<p>The accelerated development of mobile computational platforms and artificial intelligence (AI) has led to increase in interconnected products with sensors that are creating smart environments. The smart environment expands the interactive spaces from limited digital screens, such as desktops and phones, to a much broader category that includes everyday objects, smart things, surrounding contexts, robots, and humans. The improvement of personal computing devices including smartphones, watches, and AR glasses further broadens the communication bandwidth between us and the ambient intelligence from the surrounding environment. Additionally in this smart environment people want to pursue personalization and are motivated to design and build their own smart environments and author customized functions.</p> <p> </p> <p>My work in this thesis focuses on investigating workflows and methods to support end-users to create personalized interactive experiences within smart environments. In particular, I designed the authoring systems by inspecting different interaction modalities, namely the direct input, spatial movement, in-situ activity and embodied interactions between users and everyday objects, smart things, robots and virtual mid-air contents. To this end, we explored 1) the software tools, hardware modules, and machines that support users to augment non-smart environments with digital interfaces and functions, and 2) the intelligence and context-awareness powered by the smart environments that deliver automatic and assistance during living and entertaining experiences. In this thesis, I mainly studied the following authoring workflows and systems: 1) customizing interactive interfaces on ordinary objects by surface painted circuits, 2) constructing a spatially aware environment for service robots with IoT modules, 3) authoring robot and IoT applications that can be driven by body actions and daily activities and 4) creating interactive and responsive augmented reality applications and games that can be played through natural input modalities.</p> <p> </p> <p>Takeaways from the main body of the research indicate that the authoring systems greatly lower the barrier for end-users to understand, control, and modify the smart environments. We conclude that seamless, fluent, and intuitive authoring experiences are crucial for building harmonious human-AI symbiotic living environments.</p>

In the past three decades, using Augmented Reality (AR) in repair tasks has received a growing amount of attention from researchers, because AR provides the users with a more immersive experience than traditional methods, e.g., instructional booklets, and audio, and video content. However, traditional methods are mostly used today, because there are several key challenges to using AR in repair tasks. These challenges include device limita- tions, object pose tracking, human-computer interaction, and authoring. Fortunately, the research community is investigating these challenges actively. The vision of this thesis is to move the AR technology towards being widely used in this field. Under this vision, I propose an AR platform for repair tasks and address the challenges of device limitations and authoring. The platform contains a new authoring ap- proach that tracks the real components on the expert’s side to monitor her or his operations. The proposed approach gives experts a novel authoring tool to specify 6DoF movements of a component and apply the geometrical and physical constraints in real-time. To ad- dress the challenge of device limitations, I present a hybrid remote rendering framework for applications on mobile devices. In my remote rendering approach, I adopt a client-server model, where the server is responsible for rendering high-fidelity models, encoding the ren- dering results and sending them to the client, while the client renders low-fidelity models and overlays the high-fidelity frames received from the server on its rendering results. With this configuration, we are able to minimize the bandwidth requirements and interaction latency, since only key models are rendered in high-fidelity mode. I perform a quantitive analysis on the effectiveness of my proposed remote rendering method. Moreover, I conduct a user study on the subjective and objective effects of the remote rendering method on the user experience. The results show that key model fidelity has a significant influence on the objective task difficulty, while interaction latency plays an important role in the subjective task difficulty. The results of the user study show how my method can benefit the users while minimizing resource requirements. By conducting a user study for the AR remote assistance platform, I show that the proposed AR plat- form outperforms traditional instructional videos and sketching. Through questionnaires provided at the end of the experiment, I found that the proposed AR platform receives higher recommendation than sketching, and, compared to traditional instructional videos, it stands out in terms of instruction clarity, preference, recommendation and confidence of task completion. Moreover, as to the overall user experience, the proposed method has an advantage over the video method.

