Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces Commons^™

A Content-Sensitive Wiki Help System, Eswara Satya Pavan Rajesh Pinapala

Master's Projects

Context-sensitive help is a software application component that enables users to open help pertaining to their state, location, or the action they are performing within the software. Context-sensitive “wiki” help, on the other hand, is help powered by a wiki system with all the features of context-sensitive help. A context-sensitive wiki help system aims to make the context-sensitive help collaborative; in addition to seeking help, users can directly contribute to the help system. I have implemented a context-sensitive wiki help system into Yioop, an open source search engine and software portal created by Dr. Chris Pollett, in order to measure …

The Effects Of Gamifying Optional Lessons On Motivation, Aaron Zemach

McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Adding video-game elements to non-video-game interfaces (“gamification”) has become a common engagement strategy over the past several years in the domain of education. While prior studies have found that adding game elements to mandatory educational materials can increase students’ motivation to complete the materials, there has yet to be a study to investigate if game elements can make users more likely to engage with optional educational materials. In this study, we investigate whether users of a gamified educational interface are more motivated than users of a non-gamified interface to voluntarily complete educational materials. We found users of a gamified interface …

Interactive Feature Selection And Visualization For Large Observational Data, Jingyuan Wang

Doctoral Dissertations

Data can create enormous values in both scientific and industrial fields, especially for access to new knowledge and inspiration of innovation. As the massive increases in computing power, data storage capacity, as well as capability of data generation and collection, the scientific research communities are confronting with a transformation of exploiting the advanced uses of the large-scale, complex, and high-resolution data sets in situation awareness and decision-making projects. To comprehensively analyze the big data problems requires the analyses aiming at various aspects which involves of effective selections of static and time-varying feature patterns that fulfills the interests of domain users. …

A Software Design Pattern Based Approach To Auto Dynamic Difficulty In Video Games, Muhammad Iftekher Chowdhury

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

From the point of view of skill levels, reflex speeds, hand-eye coordination, tolerance for frustration, and motivations, video game players may vary drastically. Auto dynamic difficulty (ADD) in video games refers to the technique of automatically adjusting different aspects of a video game in real time, based on the player’s ability and emergence factors in order to provide the optimal experience to users from such a large demography and increase replay value. In this thesis, we describe a collection of software design patterns for enabling auto dynamic difficulty in video games. We also discuss the benefits of a design pattern …

A Method To Develop Neck Injury Criteria To Aid Design And Test Of Escape Systems Incorporating Helmet Mounted Displays, Jeffrey C. Parr

Theses and Dissertations

HMDs are becoming common human-machine interface equipment in manned military flight, but introducing this equipment into the overall aircraft escape system poses new and significant system design, development, and test concerns. Although HMDs add capabilities, which improve operator performance, the increased capability is often accompanied by increased head supported mass. The increased mass can amplify the risk of pilot neck injury during ejection when compared to lighter legacy helmets. Currently no adequate USAF neck injury criteria exist to effectively guide the requirements, design, and test of escape systems for pilots with HMDs. This research effort presents a novel method to …

Data Visualization To Evaluate And Facilitate Targeted Data Acquisitions In Support Of A Real-Time Ocean Forecasting System, Edward A. Holmberg Iv

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

A robust evaluation toolset has been designed for Naval Research Laboratory’s Real-Time Ocean Forecasting System RELO with the purpose of facilitating an adaptive sampling strategy and providing a more educated guidance for routing underwater gliders. The major challenges are to integrate into the existing operational system, and provide a bridge between the modeling and operative environments. Visualization is the selected approach and the developed software is divided into 3 packages: The first package is to verify that the glider is actually following the waypoints and to predict the position of the glider for the next cycle’s instructions. The second package …

Data Analytics Of University Student Records, Mark Blaise Decotes

Masters Theses

Understanding the proper navigation of a college curriculum is a daunting task for students, faculty, and staff. Collegiate courses offer enough intellectual challenge without the unnecessary confusion caused by course scheduling issues. Administrative faculty who execute curriculum changes need both quantitative data and empirical evidence to support their notions about which courses are cornerstone. Students require clear understanding of paths through their courses and majors that give them the optimal chance of success. In this work, we re-envision the analysis of student records from several decades by opening up these datasets to new ways of interactivity. We represent curricula through …

Designing A Goal Journaling Application, Kevin Lufkin

Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies

Achieving a personal goal and making a positive change in one’s life can be a difficult and elusive task. Everyday people are creating and setting new goals for themselves, but more often than not these goals are never realized. Motivation, determination, and discipline are all key elements when it comes to accomplishing a goal, but if there is no clear idea as to how to connect the dots from where one is to where one wants to be these important qualities lose their effectiveness.

