Proceedings of the 10th international conference on disability, virtual reality and associated technologies (ICDVRAT 2014)

The proceedings of the conference

The spaces of the Wednesday Play (BBC TV 1964–1970): production, technology and style

The BBC television drama anthology The Wednesday Play, broadcast from 1964-70 on the BBC1 channel, was high-profile and often controversial in its time and has since been central to accounts of British television’s ‘golden age’. This article demonstrates that production technologies and methods were more diverse at that time than is now acknowledged, and that The Wednesday Play dramas drew both approving but also very critical responses from contemporary viewers and professional reviewers. This article analyses the ways that the physical spaces of production for different dramas in the series, and the different technologies of shooting and recording that were adopted in these production spaces, are associated with but do not determine aesthetic style. The adoption of single-camera location filming rather than the established production method of multi-camera studio videotaping in some of the dramas in the series has been important to The Wednesday Play’s significance, but each production method was used in different ways. The dramas drew their dramatic forms and aesthetic emphases from both theatre and cinema, as well as connecting with debates about the nature of drama for television. Institutional and regulatory frameworks such as control over staff working away from base, budgetary considerations and union agreements also impacted on decisions about how programmes were made. The article makes use of records from the BBC Written Archives Centre, as well as published scholarship. By placing The Wednesday Play in a range of overlapping historical contexts, its identity can be understood as transitional, differentiated and contested.

Cognitive and environmental factors influencing the process of spatial knowledge acquisition within virtual reality environments

As the fidelity of virtual environments (VE) continues to increase, the possibility of using them as training platforms is becoming increasingly realistic for a variety of application domains, including military and emergency personnel training. In the past, there was much debate on whether the acquisition and subsequent transfer of spatial knowledge from VEs to the real world is possible, or whether the differences in medium during training would essentially be an obstacle to truly learning geometric space. In this paper, the authors present various cognitive and environmental factors that not only contribute to this process, but also interact with each other to a certain degree, leading to a variable exposure time requirement in order for the process of spatial knowledge acquisition (SKA) to occur. The cognitive factors that the authors discuss include a variety of individual user differences such as: knowledge and experience; cognitive gender differences; aptitude and spatial orientation skill; and finally, cognitive styles. Environmental factors discussed include: Size, Spatial layout complexity and landmark distribution. It may seem obvious that since every individual's brain is unique - not only through experience, but also through genetic predisposition that a one size fits all approach to training would be illogical. Furthermore, considering that various cognitive differences may further emerge when a certain stimulus is present (e.g. complex environmental space), it would make even more sense to understand how these factors can impact spatial memory, and to try to adapt the training session by providing visual/auditory cues as well as by changing the exposure time requirements for each individual. The impact of this research domain is important to VE training in general, however within service and military domains, guaranteeing appropriate spatial training is critical in order to ensure that disorientation does not occur in a life or death scenario.

Using high-fidelity virtual reality to study perception in freely moving observers

Technological innovations have had a profound influence on how we study the sensory perception in humans and other animals. One example was the introduction of affordable computers, which radically changed the nature of visual experiments. It is clear that vision research is now at cusp of a similar shift, this time driven by the use of commercially available, low-cost, high- fidelity virtual reality (VR). In this review we will focus on: (a) the research questions VR allows experimenters to address and why these research questions are important, (b) the things that need to be considered when using VR to study human perception, (c) the drawbacks of current VR systems, and (d) the future direction vision research may take, now that VR has become a viable research tool.

'All in one stroke': Grimms' fairy tales and the TV-production of a new Germany

The article looks at the most recent TV adaptations of the Grimms’ fairy tales by public broadcasting. Realized and marketed as a season which started in 2008,the thirty-four currently existing individual films constitute a significant national project that presents highly appealing notions of the German past to an audience divided over national conflict and demands of globalization. With children and adolescents at the centre, the films offer the young as a generation of moral superiority that facilitates social harmony and moral consensus. This post-unification utopia is beautifully realized on screen but rests on very conservative assumptions about gender, social driving forces, and political order.

Schizophrenic urban reality: the changing urban landscapes of the Mediterranean region and developmental influences

This chapter considers aspects of urban design and associated identity of place that shifts over time and has to identify with aspects of economic pressures to develop as well as cultural concerns about change.