Widespread accessibility to the Internet and the proliferation of Web 2.0 technologies has led to the growth of online tools for educational content creation, delivery, and assessment. Maintaining high quality of assessment using this medium is made more practical by using tools to author and represent a broad range of assessment problems. A survey of existing problem-authoring tools uncovered two main deficiencies: (a) lack of support for authoring "dynamic" (parameterized) problems, and (b) lack of tools that are independent of a specific publishing format, persistence format, and/or authoring platform. Dynamic problems are assessment problem templates that support parameterization of the problems by the use of variables. Variables dynamically take values assigned at random to generate different instances of a problem from a template. This provides for greater diversity of authored problems, and permits students to practice with different variations of a problem. In existing problem authoring tools, the problem types supported are often limited to static problems. A formal definition of an assessment problem structure is presented. This formal definition served as a design aide for a new problem authoring system named QBank, a web-based tool that supports authoring dynamic problems. The proof-of-concept implementation of QBank supports export of questions in CSV format and the Khan Academy Exercise format. The extensible nature of the framework allows future development of features supporting export of authored problems into other publishing and/or persistence formats. / Master of Science

No description available.

<p>Immersive reality technology, such as augmented and virtual reality, has recently become quite prevalent due to innovation in hardware and software, leading to cheaper devices such as Head-mounted displays. There is significant evidence of an improved rate of skill acquisition with immersive reality training. However, the knowledge required to develop content for such immersive media is still relatively high. Subject experts often work together with programmers to create such content. </p> <p><br></p> <p>Our research goal in this thesis can be broadly classified into four distinct but mutually dependent categories. First, we explored the problem of immersive content creation with ProcessAR, an AR-based system to develop 2D/3D content that captures subject matter experts (SMEs) environment-object interactions in situ. The design space for ProcessAR was identified from formative interviews with AR programming experts and SMEs, alongside a comparative design study with SMEs and novice users. To enable smooth workflows, ProcessAR locates and identifies different tools/objects through computer vision within the workspace when the author looks at them. We explored additional features, such as embedding 2D videos with detected objects and user-adaptive triggers. A final user evaluation comparing ProcessAR and a baseline AR authoring environment showed that, according to our qualitative questionnaire, users preferred ProcessAR.</p> <p><br></p> <p>Second, we explored a unified authoring and editing environment, EditAR, that can create content for multiple media, such as AR, VR, and video instructions, based on a single demonstration. EditAR captures the user's interaction within an environment and creates a digital twin, enabling users without programming backgrounds to develop content. We conducted formative interviews with the subject and media experts to design the system. The prototype was developed and reviewed by experts. We also performed a user study comparing traditional video creation with 2D video creation from 3D recordings via a 3D editor, which uses freehand interaction for in-headset editing. Users took five times less time to record instructions and preferred EditAR, giving significantly higher usability scores.</p> <p><br></p> <p>We then explore AnnotateXR, an extended reality (XR) workflow to collect various high fidelity data and auto-annotate it in a single demonstration. AnnotateXR allows users to align virtual models over physical objects, tracked with 6DoF sensors. AnnotateXR utilizes a hand tracking capable XR HMD coupled with 6DoF information and collision detection to enable algorithmic segmentation of different actions in videos through its digital twin. The virtual-physical mapping provides a tight bounding volume to generate semantic segmentation masks for the captured image data. Alongside supporting object and action segmentation, we also support other dimensions of annotation required by modern CV, such as Human-Object, Object-Object, and rich 3D recordings, all with a single demonstration. Our user study shows AnnotateXR produced over 112,000 annotated data points in 67 minutes while maintaining the same performance quality as manual annotations.</p> <p><br></p> <p>Lastly, We conducted two elicitation studies empirically evaluated to determine design guidance for cross-modal devices capable of supporting an immersive interface in VR, allowing for simultaneous interaction with direct hand interaction while allowing for keyboard and mouse input. Recent advances in hand tracking have allowed users to interact with and experience interactions closer and similar to interactions in the physical world. However, these added benefits of natural interaction come at the cost of precision and accuracy offered by legacy input media such as a keyboard/mouse. The results and the guidelines from the two studies were used to develop a prototype called the Immersive Keyboard, which was evaluated against only traditional interface of only the keyboard and mouse. </p> <p><br></p> <p>In this thesis, we have explored a novel extended reality authoring environment that enables users without programming to author asynchronous immersive content in-situ, especially for spatial instructions.</p>

