Digital video games are an immensely popular form of entertainment. The meaningful positive experiences that games facilitate are fundamental to the activity; players are known to invest a lot of time playing games in search of those experiences. Digital games research is polarized. Some studies find games to be a healthy hobby with positive effects; games promote well-being through regular experience of positive psychological experiences such as flow and positive emotions. Others have identified rare problematic use in those players who devote excessive amounts of time to gaming, associating them with social dysfunction, addiction, and maladaptive aggression. While it remains unclear if games cause these effects, or merely coincide with play, the negative effects historically receive more attention in both popular media and academia. Some authorities attempt to reduce the harms associated with games to such an extent that their methods have become national policy affecting all players including those who exhibit no negative outcomes. In South Korea and Taiwan, policing authorities employ a behaviour policy that sets strict daily limits on session length, thereby controlling the amount of time people spend playing games each day. In China, the General Administration of Press and Publication employ a design policy requiring that games service-providers fatigue their games’ mechanics after a period to coax them to take a break sooner than they ordinarily would. Both policy types alter player interaction with games in any given session and it is unclear how these policies affect players in general. This research aims to compare sessions affected by the behaviour policy, design policy, and policy-free sessions in terms of session length, measurable subjective user-experience, the player's intention to return to the game, and their reasons for choosing to stop playing in a particular session. For use in a repeated-measures experiment, we modified the action RPG Torchlight II to simulate both policies. Participants had one session at the same time each week for three consecutive weeks. In varied sequences, participants played a control session unaffected by policy, a onehour shutdown session representing behaviour policy, and a fatigue session representing design policy. After each session, we recorded their session's length, their user-experience in terms of flow and affect, their intention to return to the game, and their reason for ending the current session. We found that our shutdown condition successfully decreases session length, when compared to the other conditions. The condition facilitates strong flow, moderate positive-affect, and weak negative-affect. The shutdown event does not appear to degrade positive experiences and makes participants slightly more upset (statistically significant) than they would be after choosing to stop playing. This is because players do not get to make that decision, and because players are unable to complete the goals they have set for themselves. Most players intended to play the game again immediately or sometime later in that same day, much sooner (statistically significant) iii Word Template by Friedman & Morgan 2014 than they would after choosing to stop. This also may be due to satisfaction associated with choosing to stop, or being unable to complete their self-set goals. We found that our fatigue condition increases session length when compared to the other conditions. This result contradicts the intentions associated with design policies: shorter sessions. The fatigue mechanics make the game more difficult, which increases the time required for players to complete the goals they have set for themselves, whether it is to complete a level, quest, or narrative sequence. The condition facilitates high levels of flow, moderate positive-affect and low negativeaffect; the condition does not appear to degrade these positive experiences, nor increase negative experience. Most players intended to take the longest breaks between sessions of at least one day, and although we observed that these were longer than the control condition, the differences is not statistically significant. We found that most participants chose to stop playing when the game stopped providing them with positive experiences, or begins to generate discomfort. A large group of participants chose to stop because another activity took priority. Few participants chose to stop because they were satisfied with their session. Less than one third of players explicitly referenced the fatigue mechanics in their decision to stop. Neither policy is holistically better than the other. Both provide strong positive experiences, and have different effects on session length. Whereas it appears that the fatigue condition fails to reduce session length, it also appears that players intend taking longer breaks between sessions, which may reduce total play-time across all sessions. Similarly, the shutdown condition may increase total play time, or at least bring it closer to normal amounts of play-time while also making players more upset. Our operational definition of user-experience is bi-dimensional, and does not include many experiential constructs commonly associated with digital games. During this research, several reliable and valid, and more representative experience measures became available. Any future work on this topic should make use of one of these. Our experiment tested the effects of player experience associated with a single game, genre, and context. Future research should reduce the variation of player factors by focusing on single personalities, typologies, or risk-factors rather than generalizing to all players. We tested out participants only as they played in the early stages of Torchlight II. It is possible that the game's narrative elements, rather than the gameplay mechanics fatigued by the design policy, motivated continued play. We suggest a longitudinal study of the individual policies to explore their effects over many sessions.

As a proof of concept, the presented power-efficient design methodology is experimentally verified on a H.264/AVC baseline decoding system. A prototype chip is fabricated in UMC 0.18mum 1P6M standard CMOS technology. It is capable to decode H.264/AVC baseline profile of QCIF at 30fps. The chip contains 169k gates and 2.5k bytes on-chip SRAM with 4.5mmx4.5mm chip area. It dissipates 293muW at 1.0V and 973muW at 1.8V during realtime video decoding. Compared with conventional designs, the measured power consumption is reduced up to one order of magnitude. / CMOS technology has now entered "power-limited scaling regime", where power consumption moves from being one of many design metrics to being the number one design metric. However, rapid advances of multimedia entertainment pose more stringent constraints on power dissipation mainly due to the increased video quality. Although general power-efficient design techniques have been formed for several years, no literature studied how to systematically apply them on a specific application like video decoding. Besides these general methods, video decoding has its unique power optimization entries due to temporal, spatial, and statistical redundancy in digital video data. / This research focuses on a systematic way to exploit power saving potentials spanning all design levels for real-time video decoding. At the algorithm level, the computational complexity and data width are optimized. At the architectural level, pipelining and parallelism are widely adopted to reduce the operating frequency; distributed processing greatly helps to reduce the number of global communications; hierarchical memory organization moves great part of data access from larger or external memories to smaller ones. At the circuit level, resource sharing reduces total switching capacitance by multi-function reconfigurations; the knowledge about signal statistics is exploited to reduce the number of transitions; data dependent signal-gating and clock-gating are introduced which are dynamic techniques to for power reduction; multiplications, which account for large chip area and switching power, are reduced to minimum through proper transformations, while complex dividers are totally eliminated. At the transistor and physical design level, cell sizing and layout are optimized for power-efficiency purpose. The higher levels, like algorithm and architecture, contribute to larger portion of power reduction, while the lower levels, like transistor and physical, further reduce power where high level techniques are not applicable. / Xu, Ke. / "September 2007." / Adviser: Chui-Sing Choy. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-08, Section: B, page: 4952. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 239-247). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.