Taking advantage of contextualized interactions while users watch TV

While watching TV, viewers use the remote control to turn the TV set on and off, change channel and volume, to adjust the image and audio settings, etc. Worldwide, research institutes collect information about audience measurement, which can also be used to provide personalization and recommendation services, among others. The interactive digital TV offers viewers the opportunity to interact with interactive applications associated with the broadcast program. Interactive TV infrastructure supports the capture of the user-TV interaction at fine-grained levels. In this paper we propose the capture of all the user interaction with a TV remote control-including short term and instant interactions: we argue that the corresponding captured information can be used to create content pervasively and automatically, and that this content can be used by a wide variety of services, such as audience measurement, personalization and recommendation services. The capture of fine grained data about instant and interval-based interactions also allows the underlying infrastructure to offer services at the same scale, such as annotation services and adaptative applications. We present the main modules of an infrastructure for TV-based services, along with a detailed example of a document used to record the user-remote control interaction. Our approach is evaluated by means of a proof-of-concept prototype which uses the Brazilian Digital TV System, the Ginga-NCL middleware.

Demonstration of Closed Circuit TV by filming Wiliam C. H. Meyer in an Automotive classroom at the New York Trade School

Depiction of closed circuit TV students at the New York Trade School filming a voltage regulator check performed by William C. H. Meyer. Original caption reads, "Closed-circuit TV takes a class at the New York Trade School into the Automotive Shop where William C. H. Meyer, head of the Automotive Department, demonstrates a voltage-regulator check. Students Robert Niefeld (left) and Denis Mahoney serve as cameramen." Black and white photograph part of series of four photographs accompanying a press release of the New York Trade School announcing the demonstration of a new technique in closed-circuit TV developed at the New York Trade School.

Student at work with closed-circuit TV

A student in the Closed-circuit TV Dept. at the New York Trade School is shown working. Black and white photograph.

Framtagande av kravspecifikation beträffande en integrationav två informations-system vid Banverket Telenät

Detta PM är resultatet av ett arbete som är utfört vid Banverket Telenät i Borlänge. Målet var att leverera en kravspecifikation över en integration mellan systemen Ärling och DNA. Syftet med examensarbetet var att belysa de bakomliggande orsakerna som skapar behovet av en integration.Banverket Telenät har idag kund och beställareinformation i flera databaser. Uppdatering och underhåll av dessa databaser är ett problem för verksamheten. För att upprätthålla konsistent information så önskas en integration av kund- beställareinformationen.Vi fick som uppdrag att framställa en kravspecifikation över hur en integration av kund och beställareinformation kunde möjliggöras. Arbetet resulterade i en kravspecifikation som levererades till Banverket Telenät.

Kan egenvårdsutbildning ge kunskaper som leder till ökad livskvalitet och att fler patienter slutar röka? : En jämförelse av två olika omhändertagandenav KOL patienter i primärvården.En kvasiexperimentell studie

Syftet med studien var att jämföra livskvalitet, kunskap om KOL och antal patienter som inlett ett rökstopp där en grupp erhöll standard vård och en annan grupp förutom standard vård även fick ett strukturerat omhändertagande på en distriktssköterskeledd KOL- mottagning med undervisning i egenvård.Studien genomfördes med kvasiexperimentell design. Urvalet var 52 patienter från primärvården med diagnosen KOL. Patienterna matchades utifrån kön, sjukdomens svårighetsgrad och slumpades sen till två grupper, en interventionsgrupp och en jämförandegrupp. Jämförandegruppen erhöll standardvård medan interventionsgruppen utöver standardvård erhöll två utbildningsbesök i egenvård hos astma KOL-sjuksköterskan på en vårdcentral i mellansverige.Som datainsamlingsmetod har två enkäter använts. En enkät som innehöll frågor om kön, ålder, civilstånd, utbildning, upplevd kunskap om KOL och rökstatus samt en enkät som hade till syfte att ge information om hur andningsbesvären påverkar patientens livskvalitet. Båda grupperna har svarat på enkäterna vid två tillfällen, vid det första besöket och vid det sista besöket efter tre månader. Interventionsgruppen har däremellan fått två utbildningsbesök.Resultaten visade statistiskt säkerställda skillnader mellan grupperna gällande livskvalitet, rökstopp och kunskaper om KOL. Interventionsgruppen hade fått minskade andningsbesvär, hade ökat sin fysiska aktivitet och fått en bättre psykosocial hälsa. Medan jämförande gruppen hade försämrats något i alla dessa avseenden. I interventionsgruppen hade sex av sexton rökande patienter slutat att röka, medan ingen hade slutat av de fjorton rökande patienterna i jämförandegruppen. Patienterna i interventions- gruppen hade också väsentligen större kunskaper om sin sjukdom jämfört med patienterna i jämförandegruppen.