This book and its companion volume, LNCS 7282 and 7283, constitute the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference, EuroHaptics 2012, held in Tampere, Finland, in June 2012. The 99 papers (56 full papers, 32 short papers, and 11 demo papers) presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 153 submissions. Part I contains the full papers whereas Part II contains the short papers and the demo papers.
An overview of emerging topics, theories, methods, and practices in sonic interactive design, with a focus on the multisensory aspects of sonic experience. Sound is an integral part of every user experience but a neglected medium in design disciplines. Design of an artifact's sonic qualities is often limited to the shaping of functional, representational, and signaling roles of sound. The interdisciplinary field of sonic interaction design (SID) challenges these prevalent approaches by considering sound as an active medium that can enable novel sensory and social experiences through interactive technologies. This book offers an overview of the emerging SID research, discussing theories, methods, and practices, with a focus on the multisensory aspects of sonic experience. Sonic Interaction Design gathers contributions from scholars, artists, and designers working at the intersections of fields ranging from electronic music to cognitive science. They offer both theoretical considerations of key themes and case studies of products and systems created for such contexts as mobile music, sensorimotor learning, rehabilitation, and gaming. The goal is not only to extend the existing research and pedagogical approaches to SID but also to foster domains of practice for sound designers, architects, interaction designers, media artists, product designers, and urban planners. Taken together, the chapters provide a foundation for a still-emerging field, affording a new generation of designers a fresh perspective on interactive sound as a situated and multisensory experience. Contributors Federico Avanzini, Gerold Baier, Stephen Barrass, Olivier Bau, Karin Bijsterveld, Roberto Bresin, Stephen Brewster, Jeremy Coopersotck, Amalia De Gotzen, Stefano Delle Monache, Cumhur Erkut, George Essl, Karmen Franinović, Bruno L. Giordano, Antti Jylhä, Thomas Hermann, Daniel Hug, Johan Kildal, Stefan Krebs, Anatole Lecuyer, Wendy Mackay, David Merrill, Roderick Murray-Smith, Sile O'Modhrain, Pietro Polotti, Hayes Raffle, Michal Rinott, Davide Rocchesso, Antonio Rodà, Christopher Salter, Zack Settel, Stefania Serafin, Simone Spagnol, Jean Sreng, Patrick Susini, Atau Tanaka, Yon Visell, Mike Wezniewski, John Williamson
For a long time, human beings have dreamed of a virtual world where it is possible to interact with synthetic entities as if they were real. It has been shown that the ability to touch virtual objects increases the sense of presence in virtual environments. This book provides an authoritative overview of state-of-theart haptic rendering algorithms
This insightful book explores the relationship between theater and digital culture. The authors show that the marriage of traditional performance with new technologies leads to an upheaval of the implicit “live” quality of theatre by introducing media interfaces and Internet protocols, all the while blurring the barriers between theater-makers and their audience.
Surveying normal hand function in health individuals, this book presents a conceptual framework for analysing what is known about it. It organises human-hand research on a continuum that ranges from activities that are sensory to those with a strong motor component. It is useful for researchers in neuroscience, cognitive science, and gerontology.
Neural Networks in Robotics is the first book to present an integrated view of both the application of artificial neural networks to robot control and the neuromuscular models from which robots were created. The behavior of biological systems provides both the inspiration and the challenge for robotics. The goal is to build robots which can emulate the ability of living organisms to integrate perceptual inputs smoothly with motor responses, even in the presence of novel stimuli and changes in the environment. The ability of living systems to learn and to adapt provides the standard against which robotic systems are judged. In order to emulate these abilities, a number of investigators have attempted to create robot controllers which are modelled on known processes in the brain and musculo-skeletal system. Several of these models are described in this book. On the other hand, connectionist (artificial neural network) formulations are attractive for the computation of inverse kinematics and dynamics of robots, because they can be trained for this purpose without explicit programming. Some of the computational advantages and problems of this approach are also presented. For any serious student of robotics, Neural Networks in Robotics provides an indispensable reference to the work of major researchers in the field. Similarly, since robotics is an outstanding application area for artificial neural networks, Neural Networks in Robotics is equally important to workers in connectionism and to students for sensormonitor control in living systems.
Central to identity, personal responsibility, economic systems, theology, and the political and military imaginaries, the practice of sacrifice has inspired, disturbed, and abused. Mimesis and Sacrifice brings together scholars from the humanities, military, business, and social sciences to examine the role that sacrifice plays in different present-day settings, from economics to gender relations. Inspired by Rene Girard's work, chapters explore (i) the extent to which the social character of human living makes us mimetic, (ii) whether mimesis necessarily leads to competitive aggression, (iii) whether aggression must be defused by aggressive sacrificial rituals-and whether all sacrifice has this aim, and (iv) the role of the “second lesson of the cross” (as Girard called it), the lesson of self-giving for others, in addressing present societal problems. By investigating sacrifice across this span of arenas and questions yet within one volume, Mimesis and Sacrifice presents a new appreciation of its influence and consequences in the world today, contributing not only to mimetic theory but to greater understanding of which societal arrangement enable us to live well together and what hobbles that goal.
After a long time of neglect, Artificial Intelligence is once again at the center of most of our political, economic, and socio-cultural debates. Recent advances in the field of Artifical Neural Networks have led to a renaissance of dystopian and utopian speculations on an AI-rendered future. Algorithmic technologies are deployed for identifying potential terrorists through vast surveillance networks, for producing sentencing guidelines and recidivism risk profiles in criminal justice systems, for demographic and psychographic targeting of bodies for advertising or propaganda, and more generally for automating the analysis of language, text, and images. Against this background, the aim of this book is to discuss the heterogenous conditions, implications, and effects of modern AI and Internet technologies in terms of their political dimension: What does it mean to critically investigate efforts of net politics in the age of machine learning algorithms?
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Simulation, Modeling, and Programming for Autonomous Robots, SIMPAR 2014, held in Bergamo, Italy, in October 2014. The 49 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 62 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on simulation, modeling, programming, architectures, methods and tools, and systems and applications.
