Author: matthias

Koldinghus Augmented: Memories of the Walls and The Castle Chapel – Jakob Madsen, Claus Madsen

Date: 14 November 2012
Time: 13.00-14.00
Place: NJ14 3-228 (Las Vegas)

Since June 2011 we have participated in two Computer Graphics oriented projects centered around dissemination of historical knowledge with a focus on the Koldinghus Castle, in Kolding, Denmark. Koldinghus has played a major role as a part time residence for a row of kings from circa 1200 to 1700. In 1808 the castle was destroyed in a fire. The castle is now partly restored and houses a museum.

We will present two different projects: 1) an iPad based Augmented Reality game for children, and 2) a Virtual Reality visual reconstruction of the castle chapel as it appeared in early 1600 during King Christian IV’s reign.

Memories of the Walls is an interactive Augmented Reality game where children use an iPad handed out by the museum to go through an interactive narrative and solve puzzles at various stations scattered throughout the castle. In a longitudinal study we have datamined logging data from the iPads allowing us a look into what the children actually do while playing the game. The experiences from a 3 month trial period are not entirely positive, and we discuss things we have learnt from the project.

The Castle Chapel is a visual reconstruction of how the castle’s church looked like 400 years ago. We have modeled the chapel based on all available historical material, as well as on 3D scannings of surviving lime stone carvings, etc. The visual reconstruction is displayed to visitors on a pair of “view finder” stands, allowing users to look around inside the church.

MEL: A Geometric Language for Representing Musical Structure – David Meredith

CANCELED, will be presented next semester

Date: 7 November 2012
Time: 13.00-14.00
Place: NJ14 3-228 (Las Vegas)

The work described here takes its starting point in the idea that the best ways of understanding a particular musical object are those that are represented by the shortest possible descriptions of that object. I also propose that the goals of both music analysis and music perception are to find the shortest possible descriptions of musical objects. Note that a musical “object” could be a short musical fragment, a song, a multi-movement work or even a whole corpus of pieces. The goal of the research presented in this talk is to design an encoding language capable of expressing parsimonious descriptions of musical objects. This language must be able to express the types of equivalence relations that occur between musical structures, since a description of an object can often be shortened (i.e., compressed) by taking advantage of such equivalences that exist between parts of the object. The most important type of equivalence in music is translational equivalence within pitch-time space. However, musical translation is different from Euclidean geometric translation because pitch-time space can be transformed by pitch alphabets (periodic subsets of the pitch dimension) and rhythms (periodic subsets of the time dimension). Common examples of pitch alphabets are the usual scales and chords used in tonal music. Both pitch alphabets and rhythms can be represented by periodic masks, organised into mask sequences. Examples will be given of parsimonious descriptions (encodings) of musical objects that employ masks and mask sequences and an algorithm will be introduced that attempts to find such encodings from in extenso descriptions of musical objects.

Noise localization in a car – Sidsel Marie Nørholm

Date: 17 October 2012
Time: 13.00-14.00
Place: NJ14 3-228 (Las Vegas)

The localization of noise is of interest in the car industry where a good mapping will make it much easier to find the sources generating the noise and thereby lower their output. The normal methods used are the delay-and-sum beam-forming and spherical harmonics beam-forming. These methods give a bad low frequency resolution and since much noise generated in a car is of low frequency these methods are not optimal. Here the mapping is done by solving an inverse problem with a transfer matrix between the volume velocity of the sources and the measured pressures at the microphone array. The problem is very ill-posed and therefore regularization have to be applied when the transfer matrix is inverted in order to give good results.

Bio
Sidsel Marie Nørholm got a Master Degree in Sound and Acoustic Technology at the Technical University of Denmark in August 2012. In September 2012 she started as a PhD student at ad:mt  working at the project Spatio-Temporal Filtering Methods for Enhancement and Separation of Speech Signals.

Modeling Vibrotactile Detection by Logistic Regression – Lars Knudsen

Date: 03 October 2012
Time: 13.00-14.00
Place: NJ14 3-228 (Las Vegas)

In this study we introduce logistic regression as a method for modeling, in this case the user’s detection rate, to more easily show cross-effecting factors, necessary in order to design an adaptive system. Previously such effects have been investigated by a variety of linear regression type methods but these are not well suited for developing adaptive systems. We investigate the method on a qualitative and quantitative dataset with ages spanning from seven to 79 years under indoor and outdoor experimental settings. The results show that the method is indeed a suitable candidate for quantification of, in this instance vibrotactile information, and for the future design of user adaptive vibrotactile displays. More generally the model shows potential for designing a variety of adaptive systems.

Bio
Lars Knudsen finished his studies at medialogy the summer 2011 where his master thesis concerned tactile displays and navigation, supervised by Hans Jørgen Andersen and Ann Morrison. Afterwards he has continued studying the field of tactile displays, especially with a focus on modeling modeling vibrotactile sensitivities.

A System for Sketching in Hardware: Do-It-Yourself Interfaces for Sound and Music Computing – Dan Overholt

Date: 30 May 2012
Time: 13.00-14.00
Place: NJ14 3-228 (Las Vegas)

A system for Do-It-Yourself (DIY) interface designs focused on sound and music computing has been developed. The system is based on the Create USB Interface (CUI), which is an open source microcontroller prototyping board together with the GROVE system of interchangeable transducers. Together, these provide a malleable and fluid prototyping process of ‘Sketching in Hardware’ for both music and non-music interaction design ideas. The most recent version of the board is the CUI32Stem, which is designed specifically to work hand- in-hand with the GROVE elements produced by Seeed Studio, Inc. GROVE includes a growing collection of open source sensors and actuators that utilize simple 4-wire cables to connect to the CUI32Stem. The CUI32Stem itself utilizes a high-performance Microchip® PIC32 microcontroller, allowing a wide range of programmable interactions. The development of this system and its use in sound and music interaction design is described. Typical use scenarios for the system may pair the CUI32Stem with a smartphone, a normal computer, and one or more GROVE elements via wired or wireless connections.

