Many manual tasks such as those in surgical applications require a high degree of motor skills that can only be gained through extensive training. This thesis is concerned with the design and control of collaborative training virtual environments with haptic feedback for skills training. The term ”collaborative training” refers to a scheme in which the trainee and the trainer operate in a share...

In this technical paper, we describe an implementation of Distributed Drama Management (DDM). DDM is a concept which involves synthetic actor agents in an Emergent Narrative scenario acting on both an in-character level, which reflects the concerns of the characters, and an out-of-character level, which reflects the concerns of a storyteller. By selecting the most “dramatically appropriate” act...

This paper presents a vision based virtual mouse interface using a single camera. A virtual panel which is a rectangular board with its borders shaded by red color and its four corners shaded by blue color are extracted using HSV color quantization. In consecutive frames of a video, four corners are tracked using color based histogram tracker. The four corners of rectangular panel are mapped to...

although there are many potential benefits associated with the use of virtual product development teams, exploiting these benefits requires an appropriate management. managing virtual product development team is a critical issue as many of these teams fail to accomplish their goals. review of previous literature shows that body of knowledge in managing virtual product development teams is fragm...

In this paper, the authors examine how instructors used an online assessment environment designed to evaluate the performance of undergraduate students enrolled in American Sign Language (ASL) courses. 640 undergraduate ASL students at a large Midwestern university participated in this study. The findings suggest that instructors varied greatly in the manner in which they used the e-assessment ...

Encouraging individual goal pursuit through social influence is a growing trend. While friendships can be both an asset but also a burden, the impact friends have on goal attainment is not well established in the literature. We explore the influence that friend quantity and quality have on individual task-oriented goal-directed behavior using a unique set of online gaming data with a sample of ...

The use of “highly elaborative” reminiscing by mothers, involving open-ended questions and more detail about past events has been shown to produce children with greater accuracy and detail in their autobiographical memory recall of past events. This paradigm has not been extended to semantic learning, or to an adult population before. Thus, the present study used a virtual reminiscing agent to ...

In this paper, analysis of linear and nonlinear buckling of relatively thick orthotropic graphene sheets is carried out under mechanical load based on elasticity theories. With the help of  nonlocal elasticity theory, the principle of virtual work, first order shear theory and Von-Karman nonlinear strain, the dominant relationship in terms of obtained displacements has been obtained, and the me...

Stretching process of sheet metals in both cases of axisymmetric and non-axisymmetric is analyzed. A rigid-plastic, normal anisotrop material is assumed and large strain formulation is applied. Triangular elements are used and stiffness equations of elements are obtained from virtual work principle. These nonlinear equations are linearized by Newton-Raphsons method and are solved by Gaussian el...

With the rapid pace of technological development, individuals are frequently challenged to make sense of equivocal innovative technology while being given limited information. Virtual worlds are a prime example of such an equivocal innovative technology, and this affords researchers an opportunity to study sensemaking and the construction of perspectives about the organizational value of virtua...