A steganographic method was developed based on the temporal redundancies present in digital video streams, these redundancies are utilised by the H.264 encoding standard to reduce the bandwidth requirements of a digital video stream while maintaining content quality. The temporal redundancies are used to steganographically embed unique binary data within the digital video stream, this results in a unique embedding strategy within each video stream while also utilising areas that reduce the potential data loss experienced during the H.264 encoding process. The effectivness of the developed steganographic method is measured using the common steganographic metrics of Payload Capacity, Embedded Data Robustness and Media Impact. The results illustrate that the compensation of mutative factors in the embedding process using temporal redundancies result in a more robust method of data embedding within digital video encoded using H.264.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 111-116).

Electronic book production is a developing field which is still in its infancy. As such, there is still relatively little material available in the form of design principles or guidelines for the production of such books. It is also extremely complex, in that electronic book designers can take advantage of a number of delivery techniques which are not available to authors of traditional paper-based books. Such techniques include: multimedia (the delivery of text, pictures, sound, and moving pictures); and hypermedia (the linking of reactive information items to form non-linear structures). This research investigates some of the key issues in the design of end-user interfaces to electronic books. Essentially, this centres on three basic problems: the use of metaphors in the design of interfaces to electronic books; models for the design of multimedia pages; and the provision of various knowledge corpus structures. Interface metaphors are investigated through the implementation and evaluation of the book metaphor. Applications were developed which either embedded or did not embed the book metaphor. Subjects used these applications while undertaking a number of information access tasks. Both qualitative and performance data werecollected and some significant results were obtained. Five page models were developed (referred to as: simple; tiled; overlay; oversize; and dynamic) which were used to design a number of page structures. These page structures were evaluated using qualitative measures of user reactions to the various page structures. Seven interface dimensions were measured and again significant results were obtained. To measure the effects of knowledge corpus structure on the design of electronic books three different book structures were created: linear; tree; and network. These were investigated in the light of some common information access tasks. The results indicated that some knowledge corpus structures were more appropriate for certain types of task.

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This research analyzes media agency executives' perceptions and strategic decision-making processes when accessing the impact of digital video recorders (DVRs) on the traditional television commercial spot. Strategic decision-making models, as well as major industry research, forms the theoretical framework used to guide the study. The research takes a quantitative approach using a survey in order to obtain the perceptions and decision-making processes of the media agency executives'. The findings are presented while a discussion of the findings is detailed. The thesis concludes with a summary of the overall thesis research as applied to the field of study.

M.Ing. / Atmospheric turbulence (also referred to as optical or heat Scintillation, or heat shimmer) is a particular problem encountered in video surveillance, especially over distances where the target object focused on is over lkm in the distance. Images obtained from video surveillance are commonly required to be of a high quality for object identification and classification. Atmospheric turbulence causes degradation in the image quality through the blurring and a warping of the image, making object identification difficult. Algorithms have and still are being developed to suppress the image turbulence in digital video footage and enhance detail. There is a lack of reliable comparisons among algorithms to provide research direction, methods for identification of the best algorithms for particular applications, identification of useful image processing techniques and a full understanding of the problem. This need and lack of comparisons among the algorithms and atmospheric turbulence degraded videos is identified through the problem identification chapter. A literature study is undertaken in which the source of atmospheric turbulence and models are identified, image processing techniques discussed, filtering of electromagnetic waves reviewed, a review of some equipment, and a discussion of metrics. This is followed by the presentation of a number of atmospheric turbulence suppression algorithms developed by other authors. After a discussion of the algorithm implementations, the experimental design is described for algorithm image quality and performance investigation as well as the effect of optical filters. Experimental results are presented and discussed which provide repeatable results pertaining to the algorithms' image quality and processing requirements. The results allowed identification of the algorithms' strengths and weaknesses, how they compare, and their suitability for real and post processing environments. Efficient performing software components were also able to be identified, particularly Illuminance-Reflectance adjustment. The experiments and results provide a solution to this atmospheric turbulence comparison problem.

This thesis documents the production of THE GOLDEN RING, a short narrative film shot on digital video. All the phases of the production, from the writing process through the post-production, are addressed in the thesis. THE GOLDEN RING is a film I wrote and directed. It tells the story of Luke Stevenson, a man who has it all on a material level, but that otherwise has a void in his life. One day something out of the ordinary happens to him. He finds a ring that belonged to a woman he used to be in love with. Now he might have a chance to recover that love and change his life forever. But, will he have the courage of facing the challenge that change represents?