ISPR Presence News

Monthly Archives: December 2014

Call: Eurographics Workshop on Intelligent Cinematography and Editing (WICED 2015)

Call for Papers:

Eurographics Workshop on Intelligent Cinematography and Editing (WICED 2015)
Zurich, May 4, 2015

Co-located with the 36th annual conference of the European Association of Computer Graphics

http://wiced2015.inria.fr

Deadline for submission: February 28, 2015.

The expressive use of virtual cameras, mise-en-scene, lighting and editing (montage) within 3D synthetic environment shows great promise to extend the communicative power of film and video into the artificial environments of games and virtual worlds.

Cinematics produced in virtual worlds play a role not just for entertainment, but also for training, education, health-care communication, simulation, visualization and many other contexts. The automatic creation of cinematics in these environments holds the potential to produce video sequences appropriate for a wide range of applications and tailored to specific spatial, temporal, communicative, user and application contexts.

At the same time, recent advances in computer vision-based object, actor and action recognition make it possible to envision novel re-cinematography (re-lighting, re-framing) and automatic editing of live-action video.… read more. “Call: Eurographics Workshop on Intelligent Cinematography and Editing (WICED 2015)”

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Jaguar develops ‘transparent’ pillars and ghost cars for urban safety

[From Autoblog, where the post includes more images, a 2:08 minute video and Jaguar’s press release]

Jaguar's 360 virtual urban windscreen

Jaguar Land Rover develops ‘transparent’ A-pillar and ghost car [w/video]

By Noah Joseph
Posted Dec 15th 2014

Jaguar and Land Rover are known for making highly covetable luxury, performance and off-road vehicles, but the British automakers are on a bit of a technology bent lately. Keen to show that it can not only keep up but lead the way when it comes to safety and convenience features, JLR has come out with two more systems to show the way forward.

JLR’s new 360 Virtual Urban Windscreen system, showcased on an XJ sedan, adopts two novel approaches to getting around town. First up is the Transparent Pillar system, which uses a combination of cameras and display screens embedded in the A, B and C-pillars to make them virtually disappear.… read more. “Jaguar develops ‘transparent’ pillars and ghost cars for urban safety”

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Call: Reimagining Interfaces for Older Adults – Special issue of IJMHCI

CALL FOR PAPERS

SPECIAL ISSUE ON Reimagining Interfaces for Older Adults
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MOBILE HUMAN COMPUTER INTERACTION (IJMHCI)
Official publication of the Information Resources Management Association
www.igi-global.com/IJMHCI

Guest Editors: Emma Nicol, Mark D Dunlop, Jutta Treviranus

http://www.igi-global.com/publish/call-for-papers/call-details/1549

SUBMISSION DUE DATE: 23.01.2015

INTRODUCTION:

Many countries have an increasingly ageing population. In recent years, mobile and related technologies have had a massive impact on social and working life. As the older adult population rises, many people will want to continue professional, social and lifestyle usage of such technologies into their 70s and beyond. Mobiles support community involvement and personal independence, but the ageing process can interfere considerably with their usage, e.g. through changes in vision, hearing, attention, memory and motor control.

OBJECTIVE OF THE SPECIAL ISSUE:

This special issue will bring together the work and reflections of researchers who are re-imagining interfaces so that they are more suited for use by older adults.… read more. “Call: Reimagining Interfaces for Older Adults – Special issue of IJMHCI”

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“Wild – The Experience” puts you in the wilderness with Reese Witherspoon

[From The New York Times]

"Wild - The Experience"

[Image: “Wild — The Experience” puts viewers in the wilderness with Reese Witherspoon. Credit Felix & Paul Studios]

Virtual Reality ‘Wild’ Trek, With Reese Witherspoon

By Michael Cieply
DEC. 14, 2014

LOS ANGELES — They read the book. They saw the movie.

Now, a few admirers of “Wild,” Cheryl Strayed’s tale of her lonely trek along the Pacific Crest Trail, can spend several bone-weary, fully immersive minutes in the deep wilderness with Reese Witherspoon, who plays Ms. Strayed in the Fox Searchlight Pictures film about the adventure. On a smartphone.

Fox Searchlight and its partners — including Samsung and Oculus — are planning to demonstrate “Wild — The Experience” at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, both in January. It is a three-minute, 360-degree, virtual reality encounter with Ms.… read more. ““Wild – The Experience” puts you in the wilderness with Reese Witherspoon”

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Job: Faculty position in Computational Media at University of California, Santa Cruz

Faculty position – University of California, Santa Cruz
Computational Media: Assistant, Associate, or Full Professor
Job #JPF00223

Open Nov 12, 2014 through Jun 30, 2015
Apply by January 12th, 2015 to ensure full consideration by the committee

DESCRIPTION

The Computational Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) invites applications for a tenure track (Assistant) or tenured (Associate or Full Professor) faculty position. We seek outstanding applicants who have an established record of research and teaching experience in interdisciplinary computer games research, ideally connecting novel technology research with practices of design and/or interpretation. Applicants should be able to perform research in an area related to computer games and playable media, including (but not limited to): interactive storytelling, game design, procedural content generation/generative methods, game studies, games user research, computational cinematography, computer graphics for games, artificial intelligence for games, software studies, educational games, natural language and dialogue, and serious games.… read more. “Job: Faculty position in Computational Media at University of California, Santa Cruz”

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Virtual Christmas dinner planned for long-distance couples

[From the Wall Street Journal’s Japan Real Time blog, where the post includes a different image]

Sync Dinner graphic

Virtual Christmas Dinner Planned for Long-Distance Couples

By Jun Hongo
Dec 11, 2014

In Japan, Christmas Eve is an occasion for couples to go out on a romantic date–even, it turns out, if they’re 400 kilometers apart.

