A content analysis of news Web sites reveals how many multimedia and interactive components both converged and non-converged media organizations include on their Web presence. The sample included four news Web sites considered to be highly converged with their print and broadcast counterparts (TBO.com, chicagotribune.com, DallasNews.com, and Azcentral.com), one newspaper Web site not affiliated with a broadcast media organization (buffalonews.com), and one broadcast news Web site not affiliated with a print news organization (kfmb.com). A multimedia and interactivity score was given to each Web site based on the quantity of these components each site used. Both kfmb.com (a non-converged organization) and chicagotribune.com (a highly converged news organization) offered significantly more multimedia components than the other four organizations, but only chicagotribune.com provided a statistically significant number of interactivity components on its Web site. The results of this study revealed that among the four converged news organizations (azcentral.com, dallasnews.com, chicagotribune.com, and tbo.com), the only organization demonstrating the characteristics of a converged news organization was chicagotribune.com.

The use of small scale Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is quickly becomingcommonplace in many domains. Operating such vehicles often requires using aspecialized radio control (RC) transmitter. One objective of this thesis is toinvestigate the use of other means of controlling a particular type of a UAV - aquadrotor. Two types of alternative devices are investigated, a standard gamingconsole controller PlayStation 3 gamepad (PS3 gamepad) and a smartphone(Android OS based). The purpose of substituting the RC controller is to make iteasier for a novice user to operate a UAV. The second objective is to investigate solutions to the problem of slung load control. A slung load is a uniform mass attached to a platform with a wire that may swingfreely. The slung load control problem consists of several subproblems: slung loadmodeling, altitude control, filtering of sensor data and the slung load control itself. The purpose of controlling the slung load is to reduce the oscillations of the load inflight and to minimize its influence on the flight performance of a UAV. Both types of alternative interfaces to the UAV were designed and implemented. Inorder to interface with the quadrotor platform at hand a new communicationprotocol based on TCP/IP was introduced. A study of the design process and typicaluse cases was performed. The two types of interfaces were evaluated by a group oftarget users as well as in real flight tests. The game controller was easy to use whilethe smartphone interface required automatic altitude control to be really useful. The evaluators found that the smartphone provided a smoother control over the steeringcompared to using the joystick on a game controller. The slung load control problem was investigated theoretically and in practice on astationary testing rig. The altitude control problem has been addressed byincorporating a PID controller which uses filtered data from a pressure sensor. ThePID control was extended with an anti-windup mechanism combined with afeedforward control of the tilt angle. A mechanism for a smooth transition from themanual to automatic altitude control modes was implemented and verified in flighttests.

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La complexité des mondes virtuels ne cesse d'augmenter et les techniques de modélisation classiques peinent à satisfaire les contraintes de quantité nécessaires à la production de telles scènes. Les techniques de génération procédurale permettent la création automatisée de mondes virtuels complexes à l'aide d'algorithmes, mais sont généralement contre-intuitives et par conséquent réservées à des artistes expérimentés.En effet, ces méthodes offrent peu de contrôle à l'utilisateur et sont rarement interactives.De plus, il s'agit souvent pour l'utilisateur de trouver des valeurs pour leurs nombreux paramètres en effectuant des séries d'essais et d'erreurs jusqu'à l'obtention d'un résultat satisfaisant, ce qui est long et fastidieu.L'objectif de cette thèse est de combiner la puissance créatrice de la génération procédurale avec un contrôle utilisateur intuitif afin de proposer de nouvelles méthodes interactives et intuitives de modélisation de mondes virtuels.Nous proposons plusieurs méthodes combinant génération procédurale et contrôle intuitif, en accentuant graduellement leur aspect interactif. Ainsi, nous présentons :- une méthode de génération procédurale de villages sur des terrains accidentés, dont les éléments sont soumis à de fortes contraintes de l'environnement,- une méthode interactive de modélisation de cascades, basée sur un contrôle utilisateur fin et la génération automatisée d'un contenu cohérent en regard de l'hydrologie et du terrain,- une méthode d'édition de terrains par croquis, où les éléments caractéristiques du terrain sont analysés et déformés pour correspondre aux lignes de crêtes tracées par l'utilisateur,- une méthode de peinture de mondes virtuels, où des techniques de synthèse d'éléments vectoriels sont utilisées pour automatiser la déformation et l'édition de la scène tout en préservant sa cohérence. / The complexity of virtual worlds is increasing and conventional modeling techniques are struggling to meet the constraints and amount of time required for the production of such scenes.Procedural generation techniques allow automated virtual worlds creation using algorithms, but are often non-intuitive and therefore reserved to experimented artists.Indeed, these methods offer few controls to users and are rarely interactive.Moreover, the user often needs to find values of several parameters by performing a series of trial and error, until obtaining a satisfactory result, which is a long and tedious task.The objective of this thesis is to combine the power of procedural modeling with intuitive user control to propose intuitive and interactive methods for modeling virtual worlds.We propose several methods combining procedural modeling and intuitive control, gradually increasing their interactive aspect.Thus we present:- a technique for procedural modeling of villages over arbitrary terrains, whose elements are subject to strong environmental constraints,- an interactive technique for procedural modeling of waterfall sceneries, based on an intuitive user control and the automated generation of a consistent content, in regard of hydrology and terrain constraints,- an sketch-based technique for editing terrains, where terrain features are extracted and deformed to fit the user sketches,- an interactive method for virtual world painting, where example-based synthesis of vectorial elements methods are used to automate deformation and editing of the scene while maintaining its consistency.