Ce n'est que parce que nous existons corporellement que la connaissance est possible. Cependant, dans l'expérience éducative, la puissance épistémique du corps est négligée, ce qui tend à l'appauvrissement des registres de l'intelligible. Cette thèse propose alors de se pencher sur ce problème en diagonal : à partir d'une Philosophie du Corps et de l'Image qui, dans la modernité - comprise non pas en tant que périodisation, mais comme une qualification de nos négociations entre le réel et l'intelligible -, a dévoilé d'autres façons de faire et d'effectuer ces registres. Ces moyens sont explorés à travers l'ouverture apportée par les travaux de Merleau-Ponty et Foucault, illustratifs de ce nouveau commerce du réel. Pour aborder le problème, la visibilité et le mouvement du corps dans le cinéma ont été pris comme objet d'analyse. Ce dernier est analysé à travers un corpus de films dont les intrigues se concentrent sur l'éducation formelle et, plus ou moins intensément, demandent l'engagement des personnages et des spectateurs dans une performance visuelle. Pour s'approcher de cet objet, les questions suivantes ont été posées : comment le phénomène de l'éducation est montré par le cinéma ? Quel corps y est montré ? Comment les spectateurs peuvent-ils le voir ? À partir de l'examen du corpus filmique et de l'articulation théorique entre les philosophies de Merleau-Ponty et de Foucault, il est ainsi devenu possible d'affirmer la thèse du cinéma en tant qu'éducation du regard. L'objectif général de cette thèse est de dévoiler le potentiel éducatif de l'expérience filmique, qui fournit un autre régime d'intelligibilité pour l'éducation. Dans ce régime, le corps en tant qu'opérateur visuel élargit la capacité de compréhension du réel. Pour atteindre cet objectif, le travail s'est composé en trois chapitres. Dans le premier, nous abordons l'approche méthodologique : tout d'abord, la pertinence de l'articulation théorique entre les deux philosophes a été définie ; puis, l'utilisation des images comme langage indirect qui participe à la description de la réalité a été expliquée ; une présentation du corpus filmique a suivi cette étape ; finalement, les critères du choix des films ont été décrits et ont donné lieu à une explicitation de l'instrument adopté pour l'analyse de l'objet. Le deuxième chapitre débat, au préalable, de l'incapacité de l'Occident à formuler discursivement le réel. Ensuite, en même temps que la visualisation des scènes de films, nous explorons la contribution de Merleau-Ponty et Foucault sur la performance visuelle, déclenchée par les images. Dans le troisième, les implications de l'éducation du regard faculté favorisées par l'expérience filmique sont développées, en particulier, en ce qui concerne la nouvelle place accordée à la visibilité dans la formulation du réel. Ces développements permettent, de ce fait, la construction d'un script favorisant la visibilité de l'éducation. C'est ainsi qu'en prenant le regard en tant qu'expérience de la connaissance, ce script se propose de montrer d'autres façons d'être, de voir, de penser et de sentir le monde, en reconfigurant, par conséquent, des protocoles épistémiques et de subjectivation présents dans le contexte éducatif. / The knowledge is only possible due to we exist bodily. However, during the educational experience, the epistemic potency of the body is neglected, declining the registers of the intelligibility. The current thesis approaches that problem obliquely: from a body and image philosophy which has revealed other ways of doing those registers in the modernity – understood not as period itself, but as a qualification for the negotiations between the real and the intelligible. The referred ways are explored through Merleau-Ponty's and Michel Foucault's works, which offer a spectrum about that new negotiation of the real. In order to approach the studied problem, the visibility and the human body motricity in the cinema are taken as analysis object. The mentioned objects have been analyzed through a corpus of movies of which plots are centered at the formal education and they require from the characters and the spectators engagement into a visual performance. Aiming to approach the object, it is questioned how the Education phenomenon is represented by the cinema; how the body is exposed and how spectators can see it. Analyzing the corpus and articulating Merleau-Ponty's and Michel Foucault's theories, it has been possible to state the following thesis: the cinema as an education of the gaze. The general objective of this study is to reveal the educational potency of the filmic experience, which provides a new path of intelligibility for Education. In that sense, the body as a visual operator widens the capacity of understanding the real. The current work is divided in three chapters. The first one brings the methodological approach: it is pointed how the theoretical articulation is properly arranged; it explains the method of using the images as indirect language as part of the reality description; the filmic corpus is presented, as well the criteria for the films choices and for the construction of instrument adopted during the object analysis are described. In the second chapter, it is problematized the incapacity of the western society of formulating the real discursively by debating Merleau-Ponty's and Foucault's theoretical contributions about the visual performance displayed on the images while the films are watched and analyzed. In the third chapter, the implications of the education of the gaze provided by the cinema are developed, mainly concerning about the place attributed to the visibility during the formulation of the real. Finally, paths are designed for the construction of another approach for the visibility in Education. Assuming the gaze as an experience of knowledge, this study aims to present other ways of being, seeing, thinking and feeling the world. Therefore, it is a proposal to reset the epistemic and subjectification patterns at the educational context.

