Empirical study on Game Transfer Phenomena in a location-based augmented reality game

Research on Game Transfer Phenomena (GTP) has demonstrated that playing video games can lead to re-experiencing images, sounds, tactile sensations, spontaneous thoughts and actions, sometimes triggered by physical objects/events associated with the game. Location-based augmented reality games posit interesting questions regarding GTP, particularly because they use physical locations, they overlay digital images in physical contexts and the gameplay shifts between the virtual and the physical world. This study aims to investigate the prevalence of GTP and the role of immersion, augmented reality and sound in a sample of English- (EnS) and Spanish- (SpS) speaking gamers of the game Pokémon Go (PoGo). A total of 1313 gamers (M_age?=?31.47) were recruited online. GTP was less common than in previous studies; however, 82.4% had experienced GTP at least once. The SpS showed higher prevalence of GTP and played more intensively. Automatic mental processes predominated in the EnS, while behaviours and actions were more common in the SpS. The absence or presence of video game features seems important for the way GTP manifests. For instance, tactile hallucinations were more prevalent, while sensations of self-motion were less reported. Playing with augmented reality (AR) and sounds showed significant correlations with various GTP types, but not with re-experiencing images from the game. More gamers who reported the sensation that Pokémon were physically present or looked for Pokémon outside the screen while playing, as connotations of immersion, had experienced GTP. Experiencing GTP while playing may be more common in location-based augmented reality games, compared to other games.     

Power consumption analysis of video streaming in 4G LTE networks

Video streaming, one of the most popular technologies for online video playback, has already been applied to 4G LTE networks. Previous work has been devoted to understanding the power consumption in general 4G LTE networks, while it is still unclear how the online video streaming makes impact on the power performance of mobile devices. Inspired by this, this paper investigates the relationship between the mobile device’s power performance characteristics and the behaviours of video streaming in 4G LTE networks. There are many natural issues/questions that are clearly interesting and important, while it is non-trivial to answer these issues/questions exactly (e.g., where is the energy saving room? how much is it?). To address a series of issues like the above, we formulate our energy models together with an algorithm that can assist our analysis. Particularly, we design a systematic platform, and conduct a comprehensive and also deep analysis on the power consumption of video streaming in 4G LTE networks. Our experiments reveal us a series of valuable findings—the saving room in the network part is large (from 41.86 to 69.62%), the number of RRC tails and the transmission pattern could be promising for optimizing the power consumption, for example.     

Causes of State Hostility and Enjoyment in Player Versus Player and Player Versus Environment Video Games

Video games have been under scholarly study since the 1980s, but few studies have blended the research areas of video games and aggression and video game enjoyment. This article seeks to determine how certain game play factors affect hostility, enjoyment, and the relationship between the 2 variables. A total of 289 students played games in player‐versus‐player (PvP) and player‐versus‐environment (PvE) situations. Findings indicate that outcome, competitive situation, and genre interact in their influence on state hostility and enjoyment. Results suggest that in some cases, game players are able to enjoy games despite negative experiences, such as losing, but players in PvP situations experience enjoyment‐reducing levels of hostility, contrary to P. Vorderer et al.'s (2004) complex entertainment model.     

Energy-Efficient Video Transmission Over a Wireless Link

Energy minimization is an important design goal in wireless video transmission. We examine how the RF energy and the analog circuit energy, which account for a large part of the energy consumption for wireless video transmission, can be controlled with physical-layer parameters (e.g., modulation level, bit rate, bit error rate, and multiple access interference) and link-layer specifications (e.g., the buffer status, idle time, and active time). Building on these insights, we develop three energy-efficient video transmission schemes for the single-user system, i.e., frame-by-frame transmission, group of pictures (GOP)-by-GOP transmission, and client-buffer-related energy-efficient video transmission (CBEVT). Our simulations indicate that energy savings of up to 85% is achievable in the radio frequency (RF) front end using the CBEVT algorithm. We also present an energy-efficient optimal smoothing algorithm for reducing the RF front-end energy consumption and the peak data rate. For CDMA-based multiuser systems, we propose an RF front-end energy model that assumes perfect power control. We find the signal-to-interference-noise ratio (SINR) for the entire system that minimizes the total energy consumption. We propose the multiuser-based energy-efficient video transmission (MBEVT) algorithm, which can achieve energy savings of up to 38% for a six-user CDMA system with an independent 16-MB buffer for every uplink.      

