Using virtual reality modelling in cultural management, archiving and research

This paper outlines how the Ortelia project’s 3D virtual reality models have the capacity to assist our understanding of sites of cultural heritage. The VR investigation of such spaces can be a valuable tool in 'real world' empirical research in theatre and spatiality. Through a demonstration of two of Ortelia's VR models (an art gallery and a theatre), we suggest how we might consider interpreting cultural space and sites as contributing significantly to cultural capital. We also introduce the potential for human interaction in such venues through motion-capture to discuss the potential for assessing how humans interact in such contexts.

Cascading appearance-based features for visual voice activity detection

The detection of voice activity is a challenging problem, especially when the level of acoustic noise is high. Most current approaches only utilise the audio signal, making them susceptible to acoustic noise. An obvious approach to overcome this is to use the visual modality. The current state-of-the-art visual feature extraction technique is one that uses a cascade of visual features (i.e. 2D-DCT, feature mean normalisation, interstep LDA). In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of this technique for the task of visual voice activity detection (VAD), and analyse each stage of the cascade and quantify the relative improvement in performance gained by each successive stage. The experiments were conducted on the CUAVE database and our results highlight that the dynamics of the visual modality can be used to good effect to improve visual voice activity detection performance.

A world elsewhere : virtual reality, motion capture and early modern theatre

This paper investigates virtual reality representations of the 1599 Boar’s Head Theatre and the Rose Theatre, two renaissance places and spaces. These models become a “world elsewhere” in that they represent virtual recreations of these venues in as much detail as possible. The models are based on accurate archeological and theatre historical records and are easy to navigate particularly for current use. This paper demonstrates the ways in which these models can be instructive for reading theatre today. More importantly we introduce human figures onto the stage via motion capture which allows us to explore the potential between space, actor and environment. This facilitates a new way of thinking about early modern playwrights’ “attitudes to locality and localities large and small”. These venues are thus activated to intersect productively with early modern studies so that the paper can test the historical and contemporary limits of such research.

Constructing the hallucinations of psychosis in Virtual Reality

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder affecting 1-2% of the population and it is estimated 12-16% of hospital beds in Australia are occupied by patients with psychosis. The suicide rate for patients with this diagnosis is higher than that of the general population. Any technique which enhances training and treatment of this disorder will have a significant societal and economic impact. A significant research project using Virtual Reality (VR), in which both visual and auditory hallucinations are simulated, is currently being undertaken at the University of Queensland. The virtual environments created by the new software are expected to enhance the experiential learning outcomes of medical students by enabling them to experience the inner world of a patient with psychosis. In addition the Virtual Environment has the potential to provide a technologically advanced therapeutic setting where behavioral, exposure therapies can be conducted with exactly controlled exposure stimuli with an expected reduction in risk of harm. This paper reports on the current work of the project, previous stages of software development and future educational and clinical applications of the Virtual Environments. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Cyclist visibility at night : perceptions of visibility do not necessarily match reality

Visibility limitations make cycling at night particularly dangerous. We previously reported cyclists’ perceptions of their own visibility at night and identified clothing configurations that made them feel visible. In this study we sought to determine whether these self-perceptions reflect actual visibility when wearing these clothing configurations. In a closed-road driving environment, cyclists wore black clothing, a fluorescent vest, a reflective vest, or a reflective vest plus ankle and knee reflectors. Drivers recognised more cyclists wearing the reflective vest plus reflectors (90%) than the reflective vest alone (50%), fluorescent vest (15%) or black clothing (2%). Older drivers recognised the cyclists less often than younger drivers (51% vs 27%). The findings suggest that reflective ankle and knee markings are particularly valuable at night, while fluorescent clothing is not. Cyclists wearing fluorescent clothing may be at particular risk if they incorrectly believe themselves to be conspicuous to drivers at night.

Effect of optical aberrations on the color appearance of small defocused lights

We investigated influences of optics and surround area on color appearance of defocused, small narrow band photopic lights (1’ arc diameter, λmax 510 - 628 nm) centered within a black annulus and surrounded by a white field. Participants included seven normal trichromats with L- or M-cone biased ratios. We controlled chromatic aberration with elements of a Powell achromatizing lens and corrected higher-order aberrations with an adaptive-optics system. Longitudinal chromatic aberrations, but not monochromatic aberrations, are involved in changing appearance of small lights with defocus. Surround field structure is important because color changes were not observed when lights were presented on a uniform white surround.

A research opportunity : “3D-ROSE” : virtual reality preparation for children having radiotherapy or imaging procedures

Professor Christian Langton is a medical physicist at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. He has developed a way of preparing children who are about to have either radiotherapy or MRI imaging procedures and is seeking research partners to develop and test these further. This is a great opportunity for nurses interested in research, and who have access to a children’s hospital, to work with Professor Langton on some truly innovative, multidisciplinary research.

Rights versus reality : the difficulty of providing 'access to English' in Queensland Courts

This report was developed out of a Legal Practitioner on Trust Account Fund grant from the Department of Justice and Attorney-General in Queensland, to review the Aboriginal English in the Courts Handbook. Judges, Magistrates, barristers and court staff were interviewed about the Handbook. The findings extend beyond Aboriginal English into access to English in Queensland Courts. Recommendations are made about language difficulties faced by witnessed and the ability to the courts to respond to them.