For more information, please see: http://www.seeedstudio.com/wiki/CUI32Stem

Is ‘Iron Man 2’ Right? Re-Investigating 3D User Interfaces – Wolfgang Stürzlinger

Date: 29 May 2012 (Tuesday!)
Time: 13.00-14.30
Place: NJ14 3-119

Three-dimensional (3D) user interfaces are popular in movies. There are also many current systems that enable people to interact with 3D content, including computer games. We re-investigate the ideas behind such 3D user interfaces and present innovative solutions based on the capabilities and limitations of both humans and technologies.

Bio
Dr. Stuerzlinger graduated with a Doctorate in Computer Science from the Technical University in Vienna, Austria in 1993. Then he moved to the Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Austria. Supported by an Erwin-Schrödinger fellowship Dr. Stuerzlinger visited the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill in 1997 (hosted by Prof. F. Brooks). In 1998, Dr. Stuerzlinger was appointed to the Department of Computer Science at York University in Toronto, Canada. There, he is a full professor and a member of the interdisciplinary Centre for Vision Research (CVR).

While in Austria and at UNC, Dr. Stuerzlinger’s research interests concentrated on various areas of computer graphics, as well as parallel and high-performance systems. At York University he is leading the Interactive Systems Research Group. Dr. Stuerzlinger is a leading researcher in three-dimensional user interfaces and virtual reality. Additionally, he is very active in human-computer interaction. In general, his research aims to find innovative solutions for real-world problems and is often inter-disciplinary. Current research projects include better user interfaces for two-dimensional and three-dimensional design applications, meeting room environments that actively support collaboration, user interface techniques that are based on human perception principles, new virtual reality hardware and software, a novel kind of display system that can display very vivid images, and many other projects.

Dr. Stuerzlinger is a member of the GRAND NCE (Graphics, Animation and New Media Network of Centres of Excellence) board, a journal editorial board, and numerous international program committees. He has also chaired several international scientific events. He is an author of more than a dozen patents. Dr. Stuerzlinger has supervised more than 35 graduate students to completion and published more than 100 refereed scientific papers. His group currently consists of a postdoc and 10 graduate students.

Brainstorming: Field studies for situated learning – Søren Eskildsen

Date: 23 May 2012
Time: 13.00-14.00
Place: NJ14 3-228 (Las Vegas)

Between 2007 and 2009 around 60.000 immigrants were coming to Denmark each year (Grunnet 2010). The main integration activities for these new citizens are language courses run by the communities, which are offered free of charge or with a minimal fee. The goal of these courses is to put the new comers into a position, where they can participate in everyday Danish life. But although the courses establish a thorough theoretical understanding of the language, they often lack the possibilities to motivate the students in their everyday activities to apply this knowledge in real cultural settings and thus to pro-actively participate in their host society.

To cope with this applicability problem, we suggest an approach based on our previous work on intercultural communication (e.g. Rehm et al. 2009) that puts the cultural and language learning task in the context of its actual use by embracing new and innovative training methods – like situated and experience-based learning – that have been shown to be more effective in terms of cultural integration (Landis et al 2004). Imagine e.g. a situation where the student stands in line at the train station in order to purchase a ticket. This can be seen as an ideal situation to trigger a Danish learning session on buying a train ticket. The student has some time for this session as he is waiting for his turn, he is in the right context for the knowledge that is conveyed and he is able to apply the knowledge shortly afterwards in a real situation.

The talk will be about presenting the idea and approach on how to incorporate a system/application, which will support this claim about how context based learning can be more effective in cultural integration. I hope to gain some insight from many of the “immigrants” that currently inhabit here on the department.

Bio
Søren Eskildsen graduated as M.Sc. from Medialogy in the summer 2011 at AAU Aalborg. With main focus on creating virtual environments with the purpose of investigating learning possibilities by using a more vivid approach to creating learning material. This idea has paved the way to Namibia to work on preserving indigenous knowledge for duration of 3½ weeks. His master thesis focused on learning from a virtual environment and measuring different activities like preferred media. He is currently employed as a Research assistant at Medialogy Aalborg, where the current project regarding cultural support in a learning context is being investigated. In addition he teaches Animation and Graphic Design on first semester as well as supervising on several semesters (2nd & 6th).

An Art and Technology of Understanding – Jamie Allen

Date: 09 May 2012
Time: 13.00-14.00
Place: NJ14 4-107

Jamie will present the work and direction of CIID’s new Research group and discuss the particular situation that is Interaction Design Research within a private Institution that encompasses Consulting, Education and research interests.  He will also present a series of his art-design and technology projects which develop ideas in the discovery of systems, and the possibility of fostering creative relationships to the systems and material complexes of technology.
http://heavyside.net/
http://ciid.dk/consulting/people/jamie-allen/
http://ciid.dk/

Bio
Jamie Allen is Head of Research at CIID and directs the strategy and focus of research and experimentation at the institute. He has taught at the Interactive Telecommunication from the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, the Pratt Institute of Art and Design, the Kolding School of Design and others. Prior to his work with CIID, he was Assistant Direct of Culture Lab, Newcastle University developing artistic and technology initiatives. His own work is focused on intersections between art and design, technology and culture, people and knowledge.  He has extensive industry experience and expertise in people-centered technologies, having worked with IBM, DuPont Inc., ESI Design and the American Museum of Natural History.