Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces Commons^™

Games People Play: Exploring Depaul's Top-Rated Computer Game Development Program

DePaul Magazine

In March 2014, the Princeton Review, in conjunction with PC Gamer magazine, named the top 25 schools to study game design in the United States and Canada. DePaul's undergraduate program ranked 20th, a considerable leap from 2013’s honorable mention. The graduate program came in at 12th. DePaul's strong ranking reflects the game development program's extension of its basic game development, software engineering and programming to include art, design and storytelling, as well as computer graphics technology, networking, artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. Examples of the award-winning games developed by students and now marketed by such going concerns as Sony PlayStation …

Gamification Of Education: A Review Of Literature, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Qing Zeng, Venkata R. Telaprolu, Abhishek Padmanabhuni Ayyappa, Brenda Eschenbrenner

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We synthesized the literature on gamification of education by conducting a review of the literature on gamification in the educational and learning context. Based on our review, we identified several game design elements that are used in education. These game design elements include points, levels/stages, badges, leaderboards, prizes, progress bars, storyline, and feedback. We provided examples from the literature to illustrate the application of gamification in the educational context.

Interactive Two-Sided Transparent Displays: Designing For Collaboration, Jiannan Li, Saul Greenberg, Ehud Sharlin, Joaquim Jorge

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Transparent displays can serve as an important collaborative medium supporting face-to-face interactions over a shared visual work surface. Such displays enhance workspace awareness: when a person is working on one side of a transparent display, the person on the other side can see the other's body, hand gestures, gaze and what he or she is actually manipulating on the shared screen. Even so, we argue that designing such transparent displays must go beyond current offerings if it is to support collaboration. First, both sides of the display must accept interactive input, preferably by at least touch and / or pen, …

Constructive Visualization, Samuel Huron, Sheelagh Carpendale, Alice Thudt, Anthony Tang, Michael Mauerer

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

If visualization is to be democratized, we need to provide means for non-experts to create visualizations that allow them to engage directly with datasets. We present constructive visualization a new paradigm for the simple creation of flexible, dynamic visualizations. Constructive visualization is simple—in that the skills required to build and manipulate the visualizations are akin to kindergarten play; it is expressive— in that one can build within the constraints of the chosen environment, and it also supports dynamics — in that these constructed visualizations can be rebuilt and adjusted. We describe the conceptual components and processes underlying constructive visualization, and …

Daisy Filter Flow: A Generalized Discrete Approach To Dense Correspondences, Hongsheng Yang, Wen-Yan Lin, Jiangbo Lu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.

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

LSU 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 …

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 …

Supporting Non-Verbal Visual Communication In Online Group Art Therapy, Brennan Jones, Kate Collie, Sara Prins Hankinson, Anthony Tang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Art therapy provides therapeutic benefit to people suffering from chronic pain, and recent work has explored supporting art therapy through online tools such as chat forums and discussion boards. These tools give people the benefit of engaging in art therapy without the burden of having to leave one’s home (when transportation may be a challenge), and allowing people to reveal their identities through dialogue and activity rather than through one’s appearance. However, these tools also do not provide much opportunity for collaboration and shared art making. Because group members are not aware of each other’s actions and non-verbal cues in …

One Space: Shared Visual Scenes For Active Free Play, Maayan Cohen, Kody Dillman, Haley Macleod, Seth Hunter, Anthony Tang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Children engage in free play for emotional, physical and social development; researchers have explored supporting free play between physically remote playmates using videoconferencing tools. We show that the configuration of the video conferencing setup affects play. Specifically, we show that a shared visual scene configuration promotes fundamentally active forms of engaged, co-operative play.

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 …

Exploring Video Streaming In Public Settings: Shared Geocaching Over Distance Using Mobile Video Chat, Jason Procyk, Carman Neustaedter, Carolyn Pang, Anthony Tang, Tejinder K. Judge

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Our research explores the use of mobile video chat in public spaces by people participating in parallel experiences, where both a local and remote person are doing the same activity together at the same time. We prototyped a wearable video chat experience and had pairs of friends and family members participate in 'shared geocaching' over distance. Our results show that video streaming works best for navigation tasks but is more challenging to use for fine-grained searching tasks. Video streaming also creates a very intimate experience with a remote partner, but this can lead to distraction from the 'real world' and …

Medical Imaging Specialists And 3d: A Domain Perspective On Mobile 3d Interactions, Teddy Seyed, Frank Maurer, Francisco Marinho Rodrigues, Anthony Tang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

3D volumetric medical images, such as MRIs, are commonly explored and interacted with by medical imaging experts using systems that require keyboard and mouse-based techniques. These techniques have presented challenges for medical imaging specialists: 3D spatial navigation is difficult, in addition to the detailed selection and analysis of 3D medical images being difficult due to depth perception and occlusion issues. In this work, we explore a potential solution to these challenges by using tangible interaction techniques with a mobile device to simplify 3D interactions for medical imaging specialists. We discuss preliminary observations from our design sessions with medical imaging specialists …

Automatic Objects Removal For Scene Completion, Jianjun Yang, Yin Wang, Honggang Wang, Kun Hua, Wei Wang, Ju Shen

Computer Science Faculty Publications

With the explosive growth of Web-based cameras and mobile devices, billions of photographs are uploaded to the Internet. We can trivially collect a huge number of photo streams for various goals, such as 3D scene reconstruction and other big data applications. However, this is not an easy task due to the fact the retrieved photos are neither aligned nor calibrated. Furthermore, with the occlusion of unexpected foreground objects like people, vehicles, it is even more challenging to find feature correspondences and reconstruct realistic scenes. In this paper, we propose a structure-based image completion algorithm for object removal that produces visually …

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 …

Celebrowser: An Example Of Browsing Big Data On Small Device, Song Tan, Chong-Wah Ngo, Jun Xu, Yong Rui

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this demonstration, we demonstrate a mobile-based celebrity video browsing system called CeleBrowser. Using this system, users can interactively switch among four views: people-centric, timeline-centric, month-centric and topic-centric, for browsing celebrity-related hot videos. A peculiarity of the demonstration is to highlight the advantage of multiperspective information organization and presentation in engaging users for exploratory browsing of large number of Web videos on a device with small screen. Technology-wise the demonstration shows how query logs collected for six months from two vertical search engines are leveraged for mining hot events and videos of celebrities.

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 …

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 …

An Analysis Of Eye Movements With Helmet Mounted Displays, Kalyn A. Tung

Theses and Dissertations

Helmet or Head-Mounted Displays (HMD) applications have expanded to include a range from advanced military cockpits to consumer glasses. However, users have documented loss of legibility while undergoing vibration. Recent research indicates that undesirable eye movement is related to the vibration frequency a user experiences. In vibrating environments, two competing eye reflexes likely contribute to eye movements. The Vestibulo-ocular Reflex responds to motion sensed in the otoliths while the pursuit reflex is driven by the visual system to maintain the desired image on the fovea. This study attempts to isolate undesirable eye motions that occur while using a HMD by …

Pointing Devices For Wearable Computers, Saverio Perugini, Andres A. Calvo

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We present a survey of pointing devices for wearable computers, which are body-mounted devices that users can access at any time. Since traditional pointing devices (i.e., mouse, touchpad, and trackpoint) were designed to be used on a steady and flat surface, they are inappropriate for wearable computers. Just as the advent of laptops resulted in the development of the touchpad and trackpoint, the emergence of wearable computers is leading to the development of pointing devices designed for them. However, unlike laptops, since wearable computers are operated from different body positions under different environmental conditions for different uses, researchers have developed …