RFID tag localization with virtual multi-antenna systems

In questa tesi si sono valutate le prestazioni di un sistema di localizzazione multi-antenna di tag radio frequency identification (RFID) passivi in ambiente indoor. Il sistema, composto da un reader in movimento che percorre una traiettoria nota, ha come obiettivo localizzare il tag attraverso misure di fase; più precisamente la differenza di fase tra il segnale di interrogazione, emesso dal reader, e il segnale ricevuto riflesso dal tag che è correlato alla distanza tra di essi. Dopo avere eseguito una ricerca sullo stato dell’arte di queste tecniche e aver derivato il criterio maximum likelihood (ML) del sistema si è proceduto a valutarne le prestazioni e come eventuali fattori agissero sul risultato di localizzazione attraverso simulazioni Matlab. Come ultimo passo si è proceduto a effettuare una campagna di misure, testando il sistema in un ambiente reale. Si sono confrontati i risultati di localizzazione di tutti gli algoritmi proposti quando il reader si muove su una traiettoria rettilinea e su una traiettoria angolare, cercando di capire come migliorare i risultati.

Proposta di sottotitolaggio della serie tv "los quien"

L'obiettivo di questo progetto è stato il sottotitolaggio del primo episodio della sitcom spagnola "Los Quién". Nel primo capitolo viene presentata la traduzione audiovisiva e diverse tecniche di trasferimento del linguaggio per i prodotti audiovisivi, in particolare viene approfondito il sottotitolaggio e le sue caratteristiche. Il secondo capitolo è dedicato all'ampliamento sulle fiction e sulle sitcom, presentando, inoltre, la serie e i personaggi. Il terzo capitolo presenta la proposta di sottotitolaggio. Il quarto e ultimo capitolo si concentra sull'analisi delle diverse difficoltà linguistiche incontrate e il commento sulle strategie traduttive adottate.

Progettazione e realizzazione di un'applicazione Android per il Virtual Dressing Room

Il lavoro svolto per la tesi consiste nella realizzazione di un'applicazione Android che permetta all’utente di scattare o caricare dalla gallery una foto personale e prelevare da una ListView fotografie di abiti da provare mediante trascinamento di quest’ultimi sulla foto dell’utente. Le fasi di lavoro sono state principalmente quattro: - Ricerca sullo stato dell’arte della tecnologia legata al Virtual Dressing Room (storia, elenco e descrizione dei metodi utilizzati da piattaforme esistenti, esempi reali di queste metodologie) - Progettazione con individuazione degli obiettivi e featuring dell’applicazione - Implementazione dell'applicazione (creazione dei layout e codice java delle activity:inserimento taglie e scelta uomo/donna, scatto/caricamento foto, creazione del database e utilizzo mediante ListView, visualizzazione e gestione del carrello). Scrittura del volume di tesi (introduzione e descrizione della tecnologia, progettazione, implementazione con descrizione su Android SDK, Android Studio e implementazione con descrizione dei layout e classi).

Methods and Applications in Interactive Broadcasting

Interactive TV technology has been addressed in many previous works, but there is sparse research on the topic of interactive content broadcasting and how to support the production process. In this article, the interactive broadcasting process is broadly defined to include studio technology and digital TV applications at consumer set-top boxes. In particular, augmented reality studio technology employs smart-projectors as light sources and blends real scenes with interactive computer graphics that are controlled at end-user terminals. Moreover, TV producer-friendly multimedia authoring tools empower the development of novel TV formats. Finally, the support for user-contributed content raises the potential to revolutionize the hierarchical TV production process, by introducing the viewer as part of content delivery chain.

Digital Illumination for Augmented Studios

Virtual studio technology plays an important role for modern television productions. Blue-screen matting is a common technique for integrating real actors or moderators into computer generated sceneries. Augmented reality offers the possibility to mix real and virtual in a more general context. This article proposes a new technological approach for combining real studio content with computergenerated information. Digital light projection allows a controlled spatial, temporal, chrominance and luminance modulation of illumination – opening new possibilities for TV studios.

An Architecture for End-User TV Content Enrichment

This paper proposes an extension to the televisionwatching paradigm that permits an end-user to enrich broadcast content. Examples of this enriched content are: virtual edits that allow the order of presentation within the content to be changed or that allow the content to be subsetted; conditional text, graphic or video objects that can be placed to appear within content and triggered by viewer interaction; additional navigation links that can be added to structure how other users view the base content object. The enriched content can be viewed directly within the context of the TV viewing experience. It may also be shared with other users within a distributed peer group. Our architecture is based on a model that allows the original content to remain unaltered, and which respects DRM restrictions on content reuse. The fundamental approach we use is to define an intermediate content enhancement layer that is based on the W3C’s SMIL language. Using a pen-based enhancement interface, end-users can manipulate content that is saved in a home PDR setting. This paper describes our architecture and it provides several examples of how our system handles content enhancement. We also describe a reference implementation for creating and viewing enhancements.