The aim of the present study was to investigate how the impermanence of contract work affects working lives, self-perceptions and the career strategies of Swedish screenwriters of finding and keeping work. Furthermore, it also explored how screenwriters experience their abilities to exercise authorial leverage over media content. Introducing the concept of “career authoring” to cover different aspects of the professional lives of screenwriters such as managing a career, establishing authorship and contractual negotiations, the study was able to embrace various mind-sets and strategies for career success. Combining ethnographical studies and textual analyses the study was able to ascertain that the contingency of the Swedish film and television industries necessitates strategies to cultivate reputations, industrial visibility, consciously receive writing credits and conform to a traditional division of labour. Moreover, the study illuminated the importance of contractual negotiations for career success in terms of both retaining and wavering rights to their work. Strategies for exercise increased authorial leverage were not only confined to the script, but extended beyond the page, where the latter  accentuated processes of reconfiguring traditional conceptions of screenwriters’ abilities to influence media content.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / The objective of this study is to analyze the discourse of students from an undergraduate Letters course at a university in southern Brazil and at an Applied Linguistics Laboratory the LLAp from the same department, based in the triad of teaching, research and extension, who were asked to speak about their academic discursive practices, in order to identify the characteristics of academic literacy processes, using the frameworks of ACD (FAIRCLOUGH, 1992; 2003), academic literacies (LEA; STREET, 1998; STREET, 2010) and the notion of legitimate peripheral participation (LAVE; WENGER, 1991). We developed and applied written semi-structured questionnaires and oral interviews dealing with three characteristics of academic literacy processes: genre systems, the roles played in academic literacy and the processes of authoring and co-authoring. In 58 written questionnaires answered by students of Letters and of the LLAp, we identified 47 genres mentioned by students. Among the most cited genres were those, which are most routine and formulaic in academic communities, such as reviews, abstracts and articles. On the other hand, genres less cited were those, which are more diffused and imprecise, such as conversation and defining the meaning of 'text'. Besides genre diversity, the diversity of roles mentioned by students indicates the plurality of possibilities made available by the projects developed at this university, especially at the LLAp. In the four interviews with LLAp students, we sought to focus on issues that were not explored thoroughly in the written questionnaire. In terms of genre system, students stressed different aspects. Two students emphasized bureaucratic genres, one student pointed out genres produced within the research project, co-authored with other group members and, finally, one student emphasized genres produced in the classroom and for the classroom, in relation to her role as a teacher in training and as a teacher in action. Regarding the authoring and co-authoring process, as well as the roles played, we identified different degrees of engagement and participation of students in the community. In theory, the longer a student participates and the greater the degree of engagement in the social practices of academic literacies in the community, the greater, proportionately, will be the legitimate peripheral participation process and, consequently, the greater the learning. / O objetivo deste estudo é analisar o discurso de alunos de um curso de Letras de uma universidade do sul do Brasil e um laboratório de Linguística Aplicada o LLAp que tem como base o tripé ensino, pesquisa e extensão da mesma universidade sobre suas práticas discursivas acadêmicas, de modo a identificar as características dos processos de letramentos acadêmicos, a partir da perspectiva da ACD (FAIRCLOUGH, 1992; 2003), dos estudos de letramentos acadêmicos (LEA; STREET, 1998; STREET, 2010) e da noção de participação periférica legítima (LAVE; WENGER, 1991). Para isso, elaboramos e aplicamos questionários semiestruturados escritos e entrevistas que tratavam especialmente sobre três características dos processos de letramentos acadêmicos: o sistema de gêneros, os papeis desempenhados e o processo de autoria e coautoria. Em síntese, alguns dados gerados parecem se salientar. Nos 58 questionários escritos respondidos por alunos do curso de Letras e do LLAp, identificamos 47 gêneros mencionados pelos discentes. Entre os gêneros mais citados estão aqueles mais rotineiros e formulaicos de comunidades acadêmicas como resenhas, resumos e artigos. Por outro lado, entre os gêneros menos citados, estão aqueles mais difusos e imprecisos como conversação e definição do significado de texto . Além da diversidade de gêneros, a diversidade de papeis mencionados pelos discentes indica a pluralidade de possibilidades oportunizadas pelos projetos desenvolvidos nesta universidade com destaque para o LLAp. Nas quatro entrevistas realizadas com alunos do LLAp, buscamos focar em questões que não foram exploradas profundamente no questionário escrito. Sobre o sistema de gêneros, identificamos que os alunos enfatizaram diferentes aspectos. Dois alunos enfatizaram gêneros da esfera burocrática , um aluno destacou gêneros produzidos no âmbito do projeto de pesquisa, em coautoria com outros membros do grupo e, por fim, um aluno deu ênfase em gêneros produzidos em sala de aula e para a sala de aula , seja em relação ao seu papel como docente em formação quanto docente em atuação. Em relação ao processo de autoria e coautoria, bem como dos papeis desempenhados, percebemos diferentes graus de engajamento e participação dos discentes na comunidade. Em tese, quanto maior o tempo de participação e maior o grau de engajamento dos discentes nas práticas sociais de letramentos acadêmicos na comunidade, maior, proporcionalmente, será o processo de participação periférica legítima e, consequentemente, maior será a aprendizagem.

