Perceptions of the value of site visits in assisting undergraduate learning

This study evaluates the usefulness of site visits in assisting the learning experience of undergraduate students. The research is based on a survey of undergraduates students enrolled in built-environment courses in property and construction. Past research has shown that it is becoming more difficult to provide students with access to building sites to provide learning experiences. While students were positive about the benefits of real site visits, universities have been encouraged to develop virtual approaches to teaching construction technology using photographs, movies and computer simulations.

This strategic research investigates the perceptions of students towards a number of different site visits each with particular characteristics. This was done to examine the most effective use of real site visits within an undergraduate course. The results identified that some aspects of construction technology could be easily replaced by computer simulations and the like. However, other aspects of the curriculum are more effectively taught by retaining real site visits. The research was intended to provide a more structured approach to determining the value of site-based learning in construction related courses.

Simultaneous presentation of measured and calculated environmental results

Continuous measurement of internal and external environmental parameters is critical to our understanding of how buildings perform. Yet, the quantity and variety of time-series data can be quite overwhelming as well as onerous to decipher and present. In addition to this, is the fact that several of the collected data are useless in their raw format unless processed through algorithms to obtain identifiable and meaningful results.
These circumstances challenge the conventional way we present accumulated data and their processed outputs in order to get a better understanding of how and why the environmental performance occurred. It would be ideal if all of the collected and processed data could be presented in a simultaneous, yet, useful format. It is exactly the intention of this paper to suggest and present such a process as well as its format.
An example case study is provided where several parameters (air velocity, mean radiant temperature, humidity and air temperature) are measured periodically to calculate a time-series of internal comfort performance. However, external conditions of solar radiation and solar position as well as air temperature drive the interior building surface temperatures and help to explain the end result of internal comfort.
A program has been written to present the various sets of data graphically, in an integrated manner, animated as a function of time. The animation shows solar position, a cursor scanning weather data, the changing infra-red image and a representation of the resulting internal comfort performance throughout the
monitored period.

Golden grove

Golden Grove was designed as an integral part of the redevelopment of the public space area at the university of Sydney's Darlington Campus. It uses a combination of ground patterning, dispersed and embedded lighting and stenciled poetic inscriptions to animation, of rhythmic interconnectivity across place and time. The ground pattern of the work follows that of the constellation Pleiades, to the arrangement of nine focal points across the campus.

Byron Bay hysteria

"This time lapse video work of De Bruyn's evidences the bold rythmic structures found in his nahd-painted 16 mm film work. A prolific fimmaler, de Bruyn is a master of his craft and shows in this work that that mastery knows no bounds in this format."  Fractured Light exhibition catalogue

To solaris and beyond

The great Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem—author of the book, Solaris, on which two movies have been based—died last month. This week, The Philosopher's Zone explores the philosophy underlying his visionary work.

Revelation International Film Festival (11th : 2008 : Perth, WA.)

Machinima revelations presents cutting-edge machinima experiments from around the world. Machinima is filmaking by combining the techniques of filmaking, animation production and the technology of real-time 3D game technologies.  Machinima Revelations curator Dr Leon Marvell from Deakin University presented cutting-edge machinima experiments from around the world and Australia, including the award-winning feature-length machinima, Stolen Life by Australian pioneer Peter Rasmussen

Painting that moves : digital realism and the single moving image

Explores space and object relations in a digital 3-D animation production, "Moving-Image". The exegesis examines these relations through an analysis of pictorial realism in painting. The illusion of three dimensional forms in the space of the computer screen is contextualised by investigation of the work's underlying digital conditions.

Choreotopography

Choreotopography is the result of a collaboration between the Melbourne Ballet Company and Deakin University's Motion.Lab. It is a ballet performance that uses 3D and interactive technology, requiring the aduience to wear 3D glasses.