Mobile carrier KDDI Corp. is organizing a virtual Christmas dinner event for couples in a long-distance relationship, with one person in Tokyo and the other in Osaka.

“The dinner will make it feel like the other person is actually there with you at the table,” Ayumi Tsujishita, a spokeswoman at the company, told Japan Real Time. And it won’t be just a fancy video chat, she said.… read more. “Virtual Christmas dinner planned for long-distance couples”

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Call: Digital Entertainment Technologies and Art Track at GECCO 2015

CALL FOR PAPERS
2015 GENETIC AND EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION CONFERENCE (GECCO-2015)
DIGITAL ENTERTAINMENT TECHNOLOGIES AND ART TRACK
July 11-15, 2015, Madrid, Spain
Organized by ACM SIGEVO
http://www.sigevo.org/gecco-2015/organizers-tracks.html

Arts, music, and games are key application fields for evolutionary computation, computational intelligence, and biologically inspired techniques. The digital entertainment technologies and arts (DETA) track invites submissions describing original work involving the use of computation in the creative arts, including design, games, and music. In all accepted work there must be some connection to evolutionary computation, computational intelligence, or biologically inspired algorithms.

Topics include but are not limited to:

  • Aesthetic measurement and control
    • Machine learning for predicting or controlling aesthetic preference
    • Aesthetic measures for sound, photos, textures and other content
    • Non-realistic rendering, animations
    • Content-based similarity or recommendation
    • User modeling
  • Biologically-inspired creativity
    • Evolutionary arts and evolutionary algorithms for creative applications
    • Interactive evolutionary algorithms
    • Creative virtual ecosystems
    • Artificial creative agents
    • Definition or classification of creativity
  • Interactive environments and games
    • Virtual worlds
    • Reactive worlds and immersive environments
    • Procedural content generation
    • Game AI
    • Intelligent interactive narrative
    • Learning and adaptation in games
    • Search methods for games
    • Player experience measurement and optimization
  • Composition, synthesis, generative arts
    • Visual art, architecture and design
    • Creative writing
    • Cinema music composition and sound synthesis
    • Generative art
    • Synthesis of textures, images, animations
    • Generation or learning of environmental responses
    • Stylistic recognition and classification
  • Analysis of computational intelligence techniques for games, music and the arts

As a multidisciplinary track, the DETA track will be an excellent meeting point for artists and computer scientists looking for new applications, problems and techniques that might produce synergies of interest for both worlds.… read more. “Call: Digital Entertainment Technologies and Art Track at GECCO 2015”

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Product placement comes to VR

[From Venture Beat, where the story includes more images]

A MediaSspike VR native ad

[Image: MediaSpike’s 3D blimp ad and its outdoor movie screen]

MediaSpike creates cool in-game native ads for virtual reality

December 8, 2014
Dean Takahashi

MediaSpike specializes in doing product-placement ads that look like they’re part of a game world. Now it’s doing the same thing for virtual reality, so that the emerging platform isn’t plagued by banner ads and other intrusive advertising.

The in-game virtual reality ads are part of the “native advertising” movement to make ads more welcome and less intrusive. As the brands start to get excited about virtual reality as a game and media platform, MediaSpike wants to head off the urge to stick lame banner ads all over it. So it has adapted its in-game product placement platform to handle ads in virtual reality.… read more. “Product placement comes to VR”

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Call: ICCC 2015 – Sixth International Conference on Computational Creativity

CALL FOR PAPERS

ICCC 2015: The Sixth International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC)

June 29 – July 2, 2015 (NB: dates have changed!)
Park City, Utah, USA

http://computationalcreativity.net/iccc2015/

Computational Creativity is the art, science, philosophy and engineering of computational systems which, by taking on particular responsibilities, exhibit behaviours that unbiased observers would deem to be creative. As a field of research, this area is thriving, with progress in formalizing what it means for software to be creative, along with many exciting and valuable applications of creative software in the sciences, the arts, literature, gaming and elsewhere.

The ICCC conference series organized by The Association for Computational Creativity since 2010 is the only scientific conference that focuses on computational creativity alone and also covers all aspects of it.… read more. “Call: ICCC 2015 – Sixth International Conference on Computational Creativity”

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Learn Immersive teaches languages in VR

[From Gizmag, where the story includes an image gallery]

Learn Immersive teaches languages in VR

[Image: Learn Immersive generates scene descriptions and text translations from scans of real-world environments that you experience in virtual reality, all of which they hope will help immerse you in a new language (Credit: Panoptic Group)]

Learn Immersive teaches languages in virtual reality

By Richard Moss
December 9, 2014

The trouble with learning a foreign language is that to become fluent – or even just to be passably coherent in a reasonable timeframe – you need to be immersed in it. You need to live in a country where that language predominates. But cost or opportunity often make that infeasible. San Francisco startup Learn Immersive wants to create the next best thing. Its two-man team has built a virtual reality platform that transports you to real-world environments and helps you understand them in their native language.… read more. “Learn Immersive teaches languages in VR”

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