Due to the rapid growth and development of virtual reality (VR) applications and their associated hardware, the personal computer (PC) will become a tool of daily-use in the 21st century. By combining PC with VR technology and telecommunications, the stage is set for the creation of a new type of ready-to-wear PC. Although wearable computers are merely concepts, it is now time to begin integrat...

Little work exists on the testing and evaluation of computer-game related input devices. This paper presents five new performance metrics and utilizes two tasks from the literature to quantify differences between input devices in constrained threedimensional environments, similar to “first-person”-genre games. The metrics are Mean Speed Variance, Mean Acceleration Variance, Percent View Moving,...

The increasing popularity of computer gaming as a contemporary leisure activity, together with the use of PCs and games consoles as leisure technologies are evidence of the increasing convergence of new technology and leisure practice. The size and popularity of the games industry stands out in contrast to the lack of understanding of computer gaming as a serious leisure activity. Previous rese...

We describe a new approach for testing MIDI performance characteristics, which is both inexpensive and highly accurate. Following a description of the test method, actual results for a number of MIDI interface technologies are presented. These results show that jitter and latency performance of newer (USB-based) interfaces is actually two to three times worse than older MIDI interface technolog...

Fuji Electric is providing “SPS” as a software PLC (programmable controller) for the “MICREX-SX” series of integrated controllers. The SPS is a PLC operated on Windows NT*1, a general-purpose OS (operating system) for the PC (personal computer), and is well received because it shares the same programming language and development environment as the hardware PLC for the MICREX-SX. Realization of ...

One trend in computer technology over the last decades was definitely that of devices becoming smaller and personal. Monolithic main-frame systems with many users are almost extinct and personal computers were the first milestone in this evolution. But the PC was not the end of the line. The personal computer is still getting smaller and portable computers such as powerful laptops and less powe...

James Cross, Sandra I. Woolley and Chris Baber School of Electronic & Electrical Engineering The University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT 1. Abstract This presentation will discuss the results of an archaeological field trial using a wearable (PC/104) image capture system in order to demonstrate the potential of image sequence tagging methods for efficient data retrieval in docu...

Modern smartphone devices provide valuable sensing capabilities that can be used in many context aware applications. Some applications need special sensing data that cannot be obtained directly from existing sensors or the available data is not reliable. This paper presents a method to derive an Android smartphone’s 3D orientation from accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer data. The obtaine...

Power consumption in embedded applications can be reduced either by hardware, software or both. Each instruction of a given program activates specific parts of the microprocessor. Therefore, the election of the correct instruction can generate a reduction of the power consumed by the processor. This paper presents a survey of software power reduction techniques from several authors and the futu...

ABSTRACT The Internet has transformed the nature of business-to-consumer transaction-making practices in many industries. Sellers now attract customers with innovative Internet-based selling mechanisms that can reveal or conceal market information. We define market transparency as the availability and accessibility of information about products and prices. Firms can influence market transparenc...