Unusual Viewpoints Research Articles

Development of an Immersive VR Experience Using Integrated Survey Technologies and Hybrid Scenarios

The paper was aimed to promoting and improving the knowledge of the Naples city’s monuments through an immersive visit experience, according to the paradigms of new digital languages. Thanks to the use of integrated technologies, some monuments of the city are presented in virtual way, with unusual viewpoints, that reveal previously unseen details, many of them not directly visible to tourists. A journey created by the use of integrated technologies, to discover historical facades and museums to be explored in total freedom, without physical constraints, without cognitive barriers. The technological basis supporting the visit consists of integrated solutions including digital photogrammetry, 3D modelling, virtual restoration and persuasive storytelling, all organised to provide a product for the general public, to be enjoyed with VR headsets. The available contents are organised on different reading levels, in according to three paths that include: a visit to the MANN (National Archaeological Museum of Naples), a visit within the virtual room dedicated to the most important museums of the city and a virtual walk through the decumani, the heart of historical centre. The virtual enjoyment of contexts no longer visible in original state or not accessible by tourists is resolved by the virtual reconstruction and re-location of artefacts in a virtual space, here called Virtual Room.

Embodied Visual Active Learning for Semantic Segmentation

We study the task of embodied visual active learning, where an agent is set to explore a 3d environment with the goal to acquire visual scene understanding by actively selecting views for which to request annotation. While accurate on some benchmarks, today's deep visual recognition pipelines tend to not generalize well in certain real-world scenarios, or for unusual viewpoints. Robotic perception, in turn, requires the capability to refine the recognition capabilities for the conditions where the mobile system operates, including cluttered indoor environments or poor illumination. This motivates the proposed task, where an agent is placed in a novel environment with the objective of improving its visual recognition capability. To study embodied visual active learning, we develop a battery of agents - both learnt and pre-specified - and with different levels of knowledge of the environment. The agents are equipped with a semantic segmentation network and seek to acquire informative views, move and explore in order to propagate annotations in the neighbourhood of those views, then refine the underlying segmentation network by online retraining. The trainable method uses deep reinforcement learning with a reward function that balances two competing objectives: task performance, represented as visual recognition accuracy, which requires exploring the environment, and the necessary amount of annotated data requested during active exploration. We extensively evaluate the proposed models using the photorealistic Matterport3D simulator and show that a fully learnt method outperforms comparable pre-specified counterparts, even when requesting fewer annotations.

“I’ve Been Bad”: Using Light Verse in Teaching Philosophy

Abstract Conventional wisdom in our society is that a good death involves accepting it as natural rather than striving to stave it off as long as possible. An alternative view is “Death can be good / I’ll show you how / Just have it come / decades from now.” In this essay, I discuss how I use this poem and other light verses of mine in teaching philosophy. These poems offer unusual viewpoints in several additional areas of philosophical and bioethical interest, including growth through adversity, old age, family relations, obesity, envy, inequality, and ambition. Such poems can supplement traditional philosophical writing by presenting these alternative viewpoints in an amusing way that can capture students’ attention and relieve the solemnity that often pervades philosophy courses.

Testimony on the margins: Silence, innocence and the other in Vasilii Grossman’s late fiction

This article examines the mode of testimony to trauma employed by Vasilii Grossman in his short later works. Deflecting attention from his main subject, and focusing on peripheral figures and unusual viewpoints, Grossman explores the possibilities and limitations of representing trauma, interrogating how those involved understand and testify to their experiences. The article first discusses the novella Everything Flows, in particular the encounter between Ivan, the Gulag returnee, and Anna, the former activist, that leads to her testimony about the terror famine. It then analyses two stories, ‘Mama’ and ‘The road’, which are characterized by the adoption of marginal focalizers. The article discusses recurring themes such as the absent mother figure and the embodiment of testimony through the senses. These become central to the construction of two modes of witnessing, the relational and the pure, which make testimony possible but also illuminate the difficulties of realizing it.

