Video games, as the fastest growing media, need set usability design standards. In this context, this study was motivated by the following kinds of questions: What makes a standard console game good? What makes it too frustrating to play? Each company has developed its own standards which can vary greatly. Game producers learn from experience what to do and what not to do. However, smaller companies that may have only produced a few games are left to chance. Moreover, startup game companies may fail at a game that would have otherwise succeeded if they had only had a set of standards to follow. Companies like Microsoft, Capcom and Electronic Arts rule the gaming industry mainly due to the fact that they have discovered what works. This study employs usability analysis to identify standards for assessing video game effectiveness, efficiency and player satisfaction. Experienced video game players participated in an online questionnaire. Conclusions about effective, efficient, and satisfying video games are derived from questionnaire results. Of several major findings presented in this analysis, this study reveals that the beginning of the game is an imperative experience that can determine if a player continues the game. / Department of Telecommunications

The purpose of this study was to examine if video game usage was influenced by family structure. Family structure was measured in two ways; the first, the amount of time one spends with their family, and second, family disruption. The amount of time one spends with their family was measured with specific amounts of time; for example, the number of weekly days one would engage with his or her family. Family disruption was broken into four categories; parental marriage, parental divorce, adoption, and guardian death. Video game usage was measured in two categories; weekly days one plays video games, and daily hours one plays video games. The evidence from the 701 surveys suggests there is no correlation between video game usage and the amount of time one spends with their family. The evidence also suggests that family disruption does not influence whether or not one plays video games either. / Department of Sociology

This paper reviews the process of video production that was used to create the creative portion of the thesis project. During this process, I experienced creative art theory, creative methods, and new technology applications. For the production of the thesis, I used a high definition digital video camera to illustrate the conflict and fusion between the East and West on the level of cultural mythology. The thesis is comprised of five parts and seven subdivisions:PrefaceStatement of the problemReview of influenceDescription of the artworks, including seven subdivisions:Theme of the projectSelection of creative styleElements of art and cinematographyProject OverviewTransposing the concrete into the abstractExhibit understanding of the language of cinemaCreative application of emerging HDV technologyConclusion and exhibition statement. / Department of Art

This study examines the possibility of creating original video-based content for the video-enabled iPod that was released in October 2005. Current trends show that existing content created for conventional media like television, cinema and computers are simply being ported over to this new medium. However, when this project began, none of the production studios are concentrating on creating content specifically for this medium, which has its own unique properties like portability, screen size and the ability to easily start and pause content as required. The purpose of this project is to prove that such medium-specific content can be created and made financially viable for the creators. Further, this hypothesis is put to the test by presenting it to a group of Ball State University students and their responses are examined in detail. / Department of Telecommunications

This creative project consists of a short fiction film which is finished on DVD and features a full length video commentary. The video commentary is an invention of my own which utilizes an often overlooked element of DVD technology, the multi-angle ability, to effectively merge two of the most popular features of modern motion picture DVD releases: the director's commentary and the production documentary. The disk actually contains two tracks of video, each of identical length. One is the film; the other is a documentary on the making of the film, with certain sections that correspond in real time with events in the film. The user has the ability to switch between tracks at anytime for comparison. This to my knowledge has never been done before, and because of the enormous popularity of the DVD and these features, may find widespread application. This project, while only an exploration of its potential, shows that the idea has feasibility and legitimacy. / Department of Telecommunications

This thesis identifies and explores the types of communication modes that exist in video games. Different types of communication are identified and discussed based on Frye's audience centered theory of modes. The inferior communication mode, the mimetic communication mode, the leader-centered communication mode, the romantic communication mode, and the mythical communication mode are all explained. A convenience sample of six video game players were interviewed about video games. An analysis of their self-identification statements revealed that players seek a high level of romantic communication when playing video games. The romantic communication mode makes the video game world an idealized place where the players are able to manipulate their circumstances or show more intelligence than the user in reality. Uses of the communication modes are also explained. / Department of Telecommunications

Multiple Description Coding (MDC) was fi rst formulated by A. Gersho and H. Witsenhausen as a way to improve the robustness of telephony links to outages. Lots of studies have been done in this area up to now. Another application of MDC is the transmission of an image in diff erent descriptions. If because of the link outage during transmission, any one of the descriptions fails, the image could still be reconstructed with some quality at the decoder side. In video coding, inter prediction is a way to reduce temporal redundancy. From an information theoretical point of view, one can model inter prediction with Causal Video Coding (CVC). If because of link outage, we lose any I-frame, how can we reconstruct the corresponding P- or B-frames at the decoder? In this thesis, we are interested in answering this question and we call this scenario as causal video coding with possible loss of the fi rst encoded frame and we denote it by CVC-PL as PL stands for possible loss. In this thesis for the fi rst time, CVC-PL is investigated. Although, due to lack of time, we mostly study two-frame CVC-PL, we extend the problem to M-frame CVC-PL as well. To provide more insight into two-frame CVC-PL, we derive an outer-bound to the achievable rate-distortion sets to show that CVC-PL is a subset of the region combining CVC and peer-to-peer coding. In addition, we propose and prove a new achievable region to highlight the fact that two-frame CVC-PL could be viewed as MDC followed by CVC. Afterwards, we present the main theorem of this thesis, which is the minimum total rate of CVC-PL with two jointly Gaussian distributed sources, i.e. X1 and X2 with normalized correlation coeffi cient r, for di fferent distortion pro files (D1,D2,D3). Defi ning Dr = r^2(D1 -1) + 1, we show that for small D3, i.e. D3 < Dr +D2 -1, CVC-PL could be treated as CVC with two jointly Gaussian distributed sources; for large D3, i.e. D3 > DrD2/(Dr+D2-DrD2), CVC-PL could be treated as two parallel peer-to-peer networks with distortion constraints D1 and D2; and for the other cases of D3, the minimum total rate is 0.5 log (1+ ??)(D3+??)/ (Dr+?? )(D2+?? ) + 0.5 log Dr/(D1D3) where ??=D3-DrD2+r[(1-D1)(1-D2)(D3-Dr)(D3-D2)]^0.5/[Dr+D2-(D3+1) ] We also determine the optimal coding scheme which achieves the minimum total rate. We conclude the thesis by comparing the scenario of CVC-PL with two frames with a coding scheme, in which both of the sources are available at the encoders, i.e. distributed source coding versus centralized source coding. We show that for small D2 or large D3, the distributed source coding can perform as good as the centralized source coding. Finally, we talk about future work and extend and formulate the problem for M sources.