Submitted by Renata Lopes (renatasil82@gmail.com) on 2018-03-12T18:07:31Z No. of bitstreams: 1 marcoaureliofreeszjunior.pdf: 20328090 bytes, checksum: 7633f57ccc559ade49b11d6db5026d22 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Adriana Oliveira (adriana.oliveira@ufjf.edu.br) on 2018-03-12T18:09:30Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 marcoaureliofreeszjunior.pdf: 20328090 bytes, checksum: 7633f57ccc559ade49b11d6db5026d22 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-03-12T18:09:30Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 marcoaureliofreeszjunior.pdf: 20328090 bytes, checksum: 7633f57ccc559ade49b11d6db5026d22 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-08-25 / Em meio à diversidade de veículos de comunicação atuais, as mídias Out-of-Home vêm desempenhando um papel de destaque tanto em espaços públicos quanto privados, ao permitir a difusão de informações de cunho coletivo a um grande número de pessoas. No que diz respeito à autoria de conteúdos multimídia nesse meio, grande parte do ferramental existente ou faz uso de linguagens de domínios distintos, ou faz uso de abstrações gráficas que facilitam a autoria, porém, utilizam-se de linguagens para representação hiper/multimídia com conceitos distantes aos utilizados nessas abstrações. Portanto, a representação desses documentos se torna complexa, fazendo uso ainda de linguagens de scripts que são elegíveis aos autores não-programadores e de difícil extração automatizada de informações. Com o foco nessa etapa, este trabalho elabora um modelo conceitual hipermídia com entidades de alto nível de abstração que busca se aproximar dos conceitos encontrados na indústria audiovisual, tais como cenas, trilhas e mídias. A partir desse modelo é criada uma linguagem declarativa em XML, utilizada para representar o conteúdo multimídia e, como consequência, permitir sua autoria textual. Essa linguagem procura tratar questões relativas às disposições espaciais, sincronização dos objetos de mídias, adaptação de conteúdos, além da interatividade e algumas de suas múltiplas modalidades de interação, como gestos e voz. Como resultado, alguns casos de uso são tratados por meio da criação de conteúdos DOOH utilizando-se da linguagem multimídia proposta e, em seguida, uma execução em um player de prova de conceito é realizada. Além disso, o trabalho propõe um pré-processamento específico, aplicado a cada instância do modelo, com o objetivo de otimizar a transmissão do conteúdo em arquiteturas broadcast e multicast, como IPTV. Esse pré-processamento aborda a renderização sucessiva de partes determinísticas da instância, de modo a facilitar o sincronismo do conteúdo entre terminais, reduzir a carga de processamento nestes e reduzir o uso de recursos da rede. / Among the variety of current social communication vehicles, Digital Out-of Home (DOOH) media have been playing a remarkable role in both public and private spaces, by allowing for the rapid dissemination of collective information to a large number of people. Regarding multimedia content authoring for this vehicle, much of the existing toolkits either makes use of languages from other domains or makes use of graphic abstracti ons that ease the authoring process, but making use of hyper/multimedia representation languages with distant concepts to those used in these abstractions. Therefore, docu ment representation becomes complex, sometimes makes use of scripting languages, and therefore is illegible by authors and even difficult for automated information extraction. Focusing on this step, this paper develops a conceptual hypermedia model with high-level entities of abstraction which seek to approach the concepts found in the audiovisual in dustry, such as scenes, tracks and media. From that model a XML declarative language is created, used to represent the multimedia content and, as a result, allow its textual authorship. This language seeks to deal with matters relating to spatial arrangements, synchronizing media objects, content adaptation, in addition to the interactivity and some of its multiple modalities of interaction, gesture and voice. As a result, some use cases are handled by creating DOOH content using the proposed multimedia language, and then an execution in a proof-of-concept player is performed. In addition, this paper proposes an improvement applied to the STorML instance with the aim to optimize the transmis sion of content in broadcast and multicast architectures, such as IPTV. This improvement covers subsequent rendering of deterministic parts of the instance to facilitate content timing between terminals, reducing the processing in the terminals and decreasing the use of network resources.