Real-time video super resolution network using recurrent multi-branch dilated convolutions

Recent developments of video super-resolution reconstruction often exploit spatial and temporal contexts from input frame sequence by making use of explicit motion estimation, e.g., optical flow, which may introduce accumulated errors and requires huge computations to obtain an accurate estimation. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-branch dilated convolution module for real-time frame alignment without explicit motion estimation, which is incorporated with the depthwise separable up-sampling module to formulate a sophisticated real-time video super-resolution network. Specifically, the proposed video super-resolution framework can efficiently acquire a larger receptive field and learn spatial–temporal features of multiple scales with minimal computational operations and memory requirements. Extensive experiments show that the proposed super-resolution network outperforms current state-of-the-art real-time video super-resolution networks, e.g., VESPCN and 3DVSRnet, in terms of PSNR values (0.49 dB and 0.17 dB) on average in various datasets, but requires less multiplication operations.     

The (Non)Violent World of YouTube: Content Trends in Web Video

In this content analysis, we examined violence in Web‐based entertainment. YouTube videos (N = 2,520) were collected in 3 different categories: most viewed, top rated, and random, with additional comparisons between amateur and professional content. Frequencies of violent acts and the context of violence (e.g., characteristics of perpetrator and victim, justification, consequences) were compared both between these categories of YouTube videos and with existing research on television violence. The results showed far less violence as a percentage of programming on YouTube than there is on television. Moreover, the violence that was present showed more realistic consequences and more negative context than television violence. Post hoc comparisons illustrated several differences in the presentation of violence between make and category of video.     

Lightning-Induced Surges in Paired Telephone Subscriber Cable in Japan

This paper presents measured and calculated data that can be used as a basis for designing and protecting telecommunication equipment against lightning-induced surges in Japan. The paper examines the variations in geographic and environmental conditions in different parts of Japan (e.g., thunderstorm days, summer versus winter lightning, ground (soil) conductivity) and describes measured variations in lightning-induced surge characteristics in subscriber-paired cables due to differences in geographic conditions and cable conditions (e.g., cable type, buried versus aerial cable, cable length, cable height, terminal conditions, main versus branch cable). Measured lightning characteristics (e.g., front time, time-to-half-value) are compared for various measurement locations (e.g., subscriber end for subscriber cable, telephone office end for subscriber cable, telephone office end for toll cable). A general set of equations is empirically derived that predicts lightning-induced surgevoltage occurrences, front time, and time-to-half-value distributions.     

全自动中文新闻字幕生成系统的设计与实现

本文设计与实现了一个全自动中文新闻字幕生成系统,输入为新闻视频,输出为视频对应的字幕文本.以<新闻联播>为语料,实现了音频提取、音频分类与切分、说话人识别、大词汇量连续语音识别、视频文件的播放和文本字幕的自动生成等多项功能.新闻字幕的自动生成,避免了繁重费时的人工字幕添加过程.实验表明,该系统识别率高,能够满足听障等特...     

Does social capital matter to the Millennials? Social capital and user engagements in online video platforms

User engagements in video platforms are considered critical for not only businesses in measuring attention, but also for understanding social, cultural dynamics of a form of information platform that has increasingly become influential. For instance, different generations may perceive and engage in online video platforms differently. This study investigates various factors influencing online video platform user engagements in the forms of showing empathy (e.g., “like”), commenting, and sharing. In addition to traditional motivational factors informed by the uses and gratification theory, the study explores how perception of video platforms as social platforms play a mediating role and whether such effects are moderated by generation. A moderated mediation model positing mediating role of social capital and moderating role of generational difference tested against the three types of engagement. Results indicate intriguing generational effect between the Generation X and the Millennials on social capital’s role in online video platform engagement.     

