Human Pacman: a mobile,wide-area entertainment system based on physical,social, and ubiquitous computing

Human Pacman is a novel interactive entertainment system that ventures to embed the natural physical world seamlessly with a fantasy virtual playground by capitalizing on mobile computing, wireless LAN, ubiquitous computing, and motion-tracking technologies. Our human Pacman research is a physical role-playing augmented-reality computer fantasy together with real human–social and mobile gaming. It emphasizes collaboration and competition between players in a wide outdoor physical area which allows natural wide-area human–physical movements. Pacmen and Ghosts are now real human players in the real world, experiencing mixed computer graphics fantasy–reality provided by using the wearable computers. Virtual cookies and actual tangible physical objects are incorporated into the game play to provide novel experiences of seamless transitions between real and virtual worlds. We believe human Pacman is pioneering a new form of gaming that anchors on physicality, mobility, social interaction, and ubiquitous computing.

Multisensory musical entertainment systems

As a result of our research into multisensory perception, we developed two unique musical entertainment systems - Bubble Bumble and Magic Music Desk (MMD) - that provide users with multisensory experiences in creating and playing back music in 3D physical environments through augmented reality interfaces. During the process of creating and playing back music, users encounter visual-speech, visual-tactile, and tactile-auditory experiences. We applied visual, auditory, and tactile sensory modalities to create a system that could express a wide range of human-musical artifacts. During the process of creating and playing back music, users experience a unique sensing experience of 3D-visual-speech, 3D-visual-sound - music and nonspeech sound - and tactile-auditory perceptions. Users also can experience visual-tactile sensation by using their hands to cause a corresponding system action. Beyond the multi-sensory experience, our multimedia systems also emphasize tangible human-computer interactions and communications within a physical environment. In this article, rather than focus on the application's design, we examine the systems' multi-modal perceptions. We describe each system and how it works, and we present the results of a formal user study we conducted.     

Live three-dimensional content for augmented reality

We describe an augmented reality system for superimposing three-dimensional (3-D) live content onto two-dimensional fiducial markers in the scene. In each frame, the Euclidean transformation between the marker and the camera is estimated. The equivalent virtual view of the live model is then generated and rendered into the scene at interactive speeds. The 3-D structure of the model is calculated using a fast shape-from-silhouette algorithm based on the outputs of 15 cameras surrounding the subject. The novel view is generated by projecting rays through each pixel of the desired image and intersecting them with the 3-D structure. Pixel color is estimated by taking a weighted sum of the colors of the projections of this 3-D point in nearby real camera images. Using this system, we capture live human models and present them via the augmented reality interface at a remote location. We can generate 384/spl times/288 pixel images of the models at 25 fps, with a latency of <100 ms. The result gives the strong impression that the model is a real 3-D part of the scene.     

Eigenbackground Revisited: Can We Model the Background with Eigenvectors?

Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision - Using dominant eigenvectors for background modeling (usually known as Eigenbackground) is a common technique in the literature. However, its results...     

A new fuzzy logic filter for image enhancement

This paper presents a new fuzzy-logic-control based filter with the ability to remove impulsive noise and smooth Gaussian noise, while, simultaneously, preserving edges and image details efficiently. To achieve these three image enhancement goals, we first develop filters that have excellent edge-preserving capability but do not perform well in smoothing Gaussian noise. Next, we modify the filters so that they perform all three image enhancement tasks. These filters are based on the idea that individual pixels should not be uniformly fired by each of the fuzzy rules. To demonstrate the capability of our filtering approach, it was tested on several different image enhancement problems. These experimental results demonstrate the speed, filtering quality, and image sharpening ability of the new filter.     

A mobile pet wearable computer and mixed reality system for human–poultry interaction through the internet

Poultry are one of the most badly treated animals in the modern world. It has been shown that they have high levels of both cognition and feelings and as a result there has been a recent trend of promoting poultry welfare. There is also a tradition of keeping poultry as pets in some parts of the world. However, in modern cities and societies, it is often difficult to maintain contact with pets, particularly for office workers. We propose and describe a novel cybernetics system to use mobile and Internet technology to improve human–pet interaction. It can also be used for people who are allergic to touching animals and thus cannot stroke them directly. This interaction encompasses both visualization and tactile sensation of real objects.