User's Imagination Research Articles

Methodical recommendations for creating video content in the digital environment on the example of developing a promotional video for universities

The aim of the article.Impression management is especially relevant in digital marketing. This is due to the fact that more and more communication in today's audience takes place in the digital environment in mobile phones and other gadgets. The problem is the lack of systematic information on the practical implementation of the concept of the economy of impressions in the digital environment. The purpose of the article is to form practical recommendations for creating video content in the digital environment on the example of developing a promotional video of the university. Analyses results.The article presents methodological recommendations for the practical application of the concept of the economy of impressions in the digital environment on the example of the development of a promotional video of the university. The significance of impressions in the process of information processing as a factor that holds the user's attention is specified. Successfully designed digital content will enable the user's imagination, transfer him to the situation presented and make it part of the action that takes place. Thanks to the proposed recommendations, the developer will be able to offer content that will be a sensory user experience. Conclusions and directions for further research. The stages of planning and implementation of the show in the digital environment in accordance with the laws of drama are substantiated. The action should take place in the user's imagination, under the influence of emotions that arise under the impressions of what is seen or heard. Summarized elements of storytelling and digital marketing, which are recommended in the development of emotional digital content. The components of the show in digital format are given. Motives for creating stories for a promotional video of a higher education institution are proposed.

Analysing virtual landscapes using postmemory

Virtual environments are becoming ubiquitous, designed to do work in the material world. They are used within urban design, medicine, the military, entertainment and a wide range of other sectors, having increasing significance within our everyday lives. Virtual landscapes are brought into being through the interaction of users and these virtual environments. In this paper, we propose the use of postmemory as a framework for analysing virtual landscapes. Postmemories, formed of second-hand accounts combined with the imagination of individuals, can shape our responses to the world around us, having similar affective force to memories of situations directly witnessed. Twenty-five participants were asked to undertake an exploration exercise within a virtual recreation of 19th century London and subsequently interviewed about their landscape experiences. Individual position and imagination had a significant effect on participants’ understanding of those landscapes, creating postmemories of the material environment being represented, going beyond the intent of the designers. Given the forceful affective qualities of postmemory, however, the balance of power between designer intent and user imagination is demonstrated to be problematic, as individuals are manipulated through their exposure to, and co-creation of, these virtual landscapes.

A Hybrid Brain Computer Interface to Control the Direction and Speed of a Simulated or Real Wheelchair

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are used to translate brain activity signals into control signals for external devices. Currently, it is difficult for BCI systems to provide the multiple independent control signals necessary for the multi-degree continuous control of a wheelchair. In this paper, we address this challenge by introducing a hybrid BCI that uses the motor imagery-based mu rhythm and the P300 potential to control a brain-actuated simulated or real wheelchair. The objective of the hybrid BCI is to provide a greater number of commands with increased accuracy to the BCI user. Our paradigm allows the user to control the direction (left or right turn) of the simulated or real wheelchair using left- or right-hand imagery. Furthermore, a hybrid manner can be used to control speed. To decelerate, the user imagines foot movement while ignoring the flashing buttons on the graphical user interface (GUI). If the user wishes to accelerate, then he/she pays attention to a specific flashing button without performing any motor imagery. Two experiments were conducted to assess the BCI control; both a simulated wheelchair in a virtual environment and a real wheelchair were tested. Subjects steered both the simulated and real wheelchairs effectively by controlling the direction and speed with our hybrid BCI system. Data analysis validated the use of our hybrid BCI system to control the direction and speed of a wheelchair.

The impact of open access upon public health

Arthur Amman, President of Global Strategies for HIV Prevention (www.globalstrategies.org), tells the following story: I recently met a physician from southern Africa, engaged in perinatal HIV prevention, whose primary access to information was abstracts posted on the Internet. Based on a single abstract, they had altered their perinatal HIV prevention program from an effective therapy to one with lesser efficacy. Had they read the full text article they would have undoubtedly realized that the study results were based on short-term follow-up, a small pivotal group, incomplete data, and were unlikely to be applicable to their country situation. Their decision to alter treatment based solely on the abstract's conclusions may have resulted in increased perinatal HIV transmission. Amman's story shows the potentially deadly gap between the information-rich and the information-poor. This gap is not the result of lack of technology or of money, but of a failure of imagination. We live in the most information-rich era of history, when the Internet allows immediate global dissemination of crucial health information, and the inter-linking of online information creates an integrated, living body of information--the ultimate vision of which is the semantic web. (1) What is preventing such a living web? For scientific and medical information, two obstacles are vested interests and traditions. Central to these traditions is the role of copyright, which was developed when the dissemination of work was on paper. Initially, applying copyright to medical articles protected both the intellectual investment of authors and the commercial investment of publishers. Authors of scientific articles handed over their copyright to the publishers to prevent unauthorized print copying. Thus, the prevention of unauthorized copying helped to disseminate information, by providing a valid business model for publishers. But the proliferation of subscription-based medical and scientific journals led to readers having to pay more and more to publishers in order to keep up with current knowledge, and an increasing fragmentation of knowledge between different publishers. Print is no longer the most efficient way to disseminate information. The Internet provides the means to revolutionize publishing in two crucial ways. First, it makes it possible to disseminate health information at no charge to anyone in the world with online access. Although it costs money to peer review, edit, produce, and host an online article, this is a one-time, fixed cost. If research funders are willing to pay this cost, then the published work can be made freely available to all readers worldwide, and there would he no need for journal subscriptions. This is one way of financing an open-access model of publishing. (2) Second, because the Internet allows not just ease of access but ease of reuse, an article's usefulness is limited only by a user's imagination. To allow this, the traditional role of copyright has to change. Instead of publishers using copyright to restrict use, authors can retain copyright and grant the public the right to creatively reuse their work. Licences such as those developed by the Creative Commons, (w3) which facilitate rather than prohibit reuse, are used by the open-access publishers Public Library of Science (PLoS) (w4) and BioMed Central (BMC). The result is that: ... copyright can be used for what it is meant to in science, not to make the articles artificially scarce and in the process restrict their distribution, but instead, to ensure that their potential for maximum possible dissemination can be realised. …