Outage probability in the presence of correlated lognormal usefuland interfering components

In many modern wireless communications systems (e.g., in OFDM based digital audio broadcasting/digital video broadcasting (DAB/DVB), CDMA) the received signal can be a superposition of multiple useful and interfering lognormal components, and correlation may exist between the components. We propose a simple method for estimating the correlation coefficient between the total useful and total interfering signals as the function of the correlation between the individual components. We show that, by taking into account this correlation factor in the derivation of the distribution of the signal-to-interference ratio, considerable accuracy improvement can be achieved in the outage probability estimation     

Exploring Third‐Person Differences Between Gamers and Nongamers

Numerous studies have demonstrated the third‐person perception, but many aspects of its origin and consequences remain unaddressed. In this study, we examine how potential positive and negative video game effects are perceived differently based on the extent to which respondents actually play video games. Although video games exhibit clear third‐person perceptions and subsequent support for censorship, these patterns are greatly diminished for heavy players.     

Perceivable artifacts in compressed video and their relation to video quality

Compressed video is degraded in quality due to the introduction of coding artifacts. A two-step subjective experiment was performed to evaluate the most visible artifacts and their relation to video quality for AVS and H.264 compressed video. In the first step, non-expert viewers were requested to score the image quality degradation as a function of compression ratio for various video sequences and to indicate which artifact was perceived during scoring. During the second step, eight trained viewers were asked to score the strength of three artifacts, i.e., blurring, blocking, and color distortion, which were reported as the most perceivable artifacts in the first step of the experiment. The quality performance between AVS and H.264 was also compared. The analysis of covariance indicated that the quality performance between AVS and H.264 was very close. A linear regression analysis showed that for the CIF videos 96% of the variance in quality degradation could be predicted by linearly combining the normalized strengths of the three most visible artifacts.     

Refreshment need metrics for improved shape and texture object-based resilient video coding

Video encoders may use several techniques to improve error resilience. In particular, for video encoders that rely on predictive (inter) coding to remove temporal redundancy, intra coding refreshment is especially useful to stop error propagation when errors occur in the transmission or storage of the coded streams, which can cause the decoded quality to decay very rapidly. In the context of object-based video coding, the video encoder can apply intra coding refreshment to both the shape and the texture data. In this paper, shape refreshment need and texture refreshment need metrics are proposed which can be used by object-based video encoders, notably MPEG-4 video encoders, to determine when the shape and the texture of the various video objects in the scene should be refreshed in order to improve the decoded video quality, e.g., for a given bit rate.     

Maritime filtering for images and videos

Maritime signal processing technologies have emerged as an important area of study because of the increasing popularity of autonomous ships and automatic maritime surveillance systems. However, the various techniques developed for detecting or tracking objects remain unable to address various maritime noise challenges that cause several types of false positives in maritime visual surveillance. Maritime signal processing is challenging because of the prevalence of noise sources such as severe dynamic backgrounds, wakes, and reflections, owing to the complex, unconstrained, and diverse nature of such scenes caused by the surface properties of water. Moreover, few studies have investigated specific maritime noise filtering as a general integrated processing approach with image and video technologies in the context of maritime visual surveillance. In this study, we propose a novel maritime noise prior (MNP) based on a dark channel prior and observations of the characteristics of the sea. A general maritime filtering technique is developed to suppress noise originating from the properties of water in maritime images and videos. The proposed method employs a noniterative, nonlinear, and simple maritime filtering approach based on MNP that does not require specialized knowledge of application scene conditions or structure. We conducted image and video experiments by applying our approach to three publicly available databases. In experiments with color images, our method successfully filtered related background noise and water, i.e., severe boat wakes and reflections, while preserving objects other than water in color images. In the experiments with video sequences, the results demonstrated that the proposed filter improved the overall performance of state-of-the-art background subtraction (BS) algorithms from 36.60%–50.63%. By combining BS algorithms and filtering to enhance foreground detection in video sequences, the proposed method ensures the universal applicability and flexibility required to eliminate noise from images and videos obtained in challenging maritime environments. The results indicate that the proposed method is appropriate for maritime surveillance applications implementing image segmentation and foreground detection, and it can potentially increase the accuracy of maritime visual surveillance.     

