Edited by Stefan Arisona, Gideon Aschwanden, Jan Halatsch, and Peter Wonka, 2012

About this Book

This book is thematically positioned at the intersections of Urban Design, Architecture, Civil Engineering and Computer Science, and it has the goal to provide specialists coming from respective fields a multi-angle overview of state-of-the-art work currently being carried out. It addresses both newcomers who wish to obtain more knowledge about this growing area of interest, as well as established researchers and practitioners who want to keep up to date. In terms of organization, the volume starts out with chapters looking at the domain at a wide-angle and then moves focus towards technical viewpoints and approaches. (Excerpt from preface by Stefan Arisona).

Contents

Part I: Introduction

1. A Planning Environment for the Design of Future Cities - Gerhard Schmitt

2. Calculating Cities - Bharat Dave

3. The City as a Socio-technical System: A Spatial Reformulation in the Light of the Levels Problem and the Parallel Problem - Bill Hillier

4. Technology-Augmented Changes in the Design and Delivery of the Built Environment - Martin Riese

Part II: Parametric Models and Information Modeling

5. City Induction: A Model for Formulating, Generating, and Evaluating Urban Designs - José P. Duarte, José N. Beirão, Nuno Montenegro, and Jorge Gil

6. Sortal Grammars for Urban Design: A Sortal Approach to Urban Data Modeling and Generation - Rudi Stouffs, José N. Beirão, and José P. Duarte

7. Sort Machines - Thomas Grasl and Athanassios Economou

8. Modeling Water Use for Sustainable Urban Design - Ramesh Krishnamurti, Tajin Biswas, and Tsung-Hsien Wang

Part III: Behavior Modeling and Simulation

9. Simulation Heuristics for Urban Design - Christian Derix, Åsmund Gamlesæter, Pablo Miranda, Lucy Helme, and Karl Kropf

10. Running Urban Microsimulations Consistently with Real-World Data - Gunnar Flötteröod and Michel Bierlaire

11. Urban Energy Flow Modelling: A Data-Aware Approach - Diane Perez and Darren Robinson

12. Interactive Large-Scale Crowd Simulation - Dinesh Manocha and Ming C. Lin

13. An Information Theoretical Approach to Crowd Simulation - Cagatay Turkay, Emre Koc, and Selim Balcisoy

14. Integrating Urban Simulation and Visualization - Daniel G. Aliaga

Part IV: Visualization, Collaboration and Interaction

15. Visualization and Decision Support Tools in Urban Planning - Antje Kunze, Remo Burkhard, Serge Gebhardt, and Bige Tuncer

16. Spatiotemporal Visualisation: A Survey and Outlook - Chen Zhong, Tao Wang, Wei Zeng, and Stefan Arisona

17. Multi-touch Wall Displays for Informational and Interactive Collaborative Space - Ian Vince McLoughlin, Li Ming Ang, and Wooi Boon Goh

18. Testing Guide Signs’ Visibility for Pedestrians in Motion by an Immersive Visual Simulation System - Ryuzo Ohno and Yohei Wada

Publication Information

Publisher: Springer, Berlin Heidelberg
Series: Communications in Computer and Information Science, Vol. 242
Editors: Arisona, S.; Aschwanden, G.; Halatsch, J.; Wonka, P.
Year: 2012
ISBN: 978-3-642-29757-1
Link: https://www.springeronline.com/978-3-642-29757-1

Agent based simulation tools such as MATSim and MITSIM allow us to achieve efficient and accurate predictions of crowd behavior, thereby increasing our understanding of urban systems and assist in urban planning. However, output produced by such simulation platforms are difficult to communicate to stakeholders such as government agencies and the general public due to their technical nature.

In Project Metrobuzz we present a novel and visually striking method of displaying and interacting with large amounts of simulation data in a way that is both scientifically interesting as well as understandable for a broader audience. In order to achieve this, we generalised trip origin-destination information in terms of series of line segments in 3D space that allow spatiotemporal queries to quickly retrieve relevant data. In addition, we implemented interactive tools running on mobile devices (e.g. tablets) to define such queries in an intuitive manner.