Visual attention is an important characteristic in the human vision system, which is capable of allocating the cognitive resources to the selected information. Many researchers are attracted to the study of this mechanism in the human vision system and have achieved a wide range of successful applications. Generally, there are two tasks encountered in the visual attention research including visual saliency detection and gaze estimation. The former is normally described as distinctiveness or prominence as a result of a visual stimulus. Given images or videos as input, saliency detection methods try to simulate the mechanism of human vision system, predicting and locating the salient parts in them. While the later involves physical device to track the eye movement and estimate the gaze points. As for saliency detection, it is an effective technique for studying and mimicking the mechanism of the human vision system. Most of saliency models can predict the visual saliency with the boundary or the rough location of the true salient object, but miss the appearance or shape information. Besides, they pay little attention to the image quality problem such as low-resolution or noises. To handle these problems, in this thesis, we propose to model the visual saliency from local and global perspectives for better detection of the visual saliency. The combination of the local and global saliency scheme employing different visual cues can make fully use of their respective advantages to compute the saliency. Compared with existing models, the proposed method can provide better saliency with more appearance and shape information, and can work well even in the low-resolution or noisy images. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm. Next, video saliency detection is another issue for the visual saliency computation. Numerous works have been proposed to extract the video saliency for the tasks of object detection. However, one might not be able to obtain desirable saliency for inferring the region of foreground objects when the video presents low contrast or complicated background. Thus, this thesis develops a salient object detection approach with less demanding assumption, which gives higher detection performance. The method computes the visual saliency in each frame using a weighted multiple manifold ranking algorithm. It then computes motion cues to estimate the motion saliency and localization prior. By adopting a new energy function, the data term depends on the visual saliency and localization prior; and the smoothness term depends on the constraint in time and space. Compared to existing methods, our approach automatically segments the persistent foreground object while preserving the potential shape. We apply our method to challenging benchmark videos, and show competitive or better results than the existing counterparts. Additionally, to address the problem of gaze estimation, we present a low cost and efficient approach to obtain the gaze point. As opposed to eye gaze estimation techniques requiring specific hardware, e.g. infrared high-resolution camera and infrared light sources, as well as a cumbersome calibration process. We concentrate on visible-imaging and present an approach for gaze estimation using a web camera in a desktop environment. We combine intensity energy and edge strength to locate the iris center and utilize the piecewise eye corner detector to detect the eye corner. To compensate for head movement causing gaze error, we adopt a sinusoidal head model (SHM) to simulate the 3D head shape, and propose an adaptive weighted facial features embedded in the pose from the orthography and scaling with iterations algorithm (AWPOSIT), whereby the head pose can be estimated. Consequently, the gaze estimation is obtained by the integration of the eye vector and head movement information. The proposed method is not sensitive to the light conditions, and the experimental results show the efficacy of the proposed approach

