There has been significant progress in the graphical realism of digital humans in recent years. This work investigates the realistic portrayal of emotions beyond facial expressions by analysing how skin colour changes when expressing different emotional states. The study combines existing knowledge from old painters, photogrammetry data, thermal imaging, and skin colouration maps to create an artistic guideline to portray emotions realistically, resulting in the proposal of a set of colour maps representing the six basic emotions. By using skin colour changes to represent emotional states, the proposed colour maps offer an alternative workflow for portraying emotions. During the experiment of this research four of these proposed colour maps, which represent neutrality, anger, disgust, and happiness, were preferred over traditional alternatives in terms of realism perception and likeability. The findings have implications for the development of digital human technology, particularly in the creation of more realistic and expressive digital characters.
LINK
In dit hoofdstuk zijn de ervaringen beschreven die Hogeschool INHolland opdeed met het stimuleren en faciliteren van ‘Visueel Leren’, het gebruik van digitale concept maps. Twee projecten met concept maps van de Digitale Universiteit (DU), een samenwerkingsverband tussen tien universiteiten en hogescholen, vormden de start.
DOCUMENT
Autonomous driving in public roads requires precise localization within the range of few centimeters. Even the best localization systems based on GNSS cannot always reach this level of precision, especially in an urban environment, where the signal is disturbed by surrounding buildings and artifacts. Recent works have shown the advantage of using maps as a precise, robust, and reliable way of localization. Typical approaches use the set of current readings from the vehicle sensors to estimate its position on the map. The approach presented in this paper exploits a short-range visual lane marking detector and a dead reckoning system to construct a registry of the detected back lane markings corresponding to the last 240 m driven. This information is used to search in the map the most similar section, to determine the vehicle localization in the map reference. Additional filtering is used to obtain a more robust estimation for the localization. The accuracy obtained is sufficiently high to allow autonomous driving in a narrow road. The system uses a low-cost architecture of sensors and the algorithm is light enough to run on low-power embedded architecture.
DOCUMENT
Urban planning will benefit from tools that can assess the vulnerabilityto thermal stress in urban dense cities. Detailed quick-scan heat stressmaps, as made in this study for Johannesburg, have proven valuable inthe decision-making process on this topic. It raised awareness on theurgent need to implement measures to tackle the effects of climatechange and urbanization. Awareness on heat stress has led to theimplementation of measures to mitigate the effects of climate change.As in other countries, nature-based solutions (e.g. green roofs and walls,swales, rain gardens, planting trees etc) are considered in urban areasin South Africa for various reasons. The awareness of the effect ofnature based solutions on heat stress is still low, which can be improvedby the use of heat stress maps. Some of these measures are alreadymapped on the open source web tool, Climate-scan(www.climatescan.nl) for international knowledge exchange aroundthe globe.
DOCUMENT
Urban flooding and thermal stress have become key issues formany cities around the world. With the continuing effects of climatechange, these two issues will become more acute and will add to theserious problems already experienced in dense urban areas. Therefore, thesectors of public health and disaster management are in the need of toolsthat can assess the vulnerability to floods and thermal stress. The presentpaper deals with the combination of innovative tools to address thischallenge. Three cities in different climatic regions with various urbancontexts have been selected as the pilot areas to demonstrate these tools.These cities are Tainan (Taiwan), Ayutthaya (Thailand) and Groningen(Netherlands). For these cities, flood maps and heat stress maps weredeveloped and used for the comparison analysis. The flood maps producedindicate vulnerable low-lying areas, whereas thermal stress maps indicateopen, unshaded areas where high Physiological Equivalent Temperature(PET) values (thermal comfort) can be expected. The work to dateindicates the potential of combining two different kinds of maps to identifyand analyse the problem areas. These maps could be further improved andused by urban planners and other stakeholders to assess the resilience andwell-being of cities. The work presented shows that the combined analysisof such maps also has a strong potential to be used for the analysis of otherchallenges in urban dense areas such as air and water pollution, immobilityand noise disturbance.