Video communication of British Sign Language (BSL) is important for remote interpersonal communication and for the equal provision of services for deaf people. However, the use of video telephony and video conferencing applications for BSL communication is limited by inadequate video quality. BSL is a highly structured, linguistically complete, natural language system that expresses vocabulary and grammar visually and spatially using a complex combination of facial expressions (such as eyebrow movements, eye blinks and mouth/lip shapes), hand gestures, body movements and finger-spelling that change in space and time. Accurate natural BSL communication places specific demands on visual media applications which must compress video image data for efficient transmission. Current video compression schemes apply methods to reduce statistical redundancy and perceptual irrelevance in video image data based on a general model of Human Visual System (HVS) sensitivities. This thesis presents novel video image coding methods developed to achieve the conflicting requirements for high image quality and efficient coding. Novel methods of prioritising visually important video image content for optimised video coding are developed to exploit the HVS spatial and temporal response mechanisms of BSL users (determined by Eye Movement Tracking) and the characteristics of BSL video image content. The methods implement an accurate model of HVS foveation, applied in the spatial and temporal domains, at the pre-processing stage of a current standard-based system (H.264). Comparison of the performance of the developed and standard coding systems, using methods of video quality evaluation developed for this thesis, demonstrates improved perceived quality at low bit rates. BSL users, broadcasters and service providers benefit from the perception of high quality video over a range of available transmission bandwidths. The research community benefits from a new approach to video coding optimisation and better understanding of the communication needs of deaf people.

With the progress of computer graphics and computer vision technologies, 3D/multiview video applications such as 3D-TV and tele-immersive conference become more and more popular and are very likely to emerge as a prime application in the near future. A successful 3D/multiview video system needs synergistic integration of various technologies such as 3D/multiview video acquisition, compression, transmission and rendering. In this thesis, we focus on addressing the challenges for multiview video compression. In particular, we have made 5 major contributions: (1) We propose a novel neighbor-based multiview video compression system which helps remove the inter-view redundancies among multiple video streams and improve the performance. An optimal stream encoding order algorithm is designed to enable the encoder to automatically decide the stream encoding order and find the best reference streams. (2) A novel multiview video transcoder is designed and implemented. The proposed multiview video transcoder can be used to encode multiple compressed video streams and reduce the cost of multiview video acquisition system. (3) A learning-based multiview video compression scheme is invented. The novel multiview video compression algorithms are built on the recent advances on semi-supervised learning algorithms and achieve compression by finding a sparse representation of images. (4) Two novel distributed source coding algorithms, EETG and SNS-SWC, are put forward. Both EETG and SNS-SWC are capable to achieve the whole Slepian-Wolf rate region and are syndrome-based schemes. EETG simplifies the code construction algorithm for distributed source coding schemes using extended Tanner graph and is able to handle mismatched bits at the encoder. SNS-SWC has two independent decoders and thus can simplify the decoding process. (5) We propose a novel distributed multiview video coding scheme which allows flexible rate allocation between two distributed multiview video encoders. SNS-SWC is used as the underlying Slepian-Wolf coding scheme. It is the first work to realize simultaneous Slepian-Wolf coding of stereo videos with the help of a distributed source code that achieves the whole Slepian-Wolf rate region. The proposed scheme has a better rate-distortion performance than the separate H.264 coding scheme in the high-rate case. / Computer Networks and Multimedia Systems

In this thesis, we propose a new method for content-aware resizing of videos in real- time. Our approach consists of two steps. First, we compute a set of non-salient pixels in linear time which, when being removed or duplicated, do not alter the general appearance of the video. This is an extension of Avidan and Shamir's [3] greedy seam-carving approach to video. Second, we generate a new representation of the video, so called multi-view videos that allow us to resize the video in real-time, i.e. while being watched. This representation can be computed very effciently, the complexity is linear in the number of frames and linear in the number of pixels in a video. Our technique works on a broad variety of videos and is computationally inexpensive enough to be executed by a vast range of devices. We compare our technique to our own implementation of a current state-of-the-art approach and show several convincing results obtained by our technique.