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Since conventional audio-video teleconferencing systems have reached their limits, the needs of integrating new sensations to improve users' telecommunication experience are growing. Haptics, the sense of touch, which includes handshake, comforting hug, encouraging pat, and other physical contacts, is of great importance for interpersonal communication, since it allows people to express and receive intimate affection, intention or emotion efficiently. Motivated by a few haptic telecommunication softwares, this thesis presents an innovative webcam-based touchscreen to replace the haptic device, which is used in HugMe system as human hand, to further increase people's degree of immersion with the audio-video-haptic teleconferencing system at a more reasonable price. With our webcam-based touchscreen, the user could directly use his/her bare hand to touch the image of the person who he/she is chatting with, instead of controlling a haptic device as the medium to realize indirect touch. This thesis also gives details of the touchscreen method and our proposed mathematical models for touch position calculation. Experimental results show that our system is accurate and robust, while maintaining high compatibility with conventional audio-video teleconferencing systems for combination. With our haptic jacket, the passive user can feel the touch of the active user at the right position. Also, additional applications with the touchscreen, such as writing and drawing, are developed and tested. Finally, we draw the conclusions and talk about future work.

This research addresses the ways in which film might be used to investigate senses of place and representations of place and ritual. It focuses on two seasonal performative folk traditions in rural England, Haxey Hood in North Lincolnshire and Mayday in Padstow. By considering the experiential qualities of these annual rituals and their significance for local communities as seen in their wider socio-economic contexts, this research raises broader questions regarding place and belonging in contemporary society, and how film as a medium capable of directly conveying phenomenological experience, might transmit the sensual qualities of lived experience, place, and landscape to an audience. Drawing on Sobchack's conception of the film as a body in itself, the role of embodied experience is central in this study in exploring interconnections between the bodies of the filmmaker, the film itself, subjects and audience and their empirical possibilities. The research at the same time is wary of realist approaches to representation, instead seeking to consider the ways in which this “wild meaning” is then manipulated, fragmented and transformed in the process of filmmaking, both ‘in the field’ and in the editing process. Through the use of experimental ethnographic methods, key conceptual aspects of this thesis such as performance, the embodied camera and auto-ethnography are used to investigate the complex ways that place and ritual might not only be known and understood, but are also performed and imagined anew through film. Place and belonging are themes of great contemporary relevance in current academic and art practice, and the outcome of this study has been the creation of my film Folk in Her Machine (2013). By exploring both the sensual qualities of lived experience, and other forms of meaning through experimental ethnographic methods, it is argued that fruitful insights have been gained into both the embodied nature of filmic representation and its performative possibilities, or in MacDougall’s words, film’s interplay “between meaning and being”.

This thesis is concerned with three problems. The first is that of distinguishing and defining one category of video art. The second is developing criteria for the evaluation of works in this category. The third problem is the application of these criteria to a new psycho-narrative video art piece created by the author as well as two pieces by other artists. This paper examines the use of film and video as an art form, focusing on specific influences affecting the evolution of psycho-narrative video art. Definitions for video art and psycho-narrative video art are developed. Descriptive criteria and three critiques are used to justify the conclusions. A concluding artist statement presents the personal view of the author.

This practice-based thesis proposes radical, critical, creative reconsiderations of memory and how the mnemic may be expressed in art practice. The research took place through developing a series of works within contemporary installation art practice, which considers the experience of memory an abstract, affective event. The thesis confronts the typical assumptions and ocularcentric misconceptions that the mnemic is a visual phenomenon. It challenges presumed relationships between photographs and memory then asks: How may notions of memory be re-examined through art practice so as to allow alternative expressions of memory to emerge? After the critique, the thesis offers an alternative concept of memory that may be incorporated into art practice: the memory-event. The concept emerged through my art practice alongside engagement with the writings of philosophers Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and contemporary theorists such as Simon O’Sullivan and Brian Massumi. The inquiry utilises O’Sullivan’s framework as a method towards parallel critique and creation in contemporary art practices; these counter existing forms of thought. The framework includes seven Deleuzean concepts applied in rethinking memory: the encounter, affect, the production of subjectivity, the minor, the virtual, the event, and mythopoesis. The thesis adopts this approach, and demonstrates how the memory-event developed through phases of research. Firstly, the thesis establishes and critiques prevailing ideas and expressions of memory. It then defines the methods and theories to disrupt existing assumptions of the mnemic, showing how the defined methods and theories were applied in reconsidering and posing alternatives to established assumptions. Included is a visual and textual portfolio of work exploring the ideas of memory produced in my art practice. The implications of this research for art practice constitute, through the mobilisation of the memory-event, potentials for liberation from the constraints of representation and common assumptions of memory. This produces innovative expressions of the mnemic experience, and continues to challenge ways in which memory is considered.