How to Improve the Production Process for interactive TV with semi-formal Methods

The central question for this paper is how to improve the production process by closing the gap between industrial designers and software engineers of television(TV)-based User Interfaces (UI) in an industrial environment. Software engineers are highly interested whether one UI design can be converted into several fully functional UIs for TV products with different screen properties. The aim of the software engineers is to apply automatic layout and scaling in order to speed up and improve the production process. However, the question is whether a UI design lends itself for such automatic layout and scaling. This is investigated by analysing a prototype UI design done by industrial designers. In a first requirements study, industrial designers had created meta-annotations on top of their UI design in order to disclose their design rationale for discussions with software engineers. In a second study, five (out of ten) industrial designers assessed the potential of four different meta-annotation approaches. The question was which annotation method industrial designers would prefer and whether it could satisfy the technical requirements of the software engineering process. One main result is that the industrial designers preferred the method they were already familiar with, which therefore seems to be the most effective one although the main objective of automatic layout and scaling could still not be achieved.

Generating Realistic Camera Shake for Virtual Scenes

When depicting both virtual and physical worlds, the viewer's impression of presence in these worlds is strongly linked to camera motion. Plausible and artist-controlled camera movement can substantially increase scene immersion. While physical camera motion exhibits subtle details of position, rotation, and acceleration, these details are often missing for virtual camera motion. In this work, we analyze camera movement using signal theory. Our system allows us to stylize a smooth user-defined virtual base camera motion by enriching it with plausible details. A key component of our system is a database of videos filmed by physical cameras. These videos are analyzed with a camera-motion estimation algorithm (structure-from-motion) and labeled manually with a specific style. By considering spectral properties of location, orientation and acceleration, our solution learns camera motion details. Consequently, an arbitrary virtual base motion, defined in any conventional animation package, can be automatically modified according to a user-selected style. In an animation package the camera motion base path is typically defined by the user via function curves. Another possibility is to obtain the camera path by using a mixed reality camera in motion capturing studio. As shown in our experiments, the resulting shots are still fully artist-controlled, but appear richer and more physically plausible.

Virtual Excursions: a new way to explore science in class

The educational platform Virtual Science Hub (ViSH) has been developed as part of the GLOBAL excursion European project. ViSH (http://vishub.org/) is a portal where teachers and scientist interact to create virtual excursions to science infrastructures. The main motivation behind the project was to connect teachers - and in consequence their students - to scientific institutions and their wide amount of infrastructures and resources they are working with. Thus the idea of a hub was born that would allow the two worlds of scientists and teachers to connect and to innovate science teaching. The core of the ViSH?s concept design is based on virtual excursions, which allow for a number of pedagogical models to be applied. According to our internal definition a virtual excursion is a tour through some digital context by teachers and pupils on a given topic that is attractive and has an educational purpose. Inquiry-based learning, project-based and problem-based learning are the most prominent approaches that a virtual excursion may serve. The domain specific resources and scientific infrastructures currently available on the ViSH are focusing on life sciences, nano-technology, biotechnology, grid and volunteer computing. The virtual excursion approach allows an easy combination of these resources into interdisciplinary teaching scenarios. In addition, social networking features support the users in collaborating and communicating in relation to these excursions and thus create a community of interest for innovative science teaching. The design and development phases were performed following a participatory design approach. An important aspect in this process was to create design partnerships amongst all actors involved, researchers, developers, infrastructure providers, teachers, social scientists, and pedagogical experts early in the project. A joint sense of ownership was created and important changes during the conceptual phase were implemented in the ViSH due to early user feedback. Technology-wise the ViSH is based on the latest web technologies in order to make it cross-platform compatible so that it works on several operative systems such as Windows, Mac or Linux and multi-device accessible, such as desktop, tablet and mobile devices. The platform has been developed in HTML5, the latest standard for web development, assuring that it can run on any modern browser. In addition to social networking features a core element on the ViSH is the virtual excursions editor. It is a web tool that allows teachers and scientists to create rich mash-ups of learning resources provided by the e-Infrastructures (i.e. remote laboratories and live webcams). These rich mash-ups can be presented in either slides or flashcards format. Taking advantage of the web architecture supported, additional powerful components have been integrated like a recommendation engine to provide personalized suggestions about educational content or interesting users and a videoconference tool to enhance real-time collaboration like MashMeTV (http://www.mashme.tv/).

OS TELEJORNAIS E A ERA DIGITAL: UM ESTUDO SOBRE AS TRANSFORMAÇÕES NO TRABALHO E NA CONSTRUÇÃO DAS NOTÍCIAS EM EMISSORAS REGIONAIS DO VALE DO PARAÍBA

Este trabalho dedica-se a examinar as principais mudanças que ocorrem no processo de construção da notícia nos telejornais regionais paulistas na última década. Objetivamos o estudo das tecnologias digitais conectadas e as consequentes alterações no trabalho dos profissionais envolvidos jornalistas, técnicos e engenheiros, a fim de entender os novos formatos aplicados na transmissão de conteúdo contando com o auxílio da internet. Para tanto, realizamos um estudo comparativo com duas emissoras da Região Metropolitana do Vale do Paraíba: TV Vanguarda, afiliada a Rede Globo, e a Tv Band Vale filiada ao Grupo Bandeirantes, que passaram por transformações em todas as dimensões da difusão de notícias com a digitalização dos seus processos tecnológicos e investimentos no ambiente virtual. Por meio da técnica de pesquisa observação participante chegou-se a conclusão de que a tecnologia é uma realidade adotada nas emissoras contribuindo para agilizar os trabalhos nas redações e aproximar o público dos telejornais.

