This dissertation presents the GDI (Goal Directed Interface) approach to the user interface for office systems. The primary objectives of the approach are to create an interface that (1) requires little user training and (2) tries to perform higher level task activities (ex. 'schedule a meeting') that have been excluded from computerization in the past. The GDI technique (1) postulates a simple model of the office environment consisting of persons, things, and processes, and a decomposable goal set, (2) represents knowledge in the office environment through rules, frames, and scripts, and object-oriented programming techniques, (3) creates an iconic visual representation consisting of persons, things, and processes that closely mimics the user's 'mental model' of the office world, (4) requires that the user's own 'person icon' be present for all interactions so that actions appear to take place in a user controllable context (the user's icon is, literally, in the interface), (5) provides a 'selection window' through which the user communicates his/her goal by grouping relevant icons, (6) uses a rule-based expert system to examine an icon configuration and, through its expertise, derives a user goal (despite ambiguous or faulty icon placements), (7) attempts to complete the user goal through the use of scripts and multiple expert systems.

A storyscape is the new medium of storytelling. It originates in the model of transmedia storytelling defined by Henry Jenkins (2006a) in Convergence Culture and applied to The Matrix franchise. The storyscape medium is conceptualized from the author/designer perspective as four gestalts that create a whole from stand-alone parts. The four gestalts are mythopoeia, character, canon, and genre. This approach frames the authoring of this story-centric model in opposition to the design approaches of world-building or storyworlds. The four gestalts also provide an academic approach that unites theory and practice with a unified design vocabulary and an orientation toward the creation of a cultural and creative product that is defined as the storyscape medium. Storyscapes, such as The Star Wars franchise or the Marvel Universe, consume the lion’s share of our cultural capital (Johnson 2014). Therefore, the development of a consistent vocabulary, a design approach, and an understanding of how they create meaning and define worldviews is critical to our understanding and practice of a new medium (Dena 2009). Starting with the frame of storytelling as a practice and previous aesthetic models such as The Poetics, this research charts the evolution of the storyscape medium across topics of academic transmedia approaches, principles, affordances, and the connecting or conceptualizing principles that act as gestalts.

No description available.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 28-31, 1996 / Town and Country Hotel and Convention Center, San Diego, California / The Telemetry Data Center (TDC) at White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) is now beginning to modernize its existing telemetry data processing system. Modern networking and interactive graphical displays are now being introduced. This infusion of modern technology will allow the TDC to provide our customers with enhanced data processing and display capability. The intent of this project is to outline this undertaking.

The interactive whiteboard is a fairly recent technical device, which has become an increasingly important teaching aid. The interactive whiteboard is supposed to have a positive impact on English Language Teaching, due to its interactivity and the unlimited opportunities it creates for language teaching. However, findings still show that the interactive whiteboard is used more as a traditional whiteboard to write and show information on rather than as an interactive teaching and learning device. This study seeks to investigate English language teachers’ integration of the IWB in ELT. A qualitative approach was used to collect data for this study. Four English Language Teachers at a lower secondary school in southern Sweden were interviewed. The result from this study shows similarities to previous research. The decisive factors for the participants’ incorporation of the IWB in ELT, such as attitude, knowledge and time, were comparable to previous studies. The result also implies that the participants saw the interactive whiteboard as a useful tool in English Language Teaching and as a regular part of their teaching. Nevertheless, there was a desire among the teachers to learn more about the interactive whiteboard and its possibilities and also to develop their skills in order to improve their teaching and the pupil's language proficiency. Although the teachers in the study used the interactive whiteboard frequently and interactively, the result shows that the most frequent usage was to display information non-interactively.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 17-20, 1994 / Town & Country Hotel and Conference Center, San Diego, California / In recent years the extension of interactive simulation technology to involve simulators and live vehicles from geographically dispersed sites has produced a demand for high-bandwidth communication networks that can provide guaranteed quality of service (e.g., insured availability of bandwidth and upper bounds on end-to-end delay). This paper reviews the requirements distributed interactive simulation places on the communications infrastructure and describes the Defense Simulation Internet (DSI), a network developed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency to support distributed interactive simulations. Key features of the DSI are: more than 120 participating sites spanning Europe, the United States and Asia; use of a resource reservation mechanism to provide guaranteed quality of service; and support for communication between classified sites. Furthermore, the paper describes the internetworking protocols used in the DSI to provide guaranteed quality of service and to support transmission of classified communications. Other topics discussed in the paper are research efforts that anticipate increased load on the DSI and the relevance of the technology to the integration of the telemetry range and distributed interactive simulations.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 17-20, 1994 / Town & Country Hotel and Conference Center, San Diego, California / The Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) concept, since its inception, has been defined into three separate but distinct areas of service. • Viewing of data in the real-time environment. • Multiple range viewing and usage of"real-time data." • Problems with the sharing of information through DIS. This paper will discuss the DIS concept and some of the various methods available to display this data to users of the system.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 27-30, 1997 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / The U.S. Air Force has developed GPS-based instrumentation systems to support both test and training activities. In support of recent large-scale exercises, interfaces were developed to employ existing test and training assets in a synthetic battlefield. The writers propose exploration of similar approaches to overcome the challenge of developing a common approach to test and training instrumentation.

This paper describes a Protocol Finite State Machine (PFSM) for implementing communication protocols. Our objective is to develop and implement a general model for communication protocols based on the principles of finite state machines and make the design of transport entity more modular and easier to maintain and modify. We have designed an inference method and knowledge representation, based on semantic networks, for implementing this model. We have added interactive capability and automatic error detection to check for invalid external events and other types of errors in our model. PFSM consists of one or more knowledge bases depicting the state machine model for each communication protocol, an inference engine that uses the knowledge base(s), a working memory, a knowledge acquisition subsystem to gather the data required to build the knowledge base(s), a dialog subsystem to conduct an interactive conversation with the user(s), and an explanation subsystem to explain the inferencing mechanism. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)

Global illumination algorithms are used to render photorealistic images of 3D scenes taking into account both direct lighting from the light source and light reflected from other surfaces in the scene. Algorithms based on computing radiosity were among the first to be used to calculate indirect lighting, although they make assumptions that work only for diffusely reflecting surfaces. The classic radiosity approach divides a scene into multiple patches and generates a linear system of equations which, when solved, gives the values for the radiosity leaving each patch. This process can require extensive calculations and is therefore very slow. An alternative to solving a large system of equations is to use a Monte Carlo method of random sampling. In this approach, a large number of rays are shot from each patch into its surroundings and the irradiance values obtained from these rays are averaged to obtain a close approximation to the real value. <br /><br /> This thesis proposes the use of a Monte Carlo method to generate radiosity texture maps on graphics hardware. By storing the radiosity values in textures, they are immediately available for rendering, making this algorithm useful for interactive implementations. We have built a framework to run this algorithm and using current graphics cards (NV6800 or higher) it is possible to execute it almost interactively for simple scenes and within relatively low times for more complex scenes.