Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Editorial

2008; Wiley; Volume: 19; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/cav.270

1546-427X

Nadia Magnenat‐Thalmann, Daniel Thalmann,

Evacuation and Crowd Dynamics

This issue contains four regular papers and the two best papers of ICEC 2007. The first paper, by Silvia Rueda, Pedro Morillo, and Juan Orduña from the University of Valencia, Spain, proposes a comparative study of the performance provided by awareness methods that are supposed to fully solve the awareness problem in peer-to-peer distributed virtual environments. The paper evaluates the performance of the considered methods on actually distributed systems. The evaluation results show that only a single method actually provides full awareness to avatars. The second paper, by Fan Zhang, Hanqiu Sun, and Chong Zhao, from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Lifeng Wang from Autodesk Software, presents an enhanced variant of light space perspective shadow maps to optimize perspective aliasing distribution in possible general cases where the light and view directions are not orthogonal. Authors' experiments have shown the enhanced shadow quality using their algorithm in dynamic scenes. This paper is one of the best papers of ICEC 2007. In the third paper, Liying Wang, Wei Hua, and Hujun Bao, from Zhejiang University, China, formulate the urban planning as a constrained layout optimization problem; they propose an algorithm to solve the problem and procedurally generate models of urban zone. It produces extensive virtual urban environment for computer games and simulations at a low cost. Experimental results prove that their method can efficiently produce the virtual urban scene similar to that designed by urban planners. This paper is one of the best papers of ICEC 2007. Marco Gillies, Xueni Pan, Mel Slater, and John Shawe-Taylor from University College London, UK, introduce, in the next paper, an important aspect of non-verbal expression: people respond to each other's behavior and are highly attuned to picking up this type of response. The paper takes a data driven approach to generating interactive social behavior. Listening behavior is motion captured, together with the audio being listened to. These data are used to learn an animation model of the responses of one person to the other. This allows us to create characters that respond in real-time during a conversation with a real human. Umberto Castellani, from University of Verona, Italy, and Vincent Gay-Bellile and Adrien Bartoli from Universitè Blaise Pascal, The Puy-de-Dôme, France, present, in the next paper, a deformation capture system for surfaces from temporal range data obtained by 3D sensors. The proposed method is based on planar mesh that is deformed so as to fit each range image. The authors show how this is achieved by minimizing a compound cost function combining several data and regularization terms, needed to make the overall system robust so that it can deal with low quality datasets. In the last paper, by James Anderson, Nancie Davidson, Hazel Morton, and Mervyn Jack, from University of Edinburgh, UK, the authors introduce The Spoken Electronic Language Learning (SPELL) system. It is a self-access computer-assisted language learning package that integrates speaker-independent continuous speech recognition technology with virtual worlds and embodied virtual agents. The goal is to create an environment in which learners can converse in the target language within meaningful contextualized scenario. The paper focuses on the technological aspects of the system and its evaluation for usability and robustness, rather than its pedagogical methodology.