Kristeva reframed : interpreting key thinkers for the arts

For Kristeva, in a world immersed in readymade images, art or aesthetic experience is a practice that constitutes both a subject (a sense of self) and an object that is able to transform meaning and consciousness.Kristeva Reframed examines key ideas in Kristeva's work to show how they are most relevant to artists, and how they can be applied in interpreting artworks. With examples from the paintings of Van Gogh and Picasso, the work of contemporary feminist painters, the photography of Bill Henson and the film and animation work of Van Sowerine, Estelle Barrett demonstrates how Kristeva can illuminate the relationships between artist and art object, between artists, artworks and audiences, and between art and knowledge. Through these relationships she explores what Kristeva's work reveals about the role and function of art in society and offers a smooth passage through Kristeva's ideas and her relevance to visual culture.

Ten years of environmental university building

The authors have been involved in over ten years of environmental consulting and research on university buildings. Numerous simulations and measurement studies have occurred over this period of time. The intentions have always been to improve and optimise the environmental performing aspects of a building. This paper is a reporting of the implemented strategies, their pre-building research investigation as well as their operational outcomes. Their successes and failures are discussed here. This research is intended as a feedback loop to future design specification, commissioning and maintenance improvements. In hindsight many of the environmental concepts, when executed as planned, were successful. However, often those requiring extensive control, such as lighting, ventilation and mechanical air-conditioning were a failure. The observations between simulation and actual performance are also noted. The paper includes discussion about some of the obstacles in building procurement which can hinder the result of a good environmental performing building.

Can virtual world property be considered a digital good?

What types of goods should be considered digital goods? This paper discusses the question of whether virtual property, such as items available in virtual world environments like Linden Lab’s Second Life and Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, should be considered a valid digital good. The makeup of a virtual property items are explored in this paper and their key features compared and contrasted with that of digital goods. Common examples of digital goods include: electronic books, software, digital music and digital movies. These goods are considered a tangible commodity, that is they have an unlimited supply and secondly they are in a digital/binary form (a sequence of 1’s and 0s’). When looking at why a virtual property items should be included in the category of ‘digital goods’, it is important to consider how items in a virtual world come to exist and how the availability of these items are often controlled by publishers and developers. The aim of this paper is show that digital goods should not be limited to the traditional views such as electronic books, software, music and movies; but in fact the term ‘digital good’ should also include the active market of virtual property
items.

It was an experience that totally blew up in my face : Steve Railsback and Turkey shoot

The schlock horror film Turkey Shoot is widely regarded as one of the most disreputable Australian exploitation titles in a genre already well noted for controversy. This short article frames the controversies that surround the film from production to critical reception, which sets the scene for an interview by Mark Harley with the film's star Steve Railsback, who reflects on the movie's production, his role, the controversy and the film's reception.

Identifying annotations for adventure game generation from fiction text

Recent advancements in Text-to-Scene research have lead to the development of systems which automatically extract key concepts from the text of a fiction book and generate computer animated movies depicting the story. Extracting such annotations from raw fiction text is a laborious process and so in this work we evaluate appropriate candidates to serve as the basis for the required annotations for generating interactive virtual worlds.

We validate our choice by generating adventure games: inter-active virtual worlds which create a stylized representation of the environment described in the text, populate it with characters related to the story and define game goals related to the plot of the fiction story. Our prototype produces a fully playable game, making use of an existing open-source game engine.

The process is evaluated using user tests in which participants are asked to measure the accuracy with which the game represents the events, characters and goals described in the story. The response indicates that the chosen annotation set is sufficient to define a game that is a plausibly acceptable representation of the text.

Animated feather coats using field lines

The tedious task of manually placing feathers on computer animated objects involves aligning feathers, ensuring that they do not insect each other or penetrate the surface, deforming every feather to match the local surface features, and ensuring that the feather coat is consistent when the underlying object is animated.

We present a technique for generating a feather coat over an object. Feather orientation is specified quickly and easily, feathers are deformed while ensuring collision prevention, and the coat can be animated. We create a vector field in the space surrounding the body object and deform feathers to align with the field lines. The non-intersection property of the field lines ensures that feather intersections are avoided. We provide a formulation of a suitable vector field and demonstrate that it is capable of producing realistic feather coats. The process can easily be integrated into the work-flow of standard modelling and animation processes.

We show examples of feather coat creation on a range of objects, proving that field line based placement of feather coats provides the desired functionality for feather modelling and animation.