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.

A conceptual map about alternating current circuits

Teachers are deeply concerned on how to be more effective in our task of teaching. We must organize the contents of our specific area providing them with a logical configuration, for which we must know the mental structure of the students that we have in the classroom. We must shape this mental structure, in a progressive manner, so that they can assimilate the contents that we are trying to transfer, to make the learning as meaningful as possible. In the generative learning model, the links before the stimulus delivered by the teacher and the information stored in the mind of the learner requires an important effort by the student, who should build new conceptual meanings. That effort, which is extremely necessary for a good learning, sometimes is the missing ingredient so that the teaching-learning process can be properly assimilated. In electrical circuits, which we know are perfectly controlled and described by Ohm's law and Kirchhoff's two rules, there are two concepts that correspond to the following physical quantities: voltage and electrical resistance. These two concepts are integrated and linked when the concept of current is presented. This concept is not subordinated to the previous ones, it has the same degree of inclusiveness and gives rise to substantial relations between the three concepts, materializing it into a law: The Ohm, which allows us to relate and to calculate any of the three physical magnitudes, two of them known. The alternate current, in which both the voltage and the current are reversed dozens of times per second, plays an important role in many aspects of our modern life, because it is universally used. Its main feature is that its maximum voltage is easily modifiable through the use of transformers, which greatly facilitates its transfer with very few losses. In this paper, we present a conceptual map so that it is used as a new tool to analyze in a logical manner the underlying structure in the alternate current circuits, with the objective of providing the students from Sciences and Engineering majors with another option to try, amongst all, to achieve a significant learning of this important part of physics.

Constrained self-organizing feature map to preserve feature extraction topology

In many classification problems, it is necessary to consider the specific location of an n-dimensional space from which features have been calculated. For example, considering the location of features extracted from specific areas of a two-dimensional space, as an image, could improve the understanding of a scene for a video surveillance system. In the same way, the same features extracted from different locations could mean different actions for a 3D HCI system. In this paper, we present a self-organizing feature map able to preserve the topology of locations of an n-dimensional space in which the vector of features have been extracted. The main contribution is to implicitly preserving the topology of the original space because considering the locations of the extracted features and their topology could ease the solution to certain problems. Specifically, the paper proposes the n-dimensional constrained self-organizing map preserving the input topology (nD-SOM-PINT). Features in adjacent areas of the n-dimensional space, used to extract the feature vectors, are explicitly in adjacent areas of the nD-SOM-PINT constraining the neural network structure and learning. As a study case, the neural network has been instantiate to represent and classify features as trajectories extracted from a sequence of images into a high level of semantic understanding. Experiments have been thoroughly carried out using the CAVIAR datasets (Corridor, Frontal and Inria) taken into account the global behaviour of an individual in order to validate the ability to preserve the topology of the two-dimensional space to obtain high-performance classification for trajectory classification in contrast of non-considering the location of features. Moreover, a brief example has been included to focus on validate the nD-SOM-PINT proposal in other domain than the individual trajectory. Results confirm the high accuracy of the nD-SOM-PINT outperforming previous methods aimed to classify the same datasets.

[Draft of an advertisement for subscriptions for a celestial map, 1807?]

One-page document containing a draft of a proposal for subscriptions for the printing of a celestial map.

Proposal and recommendations for a celestial planisphere, or, map of the heavens, 1807-1810

This folder contains a broadside with an 1807 printed proposal for a Mercator celestial map that is appended with a handwritten list of subscribers, dated December 1810, as well as two copies of printed recommendations for the map.

Prehistoric man, Hall of the Stone Age of the Old World / by Henry Field, Assistant Curator of Physical Anthropology. Foreword by Berthold Laufer -- 8 plates in photogravure and 1 map.

no.31(1933)

Primitive hunters of Australia / by Wilfrid D. Hambly, Assistant Curator of African Ethnology. 12 plates in photogravure and 1 map.

no.32(1936)

A copy of the general map the most part compiled from the actual survey by order of the commisioners appointed to settle the partition line between the provinces of New York and New Jersey : manuscript map, 1769

Map showing the whole of New Jersey and its borders with as well as part of Pennsylvania and New York. Map is drawn in black ink with green, pink, and yellow watercolors used to show features such as waterways, borders, and places of interest. Notes on map concern border disputes between New Jersey and New York.

A Map of the Dead Sea, Low plains and Gulf of Eloth, [1812 May 4]

A pen-and-ink map of the Dead Sea from Jericho to the Gulf of Eloth on a grid. The map accompanied a letter by Winthrop (HUG 1203.5 Box 1, Folder 13).

[Map of the Dead Sea before the Biblical destruction of Sodom, 1812 May 4]

A pen-and-ink and watercolor map of the Dead Sea noting the "Course of Jordan before the destruction of Sodom." The map accompanied a letter by Winthrop (HUG 1203.5 Box 1, Folder 13).

A synopsis of naturall philosophy according to the method of the ancients, but improved & augmented with the notions of later philosophers : manuscript, 1677-1679

Possibly autograph, dated at end of volume: Finitu[m] mart: 14, 1678/9. Imperfect copy with title page missing; supplied from a MS copy, dated 29 March 1680, now in the Bodleian Library.

Map of Cambridge and Somerville, Mass

"318 D."