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GVU Technical Report Series

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 142
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Dynamic Door Displays

2000 , Nguyen, David H. , Tullio, Joseph , Drewes, Tom , Mynatt, Elizabeth D.

Traditionally, office doors have been used as display surfaces for communicating a variety of information between door owners and visitors. While flexible, doors also burden their owners with the task of maintenance and do not support notions of public and private information. In this paper we introduce the Dynamic Door Display, a tool for enhancing an office door's display capabilities to include automatic updates and tailored displays of private information for particular visitors. This work is based on an initial qualitative study of personalized location-specific information.

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Graphical Modeling and Animation of Fracture

2000 , O'Brien, James F.

This thesis addresses the problem of graphically modeling and animating the realistic behavior of materials that can undergo fracture due to deformation-induced stress. Using an approach based on linear elastic fracture mechanics and non-linear finite element analysis, three-dimensional volumes are modeled using a mesh of tetrahedral elements. By analyzing the stresses created as the mesh deforms, the simulation determines where cracks should begin and in what directions they should propagate. The system accommodates arbitrary propagation directions by dynamically retesselating the mesh. Because cracks are not limited to element boundaries, the models can form irregularly shaped features as they shatter. This technique overcomes limitations of previous methods that made it difficult to represent the shape of the fracture's surface. Results are presented to demonstrate that this method can be used to animate complex, real-world situations in a compelling, realistic fashion.

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The Smart Floor: A Mechanism for Natural User Identification and Tracking

2000 , Orr, Robert J. , Abowd, Gregory D.

We have created a system for identifying people based on their footstep force profiles and have tested its accuracy against a large pool of footstep data. This floor system may be used to transparently identify users in their everyday living and working environments. We have created user footstep models based on footstep profile features and have been able to achieve a recognition rate of 93% using this feature-based approach. We have also shown that the effect of footwear is negligible on recognition accuracy.

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The Real-World Wide Web Browser: An Interface for a Continuously Available, General Purpose, Spatialized Information Space

2000 , Kooper, Rob , MacIntyre, Blair

In this paper, we describe an augmented reality (AR) system that acts as continuously available interface to a spatialized information space based on the World Wide Web. We present the assumptions we make about the characteristics of such a system, and discuss the implications of those assumptions for an AR interface. In particular, we focus on the implications of continuous use, context-awareness, and distributed publishing.

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Animating Athletic Motion Planning By Example

2000 , Metoyer, Ronald A. , Hodgins, Jessica K.

Character animation is usually reserved for highly skilled animators and computer programmers because few of the available tools allow the novice or casual user to create compelling animated content. In this paper, we explore a partial solution to this problem which lets the user coach animated characters by sketching their trajectories on the ground plane. The details of the motion are then computed with simulation. We create memory-based control functions for the high-level behaviors from examples supplied by the user and from real-world data of the behavior. The control function for the desired behavior is implemented through a lookup table using a nearest neighbor approximation algorithm. To demonstrate this approach, we present a system for defining the behaviors of defensive characters playing American football. The characters are implemented using either point-masses or dynamically simulated biped robots. We evaluate the quality of the coached behaviors by comparing the resulting trajectories to data from human players. We also assess the influence of the user's coaching examples by demonstrating that a user can construct a particular style of play.

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Interaction Techniques for Ambiguity Resolution in Recognition-Based Interfaces

2000 , Mankoff, Jennifer C. , Hudson, Scott E. , Abowd, Gregory D.

Because of its promise of natural interaction, recognition is coming into its own as a mainstream technology for use with computers. Both commercial and research applications are beginning to use it extensively. However the errors made by recognizers can be quite costly, and this is increasingly becoming a focus for researchers. We present a survey of existing error correction techniques in the user interface. These mediation techniques most commonly fall into one of two strategies, repetition and choice. Based on the needs uncovered by this survey, we have developed OOPS, a toolkit that supports resolution of input ambiguity through mediation. This paper describes four new interaction techniques built using OOPS, and the toolkit mechanisms required to build them. These interaction techniques each address problems not directly handled by standard approaches to mediation, and can all be re-used in a variety of settings.

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Distributed Mediation of Imperfectly Sensed Context in Aware Environments

2000 , Dey, Anind K. , Mankoff, Jennifer C. , Abowd, Gregory D.

Current context-aware services make the assumption that the context they are dealing with is correct. However, in reality, both sensed and interpreted context is often imperfect. In this paper, we describe an architecture that supports the building of context-aware services that assume context is imperfect and allows for the refinement of this imperfect context by mobile users in aware-environments. We discuss the architectural mechanisms and design heuristics that arise from supporting this refinement over space and time. We illustrate the use of our architecture and heuristics through two example context-aware services, an In-Out Board for the home and a situation-aware reminder tool.

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Building a Better Intercom: Context-Mediated Communication within the Home

2000 , Kidd, Cory D. , O'Connell, Thomas , Nagel, Kristine Susanne , Patil, Sameer , Abowd, Gregory D.

As we enable everyday environments with ubiquitous technology, there are many opportunities to support simple activities in useful ways. We are investigating how an environment made aware of the location and activities of its occupants can better support direct human-human communication. Specifically, we have instrumented a home to explore lightweight, spontaneous hands-free communication between residents in different parts of the home. Our working prototype demonstrates how existing technologies of voice recognition, indoor positioning and audio routing lay the foundation for the exploration of a variety of more intelligent alternatives to the traditional home intercom system. We show how context can be used to mediate the initiation and management of one- and two-way audio connections between residents, supporting a range of within-home conversational patterns. In this paper, we describe a variety of home communication scenarios and the general infrastructure we have built to explore them.

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Ictus: A User-Centered System of Score Study for Semi-Novice Conductors

2000 , Mitchell, Amy , Voida, Stephen , Paradise, Jessica , Martin, Chris C. , Mynatt, Elizabeth D.

Ictus supports the study and preparation of musical scores by semi-novice conductors. It does so by representing the complex analytical processes in which professional conductors routinely engage. Through iterative design and prototyping and with feedback from expert conductors, we have developed a prototyped system for use as a learning tool. This paper presents a brief overview of the complexities of the conductor's task, including the difficulties inherent in externalizing it; a description of the Ictus system; and a discussion of some of the feedback and forward-looking issues that have been raised.

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Planning of joint trajectories for humanoid robots using B-spline wavelets

2000 , Ude, Ales , Atkeson, Christopher G. , Riley, Marcia

The formulation and optimization of joint trajectories for humanoid robots is quite different form this same task for standard robots because of the complexity of the humanoid robots' kinematics. In this paper we exploit the similarity between the movements of a humanoid robot and human movements to generate joint trajectories for such robots. In particular, we show how to transform human motion information captured by an optical tracking device into a high dimensional trajectory of a humanoid robot. We utilize B-spline wavelets to efficiently represent the joint trajectories and to automatically select the density of the basis functions on the time axis. We applied our method to the task of teaching a humanoid robot how to make a dance movement.

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