In this paper, we consider a novel 3D visualization technique based on surface flattening for virtual colonoscopy. Such visualization methods could be important in virtual colonoscopy since they have the potential for non-invasively determining the presence of polyps and other pathologies. Further, we demonstrate a method which presents a surface scan of the entire colon as a cine, and affords ...

Virtual agents that engage in dialogue with people can be used for a variety of purposes, including as service and information providers, tutors, confederates in psychology experiments, and role players in social training exercises. It seems reasonable that agents acting as service and information providers, and arguably as tutors, would be be truthful and cooperative. For other applications, h...

Colorectal carcinoma ranks third in frequency among all cancers. With regards to cancer related mortality, colorectal carcinoma is known as the second cause (Levin et al., 2003). This condition accounts for 10% of all cancer related mortalities in women and men. Overall, lifetime risk for the development of colorectal carcinoma is still 5%. (Eddy, 1990) The wellknown risk factors are age, inher...

Virtual reality (VR) technology is currently seeing a surge of interest in industry, academia, and the public. Myriad developments are already underway, aiming to bring the technology directly to users in ways that offer access to rich virtual multisensory experiences. The immersivity that VR offers is enabled by the brain’s constraints on processing bodily self-consciousness (BSC), which ancho...

Two definitions of virtual age are considered. The first one is based on the fact that a system’s deterioration depends on an environment. In a more severe environment deterioration is more intensive and, therefore, the corresponding virtual age is larger than the calendar age. The second approach defines virtual age at the moment of switching from one regime to another. It is shown that both d...

A realization of a virtual link diagram is obtained by choosing over/under markings for each virtual crossing. Any realization can also be obtained from some representation of the virtual link. (A representation of a virtual link is a link diagram on an oriented 2dimensional surface.) We prove that if a minimal genus representation meets certain criteria then there is a minimal genus representa...

We describe a model of virtual humans to be used in training for non-team interactions, such as negotiating with people from other organizations. The virtual humans build on existing task, dialogue, and emotion models, with an added model of trust, which are used to understand and produce interactional moves. The model has been implemented within an agent in the SASO-ST system, and some example...

The sense of feeling can effectively be used to enforce virtual artistic activities like virtual sculpting or modeling. In this paper, we describe how a virtual sculpture system has been extended with haptical feedback. In practice, we use the scalar field defining the implicit surface being modeled to efficiently compute several type of force feedback. We present a method for combining these f...

This study is about the evaluation of non-immersive desktop web-based photorealistic virtual environments using think-aloud protocol and heuristic evaluation to determine three aims: (1) whether applying the same usability evaluation methodologies result in additional usability guideline categoriesidentified from the Koykka, Ollikainen, Ranta-aho, Milszus, Wasserroth and Friedrich 1999 study; (...