Three primary school students’ cognition about 3D rotation in a virtual reality learning environment

This paper reports on three primary school students’ explorations of 3D rotation in a virtual reality learning environment (VRLE) named VRMath. When asked to investigate if you would face the same direction when you turn right 45 degrees first then roll up 45 degrees, or when you roll up 45 degrees first then turn right 45 degrees, the students found that the different order of the two turns ended up with different directions in the VRLE. This was contrary to the students’ prior predictions based on using pen, paper and body movements. The findings of this study showed the difficulty young children have in perceiving and understanding the non-commutative nature of 3D rotation and the power of the computational VRLE in giving students experiences that they rarely have in real life with 3D manipulations and 3D mental movements.

Editorial : knowledge-based development of cities : a myth or reality?

Urban development in the first decade of the 21st century has faced many challenges ranging from rapid to shrinking urbanisation, from emerging knowledge economy to global division of labour and from globalisation to climate change. Along with these challenges new concepts, such as essentialism, environmentalism and dematerialism, are emerged and started to influence the way urban development plans are prepared and visions for the development of cities are made. Beyond this, scholars, practitioners and decision-makers have also started to discuss the need for an new urban planning and development approach in order to achieve a development that is sustainable and knowledge-based. Limited successful examples of alternative planning and development approaches showcased potentials of moving towards a new plan-making mindset in the era of knowledge economy. This paper presents a new urban planning and development approach that is taking application ground in many parts of the globe, namely knowledge-based urban development. After providing the theoretical foundation and conceptual framework of knowledge-based urban development the paper discusses whether knowledge-based development of cities is a myth or a reality.

Knowledge-based development of cities : a myth or reality?

Urban development in the 21st decade of the 21st century has faced many challenges ranging from rapid to shrinking urbanisation, from emerging knowledge economy to global division of labour and from globalisation to climate change. Along with with these challenges new concepts, such as essentialism, environmentalism and dematerialism, are emerged and started to influence the way urban development plans are prepared and visions for the development of cities are made. Beyond this, scholars, practitioners and decision-makers have also started to discuss the need for an new urban planning and development approach in order to achieve a development that is sustainable and knowledge-based. Limited successful examples of alternative planning and development approaches showcased potentials of moving towards a new plan-making mindset in the era of knowledge economy. This paper presents a new urban planning and development approach that is taking application ground in many parts of the globe, namely knowledge-based urban development. After providing the theoretical foundation and conceptual framework of knowledge-based urban development the paper discusses whether knowledge-based development of cities is a myth or a reality.

Reproduction, mediation, and experience : virtual reality, motion capture and early modern theatre

This article investigates virtual reality representations of performance in London’s late sixteenth-century Rose Theatre, a venue that, by means of current technology, can once again challenge perceptions of space, performance, and memory. The VR model of The Rose represents a virtual recreation of this venue in as much detail as possible and attempts to recover graphic demonstrations of the trace memories of the performance modes of the day. The VR model is based on accurate archeological and theatre historical records and is easy to navigate. The introduction of human figures onto The Rose’s stage via motion capture allows us to explore the relationships between space, actor and environment. The combination of venue and actors facilitates a new way of thinking about how the work of early modern playwrights can be stored and recalled. This virtual theatre is thus activated to intersect productively with contemporary studies in performance; as such, our paper provides a perspective on and embodiment of the relation between technology, memory and experience. It is, at its simplest, a useful archiving project for theatrical history, but it is directly relevant to contemporary performance practice as well. Further, it reflects upon how technology and ‘re-enactments’ of sorts mediate the way in which knowledge and experience are transferred, and even what may be considered ‘knowledge.’ Our work provides opportunities to begin addressing what such intermedial confrontations might produce for ‘remembering, experiencing, thinking and imagining.’ We contend that these confrontations will enhance live theatre performance rather than impeding or disrupting contemporary performance practice. Our ‘paper’ is in the form of a video which covers the intellectual contribution while also permitting a demonstration of the interventions we are discussing.

Bayesian filtering over compressed appearance states

This paper presents a framework for performing real-time recursive estimation of landmarks’ visual appearance. Imaging data in its original high dimensional space is probabilistically mapped to a compressed low dimensional space through the definition of likelihood functions. The likelihoods are subsequently fused with prior information using a Bayesian update. This process produces a probabilistic estimate of the low dimensional representation of the landmark visual appearance. The overall filtering provides information complementary to the conventional position estimates which is used to enhance data association. In addition to robotics observations, the filter integrates human observations in the appearance estimates. The appearance tracks as computed by the filter allow landmark classification. The set of labels involved in the classification task is thought of as an observation space where human observations are made by selecting a label. The low dimensional appearance estimates returned by the filter allow for low cost communication in low bandwidth sensor networks. Deployment of the filter in such a network is demonstrated in an outdoor mapping application involving a human operator, a ground and an air vehicle.