Dorsal and ventral stream activation and object recognition performance in school-age children

We explored how developing neural artifact and animal representations in the dorsal and ventral stream play a role in children's increasingly more proficient interactions with objects. In thirty-three 6- to 10-year-old children and 11 adults, we used fMRI to track the development of (1) the cortical category preference for tools compared to animals and (2) the response to complex objects (as compared to scrambled objects) during a passive viewing task. In addition, we related a cognitive skill that improved substantially from age 6 to 10, namely the ability to recognize tools from unusual viewpoints, to the development of cortical object processing. In multiple complementary analyses we showed that those children who were better at recognizing tools from unusual viewpoints outside the scanner showed a reduced cortical response to tools and animals when viewed inside the scanner, bilaterally in intraparietal and inferotemporal cortex. In contrast, the cortical preference for tools in the dorsal and ventral visual stream did not predict object recognition performance, and was organized in an adult-like manner at six. While cortical tool preference did not change with age, the findings suggest that animal-preferring regions in the ventral visual stream may develop later, concordant with previous reports of a protracted development in similar regions for faces. We thus conclude that intraparietal and inferotemporal cortical networks that support aspects of object processing irrespective of tool or animal category, continue to develop during the school-age years and contribute to the development of object recognition skills during this period.

The 1930s, Photography, and Virginia Woolf's Flush

By the early 1930s modernist vocabularies were being shaped by new photographic strategies of montage, close-ups, unusual viewpoints, and sharp tonal contrasts. The new style was conspicuously urban both in subject matter and imagery. Yet Virginia Woolf's key urban novel of the early 1930s—Flush—is rarely considered in relation to the ubiquity of modernist visual photography. Virginia Woolf, however, like many other modernist writers, was an experienced amateur photographer, owning in succession Frenas, vest-pocket Kodaks, and, in 1931, a Zeiss camera. The Woolfs took more than 1,000 domestic photographs and, willingly or unwillingly, Woolf was the subject of many professional photographs. This article analyzes Flush's use of photographic tropes and the use of photography in Woolf's companion works “Aurora Leigh,” “The Cinema,” and Three Guineas in terms of modernist photography and Woolf's specific camera expertise. By demonstrating the significance of the visual in a text usually praised for its olfactory sensuality, the article aims to demonstrate the impact of photography on modernist writing.

Prefrontal and parietal regions are involved in naming of objects seen from unusual viewpoints.

Object naming is commonly used for demonstrating semantic memory abilities, known to be affected in normal aging. Yet, neuropsychological assessments of older people do not reflect irregularities. The authors used a test with 2 levels of naming complexity by 2 kinds of stimuli: common objects pictured from a conventional viewpoint (usual condition) or from an unconventional viewpoint (unusual condition). The authors studied naming performance with 129 healthy participants, aged 20-85 years. For the usual stimuli, the success rate was high (90.9%), with no reduction in performance until 65 years of age. However, for the unusual stimuli, there was a marked reduction in performance with age. Brain activity was studied on 11 healthy young participants (20-30 years of age) using functional magnetic resonance imaging. The usual condition activated brain regions associated with visual perception, language, and memory. Additional brain regions associated with semantic searching and decision making were obtained in the unusual condition in the prefrontal cortex (Brodmann's area [BA] 9 and BA 47) and anterior cingulate (BA 32). The results suggest that the poor naming performance for unusual-viewed objects in older people might be related to the shrinkage of frontal gray matter with age.

Object recognition with severe spatial deficits in Williams syndrome: sparing and breakdown

Williams syndrome (WS) is a rare genetic disorder that results in severe visual-spatial cognitive deficits coupled with relative sparing in language, face recognition, and certain aspects of motion processing. Here, we look for evidence for sparing or impairment in another cognitive system—object recognition. Children with WS, normal mental-age (MA) and chronological age-matched (CA) children, and normal adults viewed pictures of a large range of objects briefly presented under various conditions of degradation, including canonical and unusual orientations, and clear or blurred contours. Objects were shown as either full-color views (Experiment 1) or line drawings (Experiment 2). Across both experiments, WS and MA children performed similarly in all conditions while CA children performed better than both WS group and MA groups with unusual views. This advantage, however, was eliminated when images were also blurred. The error types and relative difficulty of different objects were similar across all participant groups. The results indicate selective sparing of basic mechanisms of object recognition in WS, together with developmental delay or arrest in recognition of objects from unusual viewpoints. These findings are consistent with the growing literature on brain abnormalities in WS which points to selective impairment in the parietal areas of the brain. As a whole, the results lend further support to the growing literature on the functional separability of object recognition mechanisms from other spatial functions, and raise intriguing questions about the link between genetic deficits and cognition.