Interactive Computer Animation of Hand Gestures using Status Estimation with Multiple Regression Analysis

This paper presents a method of interactively generating natural hand gesture animation using reduced dimensionality from multiple captured data sequences of finger motions conducting specific tasks. This method is achieved by introducing an estimation with multiple regression analysis. Even when the skeletal structure of the user who inputs the motion is different from that of the shape model in the computer, the motion that a user imagines is generated. Experimental results obtained from the interface applied to virtual object manipulation showed that the proposed method generates animation naturally, just as users would expect. This method enables us to make input devices that require minimal user training and computer calibration, and helps to make the user interface intuitive and easy to use.

Design of a very versatile software program for automating analytical methods

The present article proposes the design of a hardware-independent system for automating various analytical methods. System design is based on the division of the software into four layers, defining a communications interface among them. The definition of these layers allows the isolation of the highest, corresponding to the analytical application, from the lowest, the hardware, composed of the various parts of the block diagram. Although this system was initially designed for automating flow techniques (flow-injection analysis, FIA, and sequential-injection analysis, SIA), its conception allows the development of much more general applications, depending on the user's imagination. The system is very open, in the sense that it is not necessary to adapt the program as system possibilities are expanded. Thus, if new instrumentation (modules in the block diagram) is incorporated, one need only develop independently a minimum of software to comply with the previously defined interface. This system has been developed under the 32-bit Windows 95 environment, making the exchange of information with other applications very simple and allowing the various possibilities offered by the program to be executed simultaneously (for example, data acquisition and processing). © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Lab Robotics and Automation 11: 131–140, 1999

Design of a very versatile software program for automating analytical methods

The present article proposes the design of a hardware-independent system for automating various analytical methods. System design is based on the division of the software into four layers, defining a communications interface among them. The definition of these layers allows the isolation of the highest, corresponding to the analytical application, from the lowest, the hardware, composed of the various parts of the block diagram. Although this system was initially designed for automating flow techniques (flow-injection analysis, FIA, and sequential-injection analysis, SIA), its conception allows the development of much more general applications, depending on the user's imagination. The system is very open, in the sense that it is not necessary to adapt the program as system possibilities are expanded. Thus, if new instrumentation (modules in the block diagram) is incorporated, one need only develop independently a minimum of software to comply with the previously defined interface. This system has been developed under the 32-bit Windows 95 environment, making the exchange of information with other applications very simple and allowing the various possibilities offered by the program to be executed simultaneously (for example, data acquisition and processing). © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Lab Robotics and Automation 11: 131–140, 1999

Anatomy of the clinical simulation.

Computer-based clinical simulations have been used in medical education for the past 25 years. During this period, the technology has evolved from mainframe computers to microcomputers to multimedia. All designers of simulations must decide which elements of reality to include explicitly in a simulated case, which to leave to the user's imagination, and when to intervene for educational purposes. Once these decisions are made, developers of simulations have many options for structuring the simulation itself. They can develop simulations with single or multiple patient encounters, with menu or natural-language requests for data, with varying levels of volunteered information about the simulated patient, with interpreted or uninterpreted clinical findings, with deterministic or probablistic evolution of the case, with various ways to give users feedback about their progress through the case, and with manual or automated creation of specific cases. Simulations derive their specific character from how these options are implemented.

Computerized Slide Show for the 1990s Lecturer

One of the most difficult and time-consuming tasks of writing and presenting papers is the review and coordination of patient photographic records. For years, not only has the 35-mm slide been the means of photographic storage for patient records, but also the standard for illustrating lectures and presentations. This current method is cumbersome and time consuming. We have used existing software of the Cameo II and imaging system to prepare, create, and present illustrations for lectures. Patient images are digitalized from any source (eg, photographs, slides, video tape) and electronically stored in the computer along with the computer-generated illustrations. When a lecture is prepared, the images are arranged sequentially in an electronic carousel. This computerized program is recorded on video tape and simply played through the video projector during the presentation to display the images. This system is more efficient since any stored image can be displayed instantaneously in any order without the handling of 35-mm slides. The only limitation of this system is the user's imagination. As the current trend in computer technology continues with high-resolution TV and video systems, the 35-mm slide presentation will become obsolete.

The System Approach to Signal Conditioning

This paper describes a complete highly flexible signal conditioning system for matching transducers to readout devices. This system differs from conventional systems, in which a matching channel consists of separately packaged and powered components with interconnecting cables, in that all the components for a matching channel are packaged and powered together in one mainframe that provides the interconnections. The system gains tremendous advantages in flexibility, space, heat production, ``connectorology,'' and cost. Mathematically, any matching channel can be represented by a transfer function that can be analyzed into simpler transfer functions. Conversely, any matching channel can be synthesized by combining appropriate transfer functions. The subject system provides five types of components that provide power supply, input, preamplifier, processor, and dual output transfer functions. In each category, the number of transfer functions for which components can be designed is limited only by the user's imagination. By proper selection of components, the system can be used to match a wide variety of transducers and readout devices. The paper applies the analysis and synthesis techniques to several commonly used matching systems as a means of indicating the flexibility of the subject system.

Water Net— A computerized design aid

Water Net makes it possible to perform hydraulic analyses with ease. The complexity of the system to be analyzed is limited only by the user's imagination and the capacity of the computer being used. The user need not have been trained in computer programing.