ISPR Presence News

Monthly Archives: August 2013

Call: 2nd Workshop on Games and Natural Language Processing (GAMNLP-13)

CFP: 2nd Workshop on Games and NLP (GAMNLP-13) at ICIDS 2013

9, November, 2013
Istanbul, Turkey

Natural language processing (NLP) investigates computational aspects of natural language which humans produce and understand. While the applications of NLP range from information retrieval to machine translation, this workshop aims at promoting and exploring the possibilities for research and practical applications of NLP in games. With the advances in video games in recent years, areas in which games and NLP can help each other have greatly expanded. For example, games could benefit from NLP’s sophisticated human language technologies in designing and developing novel game experiences through natural and engaging dialogues, or studying games formally. On the other hand, NLP could benefit from games in obtaining language resources (e.g. construction of a thesaurus through a crowdsourcing game), or learning the linguistic characteristics of the game users (as compared to those of other domains).… read more. “Call: 2nd Workshop on Games and Natural Language Processing (GAMNLP-13)”

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VR simulators recreate pressures of sports to improve outcomes

[From the Guardian]

Davidn Beckham misses

[Image: England’s David Beckham misses a penalty against Portugal in the Euro 2004 quarter-final at Lisbon’s Estádio da Luz. Photograph: Jose Manuel Ribeiro/Reuters]

Virtual reality simulators could end England’s penalty shootout woe

  • Technology can recreate pressurised situations for footballers
  • BAE Systems and UK Sport’s project to help Olympic hopefuls

James Riach
Friday 23 August 2013

Virtual reality simulators could be the solution to end England’s penalty shootout woe in major tournaments, with plans to replicate the pressurised atmosphere of a packed stadium potentially coming to the aid of players.

Technology is being developed by engineering company BAE Systems, in conjunction with UK Sport, to assist a number of Olympians and Paralympians in the run-up to the Rio 2016 Games and beyond, with a taekwondo simulator able to create virtual fights already being worked on.… read more. “VR simulators recreate pressures of sports to improve outcomes”

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Call: GameDays 2014, 4th International Conference on Serious Games

GameDays 2014, 4th International Conference on Serious Games
Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
April 1-4, 2014

http://www.gamedays2014.de

The GameDays are fully dedicated to Serious Games and technologies, research concepts and methods for the creation, control/management and evaluation of Serious Games in a broad spectrum of application domains beyond pure entertainment.

Scientists and practitioners are cordially invited to present their latest research achievements and best-practice results and to submit full papers (e.g., surveys, reports of new research approaches that cover related work, new concepts and at least first user studies), short papers (e.g. best-practice results or new ideas and concepts, not necessarily empirically assessed with an evaluation study), demo papers (description of implemented games, products and prototypes), poster presentations (new ideas, research approaches, work in progress) or workshop proposals (2 hours or half day).

Topics include, but are not limited to:… read more. “Call: GameDays 2014, 4th International Conference on Serious Games”

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Video banking: Lights, camera… transactions & interactions?

[From The Financial Brand, where the story includes many images and infographics]

Video banking

Lights, Camera… Transactions & Interactions?

There is no substitute to talking to consumers when and where they need person-to-person help with their finances. Two-way video banking lets financial institutions keep customer engagements personal and expand the reach while cutting back on their expensive branch investments.

August 19, 2013

Telepresence holds great promise for retail banking, but most early-movers are missing the boat. Rather than reinventing the teller experience, banks should pursue video banking as an omnichannel mechanism to improve customer engagement, according to the new report, “Video Banking: Lights, Camera, Transaction?,” from Celent, an international financial research and consulting firm.… read more. “Video banking: Lights, camera… transactions & interactions?”

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Centuries-old maps of Rome used to create new exhibition’s virtual, walkable experience

[From PRWeb]

"Renaissance and Baroque Images of Rome" exhibit banner

Emory’s Gaming Platform Recovers Urban History—a Virtual Experience of Rome at the Carlos Museum

This is the first time a gaming platform has been used at Emory University to recover urban history through an immersive and interactive reconstruction.