Functional Connectivity: Integrating Behavioral, Diffusion Tensor Imaging, and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Data Sets

In the present study, we combined 2 types of magnetic resonance technology to explore individual differences on a task that required the recognition of objects presented from unusual viewpoints. This task was chosen based on previous work that has established the necessity of information transfer from the right parietal cortex to the left inferior cortex for its successful completion. We used reaction times (RTs) to localize regions of cortical activity in the superior parietal and inferior frontal regions (blood oxygen level-dependent [BOLD] response) that were more active with longer response times. These regions were then sampled, and their signal change used to predict individual differences in structural integrity of white matter in the corpus callosum (using diffusion tensor imaging). Results show that shorter RTs (and associated increases in BOLD response) are associated with increased organization in the splenium of the corpus callosum, whereas longer RTs are associated with increased organization in the genu.

Developmental Prosopagnosia: Should it be Taken at Face Value?

This study presents a rare case of developmental prosopagnosia. Structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) revealed no overt brain abnormalities. EP’s basic visual skills and visual memory were intact, as was his ability to judge age, sex and expression from faces, identify facial parts, and make face/non-face decisions. EP was impaired at recognizing famous and very familiar faces and describing visual images of famous faces. He also displayed an anterograde memory impairment for recently studied faces, and performed poorly on tests of unfamiliar face matching, most notably for chimeric faces. It is suggested that EP may be deficient at encoding configural representations of faces. EP appears to have a ‘pure’ (i.e. specific to faces) prosopagnosia, as he shows normal object recognition from unusual viewpoints, good gestalt completion for objects, but not for faces, normal visual imagery for objects but not for faces, a disruption of the inversion effect for faces but not for houses, and performs within the normal range on tests of within-category discriminations, even with unique exemplars of object categories such as famous buildings.

Age Degradation in Top-Down Processing: Identifying Objects from Canonical and Noncanonical Viewpoints

Twenty-four young (mean age 21.8 years) and 24 old (mean age 65.2years) participants were asked to determine whether spoken words correctly named pictures of objects. Half of the objects were portrayed from noncanonical (unusual) viewpoints, and half were portrayed from canon ical viewpoints. The older participants required more time and made more errors when they evaluated the noncanonical pictures (relative to the canonical pictures) than the younger participants. This finding is consistent with previous evidence that frontal lobe function degrades with aging and with results from a positron emission tomography study (S.M. Kosslyn et al., 1994) that showed that the frontal lobes (among other areas) are activated more in the noncanonical condition than in the canonical condition.

Transthoracic three-dimensional echocardiography in adult patients with congenital heart disease

This study sought to assess both the feasibility and potential role of transthoracic three-dimensional echocardiography for the evaluation of adult patients with congenital heart disease. The unrestricted views with depth perception provided by three-dimensional echocardiography with dynamic volume-rendered display may enhance visualization of cardiac structures and detection of abnormalities in patients with congenital heart defects. We studied 33 patients with various heart defects (mitral valve anomalies in 9, aortic valve anomalies in 5, subaortic membrane in 5, ventricular septal defect in 4, transposition of the great arteries in 3, tetralogy of Fallot in 2, other defects in 5). Cross-sectional images of the specific region of interest were acquired from either the parasternal or apical window with the rotational technique (2 degrees interval with electrocardiographic and respiratory gating) and postprocessed for resampling in cubic format. From these three-dimensional data sets a multitude of cut planes were selected, presented in volume-rendered dynamic display and analyzed by two observers for comparison with standard two-dimensional images to assess their additional information. Three-dimensional reconstruction was possible in all patients. Structures of interest were evaluated from unusual viewpoints, providing both cardiologists and surgeons with immediate feedback. When compared with standard two-dimensional images, additional information was provided for 12 patients (36%). The mitral valve, aortoseptal continuity and interatrial septum were the structures for which three-dimensional echocardiography was most useful. Transthoracic three-dimensional echocardiography is feasible and facilitates spatial recognition of the intracardiac anatomy in a significant proportion of patients and enhances diagnostic confidence of complex congenital heart disease.

Clever programming languages exercises

Books about programming languages usually propose exercises and questions requiring little creativity from students. Most exercises do not induce deeper thoughts about characteristics of languages and constructions. The paper proposes some exercises showing new constructions under unusual viewpoints, stimulating creativity.

Josephson Effect : Two Experiments from the Unusual Viewpoints

Josephson Effect : Two Experiments from the Unusual Viewpoints