The eyes are one of the most expressive non-verbal tools a person has and they are able to communicate a great deal to the outside world about the intentions of that person. Being able to decipher these communications through robust and non-intrusive gaze tracking techniques is increasingly important as we look toward improving Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Traditionally, devices which are able to determine a user's gaze are large, expensive and often restrictive. This work investigates the prospect of using common mobile devices such as tablets and phones as an alternative means for obtaining a user's gaze. Mobile devices now often contain high resolution cameras, and their ever increasing computational power allows increasingly complex algorithms to be performed in real time. A mobile solution allows us to turn that device into a dedicated portable gaze-tracking device for use in a wide variety of situations. This work specifically looks at where the challenges lie in transitioning current state-of-the-art gaze methodologies to mobile devices and suggests novel solutions to counteract the specific challenges of the medium. In particular, when the mobile device is held in the hands fast changes in position and orientation of the user can occur. In addition, since these devices lack the technologies typically ubiquitous to gaze estimation such as infra-red lighting, novel alternatives are required that work under common everyday conditions. A person's gaze can be determined through both their head pose as well as the orientation of the eye relative to the head. To meet the challenges outlined a geometric approach is taken where a new model for each is introduced that by design are completely synchronised through a common origin. First, a novel 3D head-pose estimation model called the 2.5D Constrained Local Model (2.5D CLM) is introduced that directly and reliably obtains the head-pose from a monocular camera. Then, a new model for gaze-estimation is introduced -- the Constrained Geometric Binocular Model (CGBM), where the visual ray representing the gaze from each eye is jointly optimised to intersect a known monitor plane in 3D space. The potential for both is that the burden of calibration is placed on the camera and monitor setup, which on mobile devices are fixed and can be determined during factory construction. In turn, the user requires either no calibration or optionally a one-time estimation of the visual offset angle. This work details the new models and specifically investigates their applicability and suitability in terms of their potential to be used on mobile platforms.

This dissertation takes as its central topic visual narratives in Death with Dignity Storytelling and posits the author’s ideas of a beautiful death and the heard gaze. Its methodology includes a textual analysis of such images, which in turn leads to a typology, and the use of a digital tool to “sum images” to test the veracity of the typology. What creates the impulse to look at images of pain, suffering the withering body, the compulsion to bear witness to misery? That question is in part answered by Sontag (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others—“we are spectators of calamities” (p. 18)—and is evident in the indefinite pronoun that hangs at the end of the slim volume’s title. Because it is in those others, that we see ourselves. A Beautiful Death: Visual Representation in Death With Dignity Storytelling considers two case studies as examination and proofs of its claims.

Neste estudo propomos uma leitura interdisciplinar, confrontando a trajetória e o encontro de dois olhares, a saber: de um lado, o olhar do escritor belga-argentino Julio Cortázar (1914/1984), e, do outro, o do cineasta italiano Michelangelo Antonioni (1912), e dado às divergências consideráveis que existem entre as duas linguagens, buscaremos encontrar o ponto onde nos parece que acontece o diálogo das poéticas do autor e do diretor. Ao postular a aproximação entre a palavra e a imagem, o olhar é eleito como questão nuclear, transitando ainda pelo erótico e a personagem feminina. / In this study we propose an interdisciplinary interpretation that evaluates the trajectories and convergence of two looks: on the one hand, the view of the Belgian-Argentinean writer Julio Cortazar (1914/1984), and on the other, the view of the Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni (1912). Given the considerable incongruities between the two languages, we aim to find a poetical meeting point at which the dialogue between the writer and the director can be established. By postulating a convergence between word and image, the gaze is chosen as the core issue, transiting also through the erotic and the feminine character.

Future warfare concerns information superiority, i.e. supplying decisionmakers with better information than their opponents. Their decisions will be based on information from various sensors such as radars, UAVs, satellites, or any other object that can supply the decision makers with information. A system like this will make use of a huge amount of data, and the decisionmakers may not be able to handle all information that will be presented to them. Because of this, they might make decisions that are not optimal for the task. To enhance tha capability in decision making, the national defence college will create an avatar which will be located in a 3D presentation device, called the Visioscope (tm). If the computer system detects that a person might have made an erroneous decision, the avatar will act and point out the error, i.e. there will be a dialog between the decision makers and the avatar. One important factor when humans communicate with each other is mutual eye gaze. If mutual eye gaze can occur between the users and the avatar, and if the avatar can behave like a human, the communication process will be improved and the users will make less errors. This literature study aims to generate some ideas about how existing technology supports mutual eye gaze between the avatar and the users in the ROLF 2010 environment. The study partly concerns how a computer system can control an avatar so that it behaves like a human.

