring efforts in VR. We discuss the underlying concepts of IN-Tiles, specifically how to visualize VR nuggets in a virtual environment and how to present affordances that support authoring and manipulating VR nuggets. We report the results of a user study where we evaluated the IN-Tiles toolkit and compared it to a conventional 2D authoring environment that also relies on component-based VR. The results support the hypothesis that nugget-based immersive authoring tools are suitable to create bitesized VR applications successfully and that authoring directly in VR has an added value particularly for authors who are no IT specialists.

Rilievo: Artistic Scene Authoring via Interactive Height Map Extrusion in VR

The authors present a virtual authoring environment for artistic creation in VR. It enables the effortless conversion of 2D images into volumetric 3D objects. Artistic elements in the input material are extracted with a convenient VR-based segmentation tool. Relief sculpting is then performed by interactively mixing different height maps. These are automatically generated from the input image structure and appearance. A prototype of the tool is showcased in an analog-virtual artistic workflow in collaboration with a traditional painter. It combines the expressiveness of analog painting and sculpting with the creative freedom of spatial arrangement in VR.

OUT-OF-THE-BOX INTEGRATED, COLLABORATIVE, MULTI-AUTHORING, MANAGED ENVIROMENT FOR THE DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION OF LARGE YACHTS

Modern computational technology available to the large yacht industry spans Naval Architecture and ship building disciplines but only rarely are tools used synergistically and processes connected, let alone integrated. Nonetheless, an Out-Of-The-Box Integrated, Collaborative, Multi-Authoring Environment for the Design and Construction of Large Yachts composed by a heterogeneous software pool spanning 3D modelling, weight engineering, CFD, structural analysis & fatigue, seakeeping, stability, CAD, etc. is available, today. The corresponding non-linear work flow is defined for practical application with no requirements for specialist training or specialized staff past Naval Architecture education for some and following LEAN and AGILE business models and strategies. Commonly used software tools are employed across the enterprise’s landscape to cover all salient activities and processes. A quasi-PLM perspective is made possible by a structured information management process and the creation and maintenance of unique information models which feed the Work In Progress and Contractual deliverable archives.