There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

Authoritative and accessible, this book introduces the theory and practice of teaching writing to students of EFL/ESL learners While assuming no specialist knowledge, Ken Hyland systematically sets out the key issues of course design, lesson planning, texts and materials, tasks, feedback and assessment and how current research can inform classroom practice This second edition is completely revised to include up-to-date work on automated feedback, plagiarism, social media, Virtual Learning Environments and teacher workload issues It takes the clear stance that student writers not only need realistic strategies for drafting and revising, but also a clear understanding of genre to structure their writing experiences according to the expectations of particular communities of readers and the constraints of particular contexts Review exercises, reflection questions, plentiful examples and a new extensive glossary make the book invaluable to both prospective and practicing teachers alike

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Second Language Writing

Real-time control of three-dimensional avatars is an important problem in the context of computer games and virtual environments. Avatar animation and control is difficult, however, because a large repertoire of avatar behaviors must be made available, and the user must be able to select from this set of behaviors, possibly with a low-dimensional input device. One appealing approach to obtaining a rich set of avatar behaviors is to collect an extended, unlabeled sequence of motion data appropriate to the application. In this paper, we show that such a motion database can be preprocessed for flexibility in behavior and efficient search and exploited for real-time avatar control. Flexibility is created by identifying plausible transitions between motion segments, and efficient search through the resulting graph structure is obtained through clustering. Three interface techniques are demonstrated for controlling avatar motion using this data structure: the user selects from a set of available choices, sketches a path through an environment, or acts out a desired motion in front of a video camera. We demonstrate the flexibility of the approach through four different applications and compare the avatar motion to directly recorded human motion.

Interactive control of avatars animated with human motion data

Human motion tracking for rehabilitation - A survey

The Xsens MVN motion capture suit is an easy-to- use, cost efficient system for full-body human motion capture MVN is based on unique, state-of-the-art miniature inertial sensors, biomechanical models and sensor fusion algorithms MVN does not need external cameras, emitters or markers It can thus be used outdoors as well as indoors, there are no restrictions for lighting, it does not suffer from problems of occlusion or missing markers In addition, unique for inertial motion capture technology: the sensor-suit captures any type of movement, including running, jumping, crawling and cartwheels

http://edge.rit.edu/content/P10010/public/PDF/MVN_white_paper.pdf

Xsens MVN: Full 6DOF Human Motion Tracking Using Miniature Inertial Sensors

Motion-capture techniques are rarely based on orientation measurements for two main reasons: (1) optical motion-capture systems are designed for tracking object position rather than their orientation (which can be deduced from several trackers), (2) known animation techniques, like inverse kinematics or geometric algorithms, require position targets constantly, but orientation inputs only occasionally. We propose a complete human motion-capture technique based essentially on orientation measurements. The position measurement is used only for recovering the global position of the performer. This method allows fast tracking of human gestures for interactive applications as well as high rate recording. Several motion-capture optimizations, including the multijoint technique, improve the posture realism. This work is well suited for magnetic-based systems that rely more on orientation registration (in our environment) than position measurements that necessitate difficult system calibration.

Human Motion Capture Driven by Orientation Measurements

We present an animation interface designed to conveniently control the motion capture process. The transition of performer's hand gestures tracked by a dataglove is recognized for software remote control. An intuitive camera metaphor allows one to specify the viewpoint location using the magnetic sensors strapped to the performer's head. The human motion capture is based on the Anatomical Converter, a toolkit to convert sensor measurements into human anatomical rotations in real time. An improved human motion capture technique, the multi-joint control, is introduced.

An animation interface designed for motion capture

The paper discusses the main requirements, constraints and challenges involved in practical realization of an immersive VR situation training system that would support simulation of interactive scenarios of various type. A special attention is paid to the demanding health emergency decision training domain. As an example an immersive JUST VR health emergency training system built in frame of EU IST JUST project is presented in more detail.

http://george.papagiannakis.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Proc.-Of-1st-International-Workshop-on-Virtual-Reality-Rehabilitation-VRMHR2002-Lausanne-2002-Ponder.pdf

Interactive Scenario Immersion: Health Emergency Decision Training in JUST Project

We present a networked virtual environment (NVE) system and an attraction building system based on Windows NT that enables users to introduce their own scenario-based applications into a shared virtual environment. Our goal was to develop and integrate several modules into a system capable of animating realistic virtual humans in a real-time performance. This includes modeling and representing virtual humans with high realism and simulating human face and body movements in real time. Realism becomes quite important in NVEs, where the communication among participants is crucial for their sense of presence.

Sharing attractions on the Net with VPark

We investigate how the movement measurement technologies developed for virtual reality applications can be applied to track in real-time the full body posture of a human being. The accuracy of this information is of definite importance to evaluate the feasibility of complex tasks involving human beings. We present a full body movement measurement approach. It provides a realistic conversion in real-time with a reasonable number of sensors. Associated with the hand movement measurement and correction algorithms we provide a pertinent visual and vibrotactile feedback to the performer.

Tom Molet

Papers

Human Motion Capture Driven by Orientation Measurements

An animation interface designed for motion capture

Interactive Scenario Immersion: Health Emergency Decision Training in JUST Project

Sharing attractions on the Net with VPark

An architecture for immersive evaluation of complex human tasks