An end-to-end approach for optimal mode selection in Internet videocommunication: theory and application

Rate-distortion (R-D) optimized mode selection is a fundamental problem for video communication over packet-switched networks. The classical R-D optimized mode selection only considers quantization distortion at the source. Such an approach is unable to achieve global optimality under the error-prone environment since it does not consider the packetization behavior at the source, the transport path characteristics, and receiver behavior. This paper presents an end-to-end approach to generalize the classical theory of R-D optimized mode selection for point-to-point video communication. We introduce a notion of global distortion by taking into consideration both the path characteristics (i.e., packet loss) and the receiver behavior (i.e., the error concealment scheme), in addition to the source behavior (i.e., quantization distortion and packetization). We derive, for the first time, a set of accurate global distortion metrics for any packetization scheme. Equipped with the global distortion metrics, we design an R-D optimized mode selection algorithm to provide the best tradeoff between compression efficiency and error resilience. The theory developed in this paper is general and is applicable to many video coding standards, including H.261/263 and MPEG-1/2/4. As an application, we integrate our theory with point-to-point MPEG-4 video conferencing over the Internet, where a feedback mechanism is employed to convey the path characteristics (estimated at the receiver) and receiver behavior (error concealment scheme) to the source. Simulation results are discussed     

Energy-Efficient Mobile Data Uploading from High-Speed Trains

Recent decades have witnessed the fast development of high-speed railway systems in many countries, which have significantly shortened the travel time between distant cities. Accompanied with this convenience is the challenge for cell phone vendors to provide broadband Internet access for passengers, particularly considering the fast changing channel conditions in high-speed trains and the limited battery of cell phones, which often cannot be re-charged in trains. In this paper, inspired by the unique spatial-temporal characteristics of wireless signals along high-speed railways, we propose a novel energy-efficient scheduling approach for uploading data from cell phones, both with soft deadlines (e.g., documents) and hard deadlines (e.g., video streaming). Our solution effectively predicts the signal strength through its spatial-temporal periodicity in this new application scenario, and smartly adjusts the transmission rate to maximize the overall data transmission rate and yet conserves the energy consumption. Performance evaluation based on realistic railway scenarios and H.264 video traces demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution and its superiority as compared to the existing solutions.     

Uncoordinated real-time video transmission in wireless multicode CDMA systems: An SMPT-based approach

We consider the real-time transmission of encoded video from distributed, uncoordinated wireless terminals to a central base station in a multicode CDMA system. Our approach is to employ the recently proposed simultaneous MAC packet transmission (SMPT) approach at the data link layer (in conjunction with UDP at the transport layer). We consider the real-time transmission of both video encoded in an open loop (i.e., without rate control) and video encoded in a closed loop (i.e., with rate control). We conduct extensive simulations and study quantitatively the trade-off between video quality, transmission delay (and jitter), and number of supported video streams (capacity). We find that the simple-to-deploy SMPT approach achieves significantly higher video quality and smaller delays than the conventional sequential transmission approach, while ensuring high capacity. In typical scenarios, with SMPT the probability of in-time video frame delivery is more than twice as large as with sequential transmission (for given delay bounds). Our results provide guidelines for the design and dimensioning of cellular wireless systems as well as ad hoc wireless systems.     

UTM: A trajectory privacy evaluating model for online health monitoring

A huge amount of sensitive personal data is being collected by various online health monitoring applications. Although the data is anonymous, the personal trajectories (e.g., the chronological access records of small cells) could become the anchor of linkage attacks to re-identify the users. Focusing on trajectory privacy in online health monitoring, we propose the User Trajectory Model (UTM), a generic trajectory re-identification risk predicting model to reveal the underlying relationship between trajectory uniqueness and aggregated data (e.g., number of individuals covered by each small cell), and using the parameter combination of aggregated data to further mathematically derive the statistical characteristics of uniqueness (i.e., the expectation and the variance). Eventually, exhaustive simulations validate the effectiveness of the UTM in privacy risk evaluation, confirm our theoretical deductions and present counter-intuitive insights.