The applications that exist today largely fit in the realm of goal/task management and planners. This …

Smarticles: A Method For Identifying And Correcting Instability And Error Caused By Explicit Integration Techniques In Physically Based Simulations, Susan Aileen Marano

Master's Theses

Using an explicit integration method in physically based animations has many advantages including conceptual and computational simplicity, however, it re- quires small time steps to ensure low numerical instability. Simulations with large numbers of individually interacting components such as cloth, hair, and fluid models, are limited by the sections of particles most susceptible to error. This results in the need for smaller time steps than required for the majority of the system. These sections can be diverse and dynamic, quickly changing in size and location based on forces in the system. Identifying and handling these trou- blesome sections could allow …

Coffee: Context Observer For Fast Enthralling Entertainment, Anthony M. Lenz

Master's Theses

Desktops, laptops, smartphones, tablets, and the Kinect, oh my! With so many devices available to the average consumer, the limitations and pitfalls of each interface are becoming more apparent. Swimming in devices, users often have to stop and think about how to interact with each device to accomplish the current tasks at hand. The goal of this thesis is to minimize user cognitive effort in handling multiple devices by creating a context aware hybrid interface. The context aware system will be explored through the hybridization of gesture and touch interfaces using a multi-touch coffee table and the next-generation Microsoft Kinect. …

A Proof Of Concept For Crowdsourcing Color Perception Experiments, Ryan Nathaniel Mcleod

Master's Theses

Accurately quantifying the human perception of color is an unsolved prob- lem. There are dozens of numerical systems for quantifying colors and how we as humans perceive them, but as a whole, they are far from perfect. The ability to accurately measure color for reproduction and verification is critical to indus- tries that work with textiles, paints, food and beverages, displays, and media compression algorithms. Because the science of color deals with the body, mind, and the subjective study of perception, building models of color requires largely empirical data over pure analytical science. Much of this data is extremely dated, …

Juiciness In Citizen Science Computer Games: Analysis Of A Prototypical Game, Eric D. Ebucktha Buckthal

Master's Theses

Incorporating the collective problem-solving skills of non-experts could ac- celerate the advancement of scientific research. Citizen science games leverage puzzles to present computationally difficult problems to players. Such games typ- ically map the scientific problem to game mechanics and visual feed-back helps players improve their solutions. Like games for entertainment, citizen science games intend to capture and retain player attention. “Juicy” game design refers to augmented visual feedback systems that give a game personality without modi- fying fundamental game mechanics. A “juicy” game feels alive and polished. This thesis explores the use of “juicy” game design applied to the citizen …

Virtual Reality Engine Development, Varun Varahamurthy

Master's Theses

With the advent of modern graphics and computing hardware and cheaper sensor and display technologies, virtual reality is becoming increasingly popular in the fields of gaming, therapy, training and visualization. Earlier attempts at popularizing VR technology were plagued by issues of cost, portability and marketability to the general public. Modern screen technologies make it possible to produce cheap, light head-mounted displays (HMDs) like the Oculus Rift, and modern GPUs make it possible to create and deliver a seamless real-time 3D experience to the user. 3D sensing has found an application in virtual and augmented reality as well, allowing for a …

Web Portal For Elderly Patients To Research Prescription Medication, Krista Miller, Robert File, Wil Murphy Jr

Mathematics and Computer Science Capstones

People 55 and older constitute 25.2% of the U.S. population. These senior citizens use a vast amount of prescription drugs to treat and control health related issues. An analysis of the drug industry reveals several challenges facing this demographic group: costs, coverage by insurance companies and drug interactions. The need for a centrally located drug information source for senior citizens and their caregivers is immense. We propose researching and viewing what is available from various areas and developing a user-friendly information source prototype to assist this demographic group with their medication under takings. We expect to deliver a summary of …

Hydrographic Surface Modeling Through A Raster Based Spline Creation Method, Julie G. Alexander

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The United States Army Corp of Engineers relies on accurate and detailed surface models for various construction projects and preventative measures. To aid in these efforts, it is necessary to work for advancements in surface model creation. Current methods for model creation include Delaunay triangulation, raster grid interpolation, and Hydraulic Spline grid generation. While these methods produce adequate surface models, attempts for improved methods can still be made.