This diploma thesis deals with the topic of multimedia learning objects and authoring systems for its design. In the form of a qualitative survey the paper discovers the most frequent practice teachers' requirements for these objects and systems. Subsequently, the paper carries out theoretical analysis of commonly available authoring systems for multimedia learning object creation and performs their evaluation from the point of view of the identified requirements. After that, the thesis notes that there is no authoring system available on the market that would adequately meet the requirements identified. Therefore, the paper works on the design and realization of such a system. Finally, the designed and implemented system is deployed in a real educational environment and its contribution to the teacher's work is validated by accomplished action research.

O Governo Brasileiro, juntamente com outros órgãos públicos e representantes do terceiro setor, criou um grande número de projetos que tentam disseminar o uso das tecnologias e promover a inclusão digital. Esses projetos são consequência da importância dada à inclusão digital e à capacitação do cidadão como ser autônomo e crítico no uso das tecnologias e na construção do seu conhecimento. Entretanto, a escola, que deveria ser considerada a principal responsável pelo futuro cidadão, ainda não consegue acompanhar o avanço das tecnologias e da sociedade fora dos seus muros, vivendo um momento de grandes questionamentos. As tecnologias já fazem parte do cotidiano da escola, mas não provocaram mudanças significativas nos processos de ensino e aprendizado como as que se observam fora dos muros da escola. Nossos alunos vivem hoje uma realidade fora da escola muito diferente da que a escola lhes oferece, o que prejudica a relação da escola com o aluno e com a sociedade. As mídias, poderosos recursos para a produção de conteúdos educacionais, estão presentes no cotidiano desses usuários, ávidos em consumirem desenhos animados, filmes e jogos eletrônicos. Entretanto, os usuários ainda são tratados como meros espectadores, que não passam de passivos consumidores que recebem todas as informações prontas, continuando reféns de uma parcela da sociedade que possui o poder de produzir e manipular estas informações. Este trabalho apresenta um estudo sobre interfaces naturais em sistemas de autoria para filmes de animação, bem como a concepção, desenvolvimento e resultados de testes de dois protótipos de sistemas. Apresenta também considerações e subsídios para o desenvolvimento de sistemas de autoria que estimulem a produção de filmes de animação de maneira fácil e intuitiva a partir de interfaces naturais com foco no processo de produção do usuário. Em vivência, os protótipos desenvolvidos se mostraram de fácil e rápida apropriação por crianças de diferentes faixas etárias, que se mostraram interessadas em explorar e construir suas animações. Os resultados obtidos mostram a viabilidade da proposta do trabalho e fornecem subsídios para o desenvolvimento de novos sistemas. / The Brazilian Government, along with other public agencies and representatives of the third sector, has created a large number of projects that try to spread the use of technologies and promote digital inclusion. These projects are the result of the importance given to digital inclusion and empowerment of the citizen as an autonomous being and critical user of technology as well as autonomous in his knowledge construction. However, the school, which should be considered the main responsible for the citizens\' future, still can not keep pace with advancing technology and society outside its walls, living a moment of great questions, since the technologies are already part of its daily but caused no significant changes in the teaching and learning as occurring outside the school walls. Today, student\'s reality outside school is very different from what school offers them, which undermines the school\'s relationship with the student and society. The digital media, with powerful resources for content production, are present in daily lives of the users, eager to consume cartoons, movies and computer games. However, users are still treated as simple spectators who are merely passive consumers and receive all the information ready, still hostage to a portion of the society that has the power to manipulate and produce this information. This work presents a study on natural interfaces to authoring systems for animation films, as well as presents the design, development and results of tests of two prototypes. It also presents considerations and subsidies for the development of authoring systems that encourage production of animated films in an easy and intuitive way, using natural interfaces and focusing on the production process and user evolution. In preliminary experiments, the prototypes proved to be easy and quickly learned, which matches the goals of this project to attract users in different age groups who had shown interest in exploring and building their own animations. The results and contributions obtained show the feasibility of the proposed work and can also provide subsidies for the development of new systems.