DOCUMENT
Urban flooding and thermal stress have become key issues for many cities around the world. With the continuing effects of climate change, these two issues will become more acute and will add to the serious problems already experienced in dense urban areas. Therefore, the sectors of public health and disaster management are in the need of tools that can assess the vulnerability to floods and thermal stress. The present paper deals with the combination of innovative tools to address this challenge. Three cities in different climatic regions with various urban contexts have been selected as the pilot areas to demonstrate these tools. These cities are Tainan (Taiwan), Ayutthaya (Thailand) and Groningen (Netherlands). For these cities, flood maps and heat stress maps were developed and used for the comparison analysis. The flood maps produced indicate vulnerable low-lying areas, whereas thermal stress maps indicate open, unshaded areas where high Physiological Equivalent Temperature (PET) values (thermal comfort) can be expected. The work to date indicates the potential of combining two different kinds of maps to identify and analyse the problem areas. These maps could be further improved and used by urban planners and other stakeholders to assess the resilience and well-being of cities. The work presented shows that the combined analysis of such maps also has a strong potential to be used for the analysis of other challenges in urban dense areas such as air and water pollution, immobility and noise disturbance.
DOCUMENT
The European Values Study (EVS) is a large-scale, cross-national and longitudinal research programme on basic human values, initiated in the late 1970s. A product of this research is the Atlas of European Values (AoEV), published by the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands for the second time. The Atlas of European Values offers maps and background information on the opinions of the population in 46 European countries. In chapters about Europe, family, work, religion, politics, society and well-being, diversity and similarities in values patterns are shown. On the website www.atlasofeuropeanvalues.eu maps of the European Values Study are accessible for free. In addition, the website offers different map tools, videos, background information and other teaching materials that are very useful sources of information for geographers and geography teachers. The most important theories to explain the value patterns that the research shows us are modernization theories. In this article, the basic findings on values are explained with respect to the theoretical frame and some examples with a special focus on Turkey are given. The findings challenge geography and other sciences, to what extent mapping the values of Europeans is possible. Two of these challenges are regionalizing the data and exploring the "context" for explaining the differences among countries.
DOCUMENT
In 1960 Kevin Lynch analysed the ‘city-image’ in The Image of the City; seven years later American artist Robert Smithson surveyed the suburb of Passaic in ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey’. Both approaches use narrativity as an instrument to connect urban space with the lived experience of its users. Where Kevin Lynch analyzes the visual perception and mental representation (‘imageability’) of the postwar American metropolis, Robert Smithson explores the temporality of its peripheral terrain vague. Where Kevin Lynch frames his inquiry within then-current conventions of perception and cognition, Robert Smithson rejects these conventions precisely because they do no justice to his experience of the suburb and offer him no method to analyze or describe it. In his analysis, there is no coherent map of the territory, no mental representation to consult. How does Smithson’s practice relate to the paradigm of ‘imageability’? What is being narrated, and how does narrativity operate? By juxtaposing the two approaches this text reflects on some ideas and issues that surround a narrative analysis of urban landscape.
DOCUMENT
Background Exergames are becoming an increasingly popular tool for training balance ability, thereby preventing falls in older adults. Automatic, real time, assessment of the user's balance control offers opportunities in terms of providing targeted feedback and dynamically adjusting the gameplay to the individual user, yet algorithms for quantification of balance control remain to be developed. The aim of the present study was to identify movement patterns, and variability therein, of young and older adults playing a custom-made weight-shifting (ice-skating) exergame. Methods Twenty older adults and twenty young adults played a weight-shifting exergame under five conditions of varying complexity, while multi-segmental whole-body movement data were captured using Kinect. Movement coordination patterns expressed during gameplay were identified using Self Organizing Maps (SOM), an artificial neural network, and variability in these patterns was quantified by computing Total Trajectory Variability (TTvar). Additionally a k Nearest Neighbor (kNN) classifier was trained to discriminate between young and older adults based on the SOM features. Results Results showed that TTvar was significantly higher in older adults than in young adults, when playing the exergame under complex task conditions. The kNN classifier showed a classification accuracy of 65.8%.Conclusions Older adults display more variable sway behavior than young adults, when playing the exergame under complex task conditions. The SOM features characterizing movement patterns expressed during exergaming allow for discriminating between young and older adults with limited accuracy. Our findings contribute to the development of algorithms for quantification of balance ability during home-based exergaming for balance training. Copyright:
DOCUMENT