A method for raster based spline creation is presented as a variation of the Hydraulic Spline algorithm. By implementing Hydraulic Splines in raster data instead of vector data, the model creation process …

Procedural-Reasoning Architecture For Applied Behavior Analysis-Based Instructions, Edmon Begoli

Doctoral Dissertations

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complex developmental disability affecting as many as 1 in every 88 children. While there is no known cure for ASD, there are known behavioral and developmental interventions, based on demonstrated efficacy, that have become the predominant treatments for improving social, adaptive, and behavioral functions in children.

Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA)-based early childhood interventions are evidence based, efficacious therapies for autism that are widely recognized as effective approaches to remediation of the symptoms of ASD. They are, however, labor intensive and consequently often inaccessible at the recommended levels.

Recent advancements in socially assistive robotics and …

Efficient Ray Tracing For Mobile Devices, Rafael De Melo Aroxa

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The demand for mobile devices with higher graphics performance has increased substantially in the past few years. Most mobile applications that demand 3D graphics use commonly available frameworks, such as Unity and Unreal Engine. In mobile devices, these frameworks are built on top of OpenGL ES and use a graphics technique called rasterization, a simple concept that yields good performance without sacrificing graphic quality. However, rasterization cannot easily handle some physical phenomena of light (i.e. reflection and refraction). In order to support such effects, the graphics framework has to emulate them, thereby leading to suboptimal results in term of quality. …

A Framework For Constructing Serious Games, Taylor Glen Yust

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Communicating ideas and knowledge through serious games is a trend that is currently gaining in popularity. However, at present, there is a distinct lack of a game development methodology that takes a critical approach to transforming information into gameplay. This thesis presents a framework that can be followed to construct compelling serious games that are effective at transferring knowledge to the player. This is accomplished through an analysis of atomic knowledge items and their relationships to one another, followed by a meaningful and synergetic implementation of these ideas at a foundational mechanics level.

This thesis also describes the development of …

The Design And Implementation Of A Lightweight Game Engine For The Iphone Platform, Luke B. Godfrey

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

In this thesis, the design for a two dimensional game engine for the iPhone using the entity component system (ECS) model is presented as a solution to enable developers to streamline game development. Some background concepts are explained, including the ECS model and a brief overview of part of the iOS SDK used in this project. Related work is explored. An implementation of the design is then described in detail, presented as two parts: a framework and a core set of systems. Finally, the implemented engine is evaluated according to three criteria: ease of use, flexibility, and efficiency. The results …

Tweet Mapper Visualization Software, Andrew W. Nash, Shawn M. Cox, Michael T. Adams

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Designing An Educational And Intelligent Human-Computer Interface For Older Adults, Drew W. Williams

Master's Theses (2009 -)

As computing devices continue to become more heavily integrated into our lives, proper design of human-computer interfaces becomes a more important topic of discussion. Efficient and useful human-computer interfaces need to take into account the abilities of the humans who will be using such interfaces, and adapt to difficulties that different users may face – such as the particular difficulties older users must face. However, various issues in the design of human-computer interfaces for older users yet exist: a wide variance of ability is displayed by older adults, which can be difficult to design for. Motions and notions found intuitive …

Towards Constructing Interactive Virtual Worlds, Francis Chang

Dissertations and Theses

Networked virtual reality environments including virtual worlds devoted to entertainment, online socializing and remote collaboration have grown in popularity with the rise of commercially available consumer graphics hardware and the growing ubiquity of the Internet. These virtual worlds are typified by a persistent simulated three-dimensional space that communicates over a computer network, where users interact with the environment and each other through digital avatars. Development of these virtual worlds challenges the limits of the networking infrastructure, 3D streaming graphics techniques, and the distributed computing design of the virtual world systems that manages the simulation. In this dissertation, we explore solutions …

Advances In Piecewise Smooth Image Reconstruction, Ralf Juengling

Dissertations and Theses

Advances and new insights into algorithms for piecewise smooth image reconstruction are presented. Such algorithms fit a piecewise smooth function to image data without prior knowledge of the number of regions or the location of region boundaries in the best fitting function. This is a difficult model selection problem since the number of parameters of possible solutions varies widely.