Atlanta, GA (PRWEB) July 24, 2013

The celebrated bird’s-eye view map of Giovanni Battista Falda, published in 1676, will be transformed into a virtual, walkable, experience of Rome using the gaming platform NVis360, as part of the Carlos Museum’s special exhibition, “Antichità, Teatro, Magnificenza: Renaissance and Baroque Images of Rome,” on view from August 24 through November 17, 2013. “Virtual Rome” subsumes the fine detail of hundreds of etched views of the city made by the young Falda. The Carlos Museum is working in collaboration with Emory Professor of Art History, Sarah McPhee, and Jordan Williams and Erik Lewitt of plexus r + d.… read more. “Centuries-old maps of Rome used to create new exhibition’s virtual, walkable experience”

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Call: ISPR 2014 in Vienna – August 30 deadline approaching

[The August 30 deadline for submitting work for our next exciting and fulfilling conference adventure, ISPR 2014 in Vienna next March, is near.

For the latest information see the conference web site and Facebook group.

And please help spread the word by distributing this post to your social networks…

–Matthew Lombard]

ISPR 2014

Call for Papers

ISPR 2014: The 15th International Conference on Presence
International Society for Presence Research

Vienna, AUSTRIA
March 17th – 19th 2014

Web site: http://presence2014.univie.ac.at
Facebook group: … read more. “Call: ISPR 2014 in Vienna – August 30 deadline approaching”

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Call: Learning Analytics in Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments and Courses – Special issue of JCAL

CALL FOR PAPERS
for a Special Issue of the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning (JCAL)
on Learning Analytics in Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments and Courses

There has been much interest of late in ‘big data’ and the role it can play in decision making in diverse areas of business, science and entertainment. By employing a combination of modern artificial intelligence, machine learning and statistics techniques, extremely large and complex data sets can be ‘ mined ’ in a variety of ways to reveal relationships, patterns and insights not easily discoverable through standard database management tools and data processing applications. In the field of education, data mining approaches have been applied to the analysis of electronic ‘ stores ’ or repositories of student data for a number of years now (see Romero & Ventura 200 5), but this has been occurring largely at the institutional or sector level.… read more. “Call: Learning Analytics in Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments and Courses – Special issue of JCAL”

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The virtual world of video games welcomes toy players

[From the New York Times]

Disney Infinity

[Image: The video game Disney Infinity shows how characters from the various Disney franchises might be mixed and matched.]

Critic’s Notebook

The Virtual World Welcomes Toy Players

By Chris Suellentrop
Published: August 15, 2013

Many people still think of video games as the province of children, precisely because, at the moment of their mass-market origins in the 1970s, they were genuinely kids’ stuff. A December 1980 article in The New York Times Magazine reported that electronics was transforming the toy industry the same way that plastics had 30 years earlier. The article barely differentiated the video games made by Atari, Coleco and others from the electronic toys made by Texas Instruments and Milton Bradley, including the once-omnipresent color-coded memory game Simon.

Over the next three decades, the two industries went their separate ways. Soon enough, no one would confuse a Furby or a Tickle Me Elmo with a video game.… read more. “The virtual world of video games welcomes toy players”

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Call: Interact with virtual human agent online to help refine SimCoach

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

I am sure you have heard me talk about or have heard about our work on the SimCoach project over the last couple of years and some of you have been a part of the project or have used some of the software. In a nutshell, the SimCoach project aims to help break down barriers to care in Service Members, Veterans and their families by providing the option for folks to interact with an online virtual human agent in an anonymous and confidential fashion. SimCoach is NOT a “doc-in-a-box” that would replace clinical care with a live provider, but RATHER is designed to be a “toe in the water” for those who may feel they are having a hard time following their military deployment and just want some information and advice that will help them to decide if they have a problem, and if so, where they can get help.… read more. “Call: Interact with virtual human agent online to help refine SimCoach”

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Augmenting reality to share both experience and information

[From Hypergrid Business; a CNET story about Space Glasses is here and the product web site is here]

Woman using Space Glasses

Commentary and Opinion: Maria’s Worlds

Virtual reality and the single office worker

By Maria Korolov

At some distant point in the future, virtual reality will be good enough and immersive enough that we can telecommute to our jobs by simply stepping into some version of a Holodeck or plugging into some version of the Matrix.

Today’s virtual reality has only very limited use for the average corporate employee.

There are some uses. Rapid prototyping, virtual simulations, the occasional virtual meeting or conference. But these are, right now, very much niche applications.

One problem is that a typical job involves dealing with two different types of tasks — ones that involve sharing and processing experiences, and ones that involve processing and sharing information.… read more. “Augmenting reality to share both experience and information”

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