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder that characteristically involves an impaired capacity to engage in reciprocal social interaction and to use eye-gaze for social purposes. This collection of conversation analytic studies examines naturally-occurring interactions involving Finnish children diagnosed with autism. The data consist of video-recorded interactions of four children, aged between 9-12 years, each engaged in dyadic or multiparty interactions with a range of familiar co-participants (teachers, parents, and siblings) at home, school, and music club. Comparative data from neurotypical interactions are also considered. The aim is to use conversation analysis to better understand how the children with autism interact in everyday settings. The study examines the organization of interactions as sequences of action, and how eye-gaze and other multimodal resources are involved in the orientation to and production of initiating and responsive actions (e.g. questions and answers). The analyses show (1) competencies with respect to using eye-gaze at relevant sequential environments to mobilise a response from a co-participant, and using smiling as an interactional resource while orienting to the response-implicativeness of eye-gaze; (2) displays of self-consciousness (involving averted gaze and other conduct) can occur when the participants orient to the children's non-production of a response that has been made relevant; (3) child's gaze aversion can become problematic in particular sequential locations, namely, when the child's response is noticeably absent and treated as unforthcoming; (4) how the handling of material objects can provide a resource when eliciting interactional involvement with the child. The findings indicate areas of interactional competence and show how, on some occasions, the direction of eye-gaze and body orientation can become interactionally problematic. The merits of researching naturally occurring interactions, and the prospect of incorporating a conversation analytic component as part of clinical assessments, are discussed.

I denna rapport undersöks samspelet mellan grafiska gränssnitt, huvudrörelser och dess inverkan för användarupplevelsen i virtuell verklighet. Studien begränsas till applicering i fastighetsvisningsapplikationer i virtuell verklighet. Studien och rapportens syfte är att besvara frågeställningen: Vilka aspekter bör tas i åtanke vid utformningen av grafiska gränssnitt för huvudrörelsebaserade inmatningsmetoder till VR-mjukvara. Denna fråga kommer besvaras med designriktlinjer orienterade för virtuell verklighet. I bakgrunden presenteras definitioner och användning av termer som: Virtuell verklighet, grafiska gränssnitt, inmatningsmetoder och huvudrörelseinmatning. I bakgrunden presenteras även företagssamarbetet med Wec360 samt riktlinjer om grafiska gränssnitt i virtuell verklighet som ligger till grund för studiens innehåll. Därefter följer ett metodkapitel som presenterar, definierar samt förklarar användning av de test- och utvärderingsmetoder som används i kommande tester. Dessa tester och utvärderingar är en heuristisk utvärdering för att finna primära problemområden som ligger som bas för kommande användbarhetstest. Men innan dess utfördes en semistrukturerad intervju med fem(5) personer som är utan, eller har mindre erfarenhet av virtuell verklighet. Dessa intervjuer utfördes för att få en grundlig idé om preferens, attityd, beteende, användning, erfarenhet samt preliminära tankar. Med samma fem deltagare utfördes ett användbarhetstest vars primära syfte var att säkerställa eller dementera de problem som uppfattades under den heuristiska utvärderingen. Användbarhetstestet användes även för att upptäcka nya problemområden som ska analyseras. Därefter följde en analys som följde bottom up-metoden för att ta alla delade problem och föra samman till en helhetsbild som studiens resultat därefter baseras på. Därefter följer resultatet – tre riktlinjer med mål att förbättra aspekter för det grafiska gränssnittet och huvudrörelseinmatning med syfte att förbättra användarupplevelsen. De främsta resultaten visas gälla applikationens sämre synlighet av interaktiva grafiska element. Men även en inkräktande upplevelse bildad av grafiska förflyttningselement. Det slutliga resultatet berörde hjälpavsnitt och hur användaren visas var funktioner och element finns i applikationen samt hur de används. Slutligen följer slutsatser och tillhörande diskussion för vidare studier inom området för användarupplevelse och grafiska gränssnitt i virtuell verklighet.