The approach followed in this work was proposed by Yvan Leclerc. It uses the Minimum Description Length principle to make the reconstruction problem well-posed: the best fitting function yields the shortest encoding of the image data. In order to derive a …

Midiflapper: A Leap Motion Midi Controller, Mark M. Henry

Computer Science and Software Engineering

An application called MIDIFlapper was developed that translates data from the Leap Motion, an NUI device, into MIDI data suitable for use by a contemporary digital audio workstation. This allows electronic musicians to use the Leap Motion for musical creation and live performance.

Conception, Design And Construction Of A Remote Wifi Vehicle Using Arduino, Clayton Broman

Physics

The scope of this senior project was to make a wireless vehicle controlled via Internet Protocol. This vehicle operates remotely and without direct line of sight. Commands are sent from a program running on a laptop and transmitted using a wireless router. Visual data is retrieved from a network camera, mounted on the vehicle, in real-time, to see where you are going.

Extracting Vessel Structure From 3d Image Data, Yuchen Zhong

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis is focused on extracting the structure of vessels from 3D cardiac images. In many biomedical applications it is important to segment the vessels preserving their anatomically-correct topological structure. That is, the final result should form a tree. There are many technical challenges when solving this image analysis problem: noise, outliers, partial volume. In particular, standard segmentation methods are known to have problems with extracting thin structures and with enforcing topological constraints. All these issues explain why vessel segmentation remains an unsolved problem despite years of research.

Our new efforts combine recent advances in optimization-based methods for image analysis …

Accessibility Of E-Commerce Websites For Vision Impaired Persons, Roopa Bose

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this thesis accessibility problems with websites for vision-impaired persons are discussed in detail. General accessibility problems and those specific to e-commerce websites,especially on-line shopping websites are discussed. Accessibility problems are analyzed from the perspective of a screen reader user. As a solution for the accessibility problems identified, the WCAG 2.0 guidelines are reviewed and new changes are proposed to improve the existing guidelines. Enhanced solutions using tactile media capable of providing a better web browsing experience for vision-impaired persons are also discussed.

Visualizing And Predicting The Effects Of Rheumatoid Arthritis On Hands, Radu P. Mihail

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

This dissertation was inspired by difficult decisions patients of chronic diseases have to make about about treatment options in light of uncertainty. We look at rheumatoid arthritis (RA), a chronic, autoimmune disease that primarily affects the synovial joints of the hands and causes pain and deformities. In this work, we focus on several parts of a computer-based decision tool that patients can interact with using gestures, ask questions about the disease, and visualize possible futures. We propose a hand gesture based interaction method that is easily setup in a doctor's office and can be trained using a custom set of …

Study Of Touch Gesture Performance By Four And Five Year-Old Children: Point-And-Touch, Drag-And-Drop, Zoom-In And Zoom-Out, And Rotate, Zainab Hamza

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Past research has focused on children's interaction with computers through mouse clicks, and mouse research studies focused on point-and-click and drag-and-drop. However, More research is necessary in regard to children's ability to perform touch gestures such as point-and-touch, drag-and-drop, zoom-in and zoom-out, and rotate. Furthermore, research should consider specific gestures such as zoom-in and zoom-out, and rotate tasks for young children. The aim of this thesis is to study the ability of 4 and 5 year-old children to interact with touch devices and perform tasks such as: point-and-touch, drag-and-drop, zoom-in and zoom-out, and rotate. This thesis tests an iPad application …

Colormoo: An Algorithmic Approach To Generating Color Palettes, Joshua Rael

CMC Senior Theses

Selecting one color can be done with relative ease, but this task becomes more difficult with each subsequent color. Colormoo is an online tool aimed at solving this problem. We implement three algorithms for generating color palettes based off of a starting color. Data is collected for each palette that is generated. Our analysis reveals two of the algorithms are preferred, but under different circumstances. Furthermore, we find that users prefer palettes containing colors that are compatible, but not too similar. With refined heuristics, we believe these techniques can be extended and applied beyond the field of graphic design alone.