This paper describes reports on the results of an experiment designed to study the impact of realism on the reported presence in an immersive virtual environment. An experiment was carried out with 40 participants who were asked to walk through a virtual street, which had virtual characters walking through it. Two factors were varied – texture quality (2 levels) and virtual character realism (2...

Chinese radicals are linguistic elements smaller than Chinese characters1. Normally, a radical is a semantic category and almost all characters contain radicals or are radicals themselves. In subjectivity classification on sentences, we can use radicals to represent characters, which reduce the scale of word space while keep the subjectivity information. In this paper, we manually labeled a cha...

Physics simulation offers the possibility of truly responsive and realistic animation. Despite wide adoption of physics simulation for the animation of passive phenomena, such as fluids, cloths and rag-doll characters, commercial applications still resort to kinematics-based approaches for the animation of actively controlled characters. However, following a renewed interest in the use of physi...

In video games, virtual characters’ decision systems often use a simplified representation of the world. To increase both their autonomy and believability we want those characters to be able to learn this representation from human players. We propose to use a model called growing neural gas to learn by imitation the topology of the environment. The implementation of the model, the modifications...

Handwritten characters in administrative antique documents from three centuries have been detected using different synchrotron X-ray imaging techniques. Heavy elements in ancient inks, present even for everyday administrative manuscripts as shown by X-ray fluorescence spectra, produce attenuation contrast. In most cases the image quality is good enough for tomography reconstruction in view of f...

We describe a method to detect common Chinese characters between Japanese and Chinese automatically by means of freely available resources and verify the effectiveness of the detecting method. We use a joint phrase alignment model on dependency trees and report results of experiments aimed at improving the alignment quality between Japanese and Chinese by incorporating the common Chinese charac...

A computer program which draws DNA sequences is described. A simple method is used which enables the user to highlight or annotate specific parts of a sequence. The sizes of the characters in the sequence to be drawn are specified by the user. In addition, vertical spacing between lines and horizontal spacing between characters can be specified. Sequences can be prepared and high quality output...

Background In last decades, the progress of molecular techniques, bioinformatics tools and genome analysis equipment allowed genomes to be sequenced and analyzed for several plants. For Eucalyptus, the combination of quantitative trait loci (QTL) mapping with genomic analyses, has allowed the identification and validation of a few genomic regions involved in growth and wood quality characters. ...

Maize (Zea mays) is a major food and animal feed worldwide and occupies a relevant place in the world economy and trade as an industrial grain crop. Currently more than 70% of maize production is used for food and feed; therefore, knowledge of genes involved in grain structure and chemical is important for improving the nutritional and food-making properties of maize. It is a good source of car...

Social Anxiety affects a significant number of people, limiting their personal and social life. We describe an interactive Virtual Reality approach to the exposure therapy for social anxiety, resorting to virtual characters that exhibit combinations of facial and body expressions controllable in real-time by the therapist. The application described in this paper updates and significantly improv...