OS TELEJORNAIS E A ERA DIGITAL: UM ESTUDO SOBRE AS TRANSFORMAÇÕES NO TRABALHO E NA CONSTRUÇÃO DAS NOTÍCIAS EM EMISSORAS REGIONAIS DO VALE DO PARAÍBA

Este trabalho dedica-se a examinar as principais mudanças que ocorrem no processo de construção da notícia nos telejornais regionais paulistas na última década. Objetivamos o estudo das tecnologias digitais conectadas e as consequentes alterações no trabalho dos profissionais envolvidos jornalistas, técnicos e engenheiros, a fim de entender os novos formatos aplicados na transmissão de conteúdo contando com o auxílio da internet. Para tanto, realizamos um estudo comparativo com duas emissoras da Região Metropolitana do Vale do Paraíba: TV Vanguarda, afiliada a Rede Globo, e a Tv Band Vale filiada ao Grupo Bandeirantes, que passaram por transformações em todas as dimensões da difusão de notícias com a digitalização dos seus processos tecnológicos e investimentos no ambiente virtual. Por meio da técnica de pesquisa observação participante chegou-se a conclusão de que a tecnologia é uma realidade adotada nas emissoras contribuindo para agilizar os trabalhos nas redações e aproximar o público dos telejornais.

Augmented and Virtual Reality techniques for footwear

The use of 3D imaging techniques has been early adopted in the footwear industry. In particular, 3D imaging could be used to aid commerce and improve the quality and sales of shoes. Footwear customization is an added value aimed not only to improve product quality, but also consumer comfort. Moreover, customisation implies a new business model that avoids the competition of mass production coming from new manufacturers settled mainly in Asian countries. However, footwear customisation implies a significant effort at different levels. In manufacturing, rapid and virtual prototyping is required; indeed the prototype is intended to become the final product. The whole design procedure must be validated using exclusively virtual techniques to ensure the feasibility of this process, since physical prototypes should be avoided. With regard to commerce, it would be desirable for the consumer to choose any model of shoes from a large 3D database and be able to try them on looking at a magic mirror. This would probably reduce costs and increase sales, since shops would not require storing every shoe model and the process of trying several models on would be easier and faster for the consumer. In this paper, new advances in 3D techniques coming from experience in cinema, TV and games are successfully applied to footwear. Firstly, the characteristics of a high-quality stereoscopic vision system for footwear are presented. Secondly, a system for the interaction with virtual footwear models based on 3D gloves is detailed. Finally, an augmented reality system (magic mirror) is presented, which is implemented with low-cost computational elements that allow a hypothetical customer to check in real time the goodness of a given virtual footwear model from an aesthetical point of view.

Appropriating Bimby on the Internet: Perspectives on technology mediated meals by a virtual brand community

It was Christmas day when an intriguing news piece about a kitchen technology was published in the Wall Street Journal in 2013 (Kowsmann, 2013). Immediately after, the piece went viral in the Portuguese (social) media (TV, blogs, press). It reported an odd 'obsession' of Portuguese consumers with a pricey German-made kitchen appliance - the Bimby (Figure 7.1) - during a difficult period of 'painful budget slashing in return for an international bailout'. The news piece served to unveil the irony: how come ''Western Europe's poorest country' could afford such an expensive technology 'that outsells high-end iPads [...] and is more popular on Facebook than the country's best-known rock band?' The journalistic piece advanced explanations for this technology craze: 'But the Portuguese love gadgets and seem determined, despite hard times, to maintain their tradition of regularly getting together for dinner. In this explanatory attempt, Bimby is portrayed as an intermediary that opens up the possibility for thinking about meal practices in a particular way, in this case, linking nation and meals through ideas around commensality.

C'era una volta il doppiaggio - Analisi del doppiaggio della varietà diacronica nella versione spagnola del primo episodio della serie tv Once Upon A Time

L’argomento principale di questa tesi è il doppiaggio. Nel primo capitolo ci inoltriamo nel mondo della traduzione audiovisiva, concentrandoci sulla storia del doppiaggio e sui processi che servono per portare le opere in paesi dove non si parla la lingua originale dei film e delle serie tv. Il secondo capitolo introduce la serie tv americana targata ABC Once Upon A Time. Vengono presentati trama, personaggi, temi e alcuni dati sulla distribuzione della serie in Italia e in Spagna. Il terzo capitolo invece, ci porta nel pieno dell’analisi del doppiaggio in italiano e in spagnolo del primo episodio della serie attraverso la comparazione con l’originale inglese e lo studio della varietà diacronica attraverso le formule di cortesia, il lessico, la fraseologia, i sintagmi verbali e la morfologia. In conclusione, il nostro scopo è quello di dimostrare che la scelta traduttiva adottata dalla Spagna è diversa da quella italiana, quest’ultima più simile all’originale inglese.