Filmturism är ett relativt nytt fenomen på turistmarknaden, som kort kan beskrivas med när en turist besöker en destination eller attraktion till följd av att destinationen/attraktionen har visats upp på tv eller i film. I Thailand har ett flertal stora filmer spelats in genom åren, bland annat The Beach och James Bond – The Man with the Golden Gun. Syftet med denna studie är att belysa fenomenet filmturism samt undersöka hur lokala aktörer i Thailand använder filmerna Beach och James Bond – Man with the golden gun som redskap för platsmarknadsföring och imageskapande. I studien har det även studerats hur destinationerna har påverkats av filmerna samt hur destinationerna uppfattas av turister som har varit eller är på väg till någon av platserna. Den destinationsimage som skapas genom film behöver inte alltid stämma överens med destinationens verkliga image. Studiens material har samlats in genom kvalitativa intervjuer, observationer och skuggningar samt kvantitativa enkäter och granskning av resesidan Tripadvisor och aktören Maya Bay Tours hemsida. Studiens resultat visar att filmerna har påverkat platsernas image och att Maya Bay inte är lika beroende av filmen i sin marknadsföring som James Bond Island är. Turister som har besökt platserna påpekade att mängden turister är det som förstört upplevelsen och att turismen måste regleras för att deras förväntningar ska uppfyllas.

Everyday face-to-face social interaction is increasingly being supplemented by computer- and video-mediated communication. With mediation, however, comes the potential loss of important non-verbal cues. It is therefore important to attempt to maintain the quality of the mediated interaction, such that it retains as many of the aspects of a real-world interaction as possible. Social presence is a measure of how similar a mediated interaction is to face-to-face, the most socially present situation, in terms of perceptions of and behaviour towards an interlocutor. Social presence can be mediated by many factors, one of which is mutual gaze, and social perceptions of an interlocutor are also thought to be related to task performance. For a successful interaction, therefore, an optimum amount of mutual gaze for maximising social presence and task performance is desirable. This research aims to investigate the relationship between mutual gaze, task performance and social presence, in order to discover the ideal conditions under which a successful mediated interaction can occur. Previous gaze research paradigms have involved one conversational partner staring continuously at the other, and the resulting mutual gaze being measured. It is hypothesised that this method may actually suppress mutual gaze, primarily due to social reasons. It is potentially, therefore, not the optimum experimental design for mutual gaze research. The first study in this thesis used eye-tracking to explore this hypothesis and investigate the relationship between mutual gaze and task performance. A suitable paradigm was developed, based on that used in previous research into eye movements and non-verbal communication. Two participants – Instruction Giver (IG) and Instruction Follower (IF) – communicated via avatars in Second Life to solve simple arithmetic tasks. There were two between-participant looking conditions: staring (the IG’s avatar stared continuously at the IF); and notstaring, (IG’s avatar looked at IF and task-relevant objects). Constant staring did, indeed, show evidence of decreasing mutual gaze within the dyad. Mutual gaze was positively correlated with task performance scores, but only in the not-staring condition. When not engaged in mutual gaze, the IF looked more at task-related objects in the not-staring condition than in the staring condition; this suggests that social factors are likely to be driving the gaze aversion in the staring condition. Furthermore, there are no task-related benefits to staring. The second study explored further how much looking by one person at another will maximise both mutual gaze and task performance between the dyad. It also investigated the relationship between mutual gaze, task performance and both manipulated and perceived social presence. Individual participants interacted with a virtual agent within the Second Life paradigm previously used in the human-human study. Participants were either told they were interacting with a computer (i.e. an agent) or another human (an avatar). This provided the between-participants manipulated social presence variable, or agency. The virtual agent was programmed to look at the participant during either 0%, 25%, 50% or 75% of the interaction, providing the within-participants variable looking condition. The majority of effects were found in the 75% looking condition, including the highest mutual gaze uptake and the highest social presence ratings (measured via a questionnaire). Although the questionnaire did not detect any differences in social presence between the agent and avatar condition, participants were significantly faster to complete the tasks in the avatar condition than in the agent condition. This suggests that behavioural measures may be more effective at detecting differences in social presence than questionnaires alone. The results are discussed in relation to different theories of social interaction. Implications and limitations of the findings are considered and suggestions for future work are made.