"Voodoo Love" is a music video for jazz saxophonist, Lance Ellis. Set at The Turning Point Lounge in New Orleans, as well as the countrysides of Madisonville and Bush, Louisiana, the video takes us into a world where classic Motown style meets the world of campy horror films. Voodoo Love is also the first local jazz video to be produced in high-definition video. It includes appearances by Lischelle Brown, Mardi Gras Indian Big Chief Alfred Doucette, blues player Big Al Carson and the singing trio Mahogany Blue. The video was authored to DVD and includes extras features on the making of the video, including an extended behind the scenes documentary.

It can be argued that the online video game medium has provided new opportunities for the dissemination of educational and informational content, and indeed, such new opportunities have become increasingly exploited by various international organisations, as well as independent gaming producers in order to promote developmental messages. Food Force, Fate of the World and Wildfire are exemplary of such games that seek to inform players of methods that can be utilised to enhance development and alleviate poverty within developing nations. While the games’ presence on the internet provides allowances for the dissemination of alternative and novel suggestions for development, the games prove however, to promote mainstream forms of development, most notably modernisation theories and participatory paradigms. Indeed, Food Force and Fate of the World strongly adhere to modernisation theories through their emphasis upon the necessity of intervention on behalf of developed nations and organisations in order to stimulate development and progress in developing nations, whereas Wildfire proves to be highly informed by participatory paradigms due its stress upon the potential of communities to bring about development by themselves and for themselves. However, due to these influences of such theories, the games also appropriate many of the problematic aspects of these theories. Thus, the games prove to offer ideological conceptualisations for development that are highly flawed and ineffective, and thus serve as a means to encourage and promote the hegemonic positions of developed nations and organisations within the developmental process.

Consumption and production of video signals drastically changed in recent years. Due to the advances in digital consumer technology and the growing availability of fast and reliable internet connections, an increasing amount of digital video sequences are being produced, stored and shared every day in different parts of the world. Video signals are inherently larger in size than other types of multimedia signals. For this reason in order to allow transmission and storage of such data, more efficient compression technology is needed. In this thesis novel methods for enhancing the efficiency of current and next generation video codecs are investigated. Several aspects of interest to video coding technology are taken into account, from computational complexity and compliance to standardisation efforts, to compression efficiency and quality of the decoded signals. Compression can be achieved exploiting redundancies by computing a prediction of a part of the signal using previously encoded portions of the signal. Novel prediction methods are proposed in this thesis based on analytical or statistical models with the aim of providing a solid theoretical basis to support the algorithmic implementation. It is shown in the thesis that appropriately defined synthetic content can be introduced in the signal to compensate for the lack of certain characteristics in the original content. Some of the methods proposed in this thesis aim to target a broader set of use cases than those typically addressed by conventional video coding methods, such as ultra high definition content or coding under high quality conditions.

Video/Image processing is a fundamental issue in computer science. It is widely used for a broad range of applications, such as weather prediction, computerized tomography (CT), artificial intelligence (AI), and etc. Video-based advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) attracts great attention in recent years, which aims at helping drivers to become more concentrated when driving and giving proper warnings if any danger is insight. Typical ADAS includes lane departure warning, traffic sign detection, pedestrian detection, and etc. Both basic and advanced video/image processing technologies are deployed in video-based driver assistance system. The key requirements of driver assistance system are rapid processing time and low power consumption. We consider Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) as the most appropriate embedded platform for ADAS. Owing to the parallel architecture, an FPGA is able to perform high-speed video processing such that it could issue warnings timely and provide drivers longer time to response. Besides, the cost and power consumption of modern FPGAs, particular small size FPGAs, are considerably efficient. Compared to the CPU implementation, the FPGA video/image processing achieves about tens of times speedup for video-based driver assistance system and other applications.

Video streaming is an increasingly popular Internet application. However, despite its popularity, real-time video streaming still remains a challenge in many scenarios. Limited home broadband bandwidth and mobile phone 3G bandwidth means many users stream videos at low quality and compromise on their user experience. To overcome this problem, we propose CStream, a system that aggregates bandwidth from multiple co-operating users in a neighborhood environment for better video streaming. CStream exploits the fact that wireless devices have multiple network interfaces and connects co-operating users with a wireless ad-hoc network to aggregate their unused downlink Internet bandwidth to improve video quality. CStream dynamically generates a streaming plan to stream a single video using multiple connections and continuously adapts to changes in the neighborhood and variations in the available bandwidth. We have built CStream and evaluated it on a controlled test-bed of computers with various performance measures. The results show linear increase in throughput and improved video streaming quality as the number of cooperating users in a neighborhood increase.