W. Zeng, C. Zhong, A. Anwar, S. Arisona, and I. V. McLoughlin. 2012. MetroBuzz: Interactive 3D Visualization of Spatiotemporal Data. International Conference on Computer and Information Sciences (ICCIS), Kuala Lumpur, Turkey, June 12 – 14.

Project: Ongoing research, software prototype.
Institution: ETH Zurich’s Future Cities Laboratory
Location: Singapore
Period: Since 2011
Concept and programming: Stefan Arisona (ETH Zurich)
Programming: Zeng Wei (NTU), Afian Anwar (MIT), Christian Schneider (ETH Zurich)
Acknowledgments: Kay Axhausen and Alex Erath of the Future Cities Laboratory’s Mobility and Transportation group for providing the base data

Edited by Randy Adams, Steve Gibson, Stefan Arisona, 2008

This volume collects selected papers from the past two instances of Digital Art Weeks (Zurich, Switzerland) and Interactive Futures (Victoria, BC, Canada), two parallel festivals of digital media art. The work represented in Transdisciplinary Digital Art is a confirmation of the vitality and breadth of the digital arts. Collecting essays that broadly encompass the digital arts, Transdisciplinary Digital Art gives a clear overview of the on-going strength of scientific, philosophical, aesthetic and artistic research that makes digital art perhaps the defining medium of the 21st Century.

Contents

1. Introduction: Why Tansdisciplinary Digital Art? - Steve Gibson

I Philosophies of the Digital

2. The Ethics of Aesthetics - Don Ritter

3. Ethical and Activist Considerations of the Technological Artwork - David Cecchetto

4. DIY: The Militant Embrace of Technology - Marcin Ramocki

5. Tuning in Rorschach Maps - Will Pappenheimer

6. Body Degree Zero: Anatomy of an Interactive Performance - Alan Dunning, Paul Woodrow

7. Artificial, Natural, Historical - Acoustic Ambiguities in Documentary Film - Julian Rohrhuber

8. The Colour of Time (God is a lobster and other forbidden bodies) - Johnny Golding

9. Behind the Screen: Installations from the Interactive Future - Ted Hiebert

II Digital Literacies

10. Transliteracy and New Media - Sue Thomas

11. Digital Archiving and “The New Screen” - John F. Barber

12. Digital Fiction: From the Page to the Screen - Kate Pullinger

13. The Present [Future] of Electronic Literature - Dene Grigar

14. Transient Passages: The Work of Peter Horvath - Celina Jeffery

III Multimedia Composition and Performance

15. Visceral Mobile Music Systems - Atau Tanaka

16. Designing a System for Supporting the Process of Making a Video Sequence - Shigeki Amitani, Ernest Edmonds

17. Video Game Audio Prototyping with Half-Life 2 - Leonard J. Paul

18. Computer-assisted Content Editing Techniques for Live Multimedia Performance - Stefan Arisona, Pascal Müller, Simon Schubiger-Banz, Matthias Specht

19. Computational Audiovisual Composition Using Lua - Wesley Smith, Graham Wakefield

20. Interrelation: Sound-Transformation and Re-Mixing in Real-Time - Hannes Raffaseder, Martin Parker

21. Functors for Music: The Rubato Composer System - Guerino Mazzola, Gerard Milmeister, Karim Morsy, Florian Thalmann

22. Inventing Malleable Scores: From Paper to Screen Based Scores - Arthur Clay

23. Glimmer: Creating New Connections - Jason Freeman

24. Variations on Variations - Daniel Peter Biro

IV Interfaces and Expression

25. Gestures, Interfaces and Other Secrets of the Stage - Eva Sjuve

26. Beyond the Threshold: The Dynamic Interface as Permeable Technology - Carolyn Guertin

27. CoPuppet: Collaborative Interaction in Virtual Puppetry - Paolo Bottoni, Stefano Faralli, Anna Labella, Alessio Malizia, Mario Pierro, Semi Ryu

28. Experiments in Digital Puppetry: Video Hybrids in Apples Quartz Composer - Ian Grant

29. Formalized and Non-Formalized Expression in Musical Interfaces - Cornelius Poepel

V Digital Space: Design, Movement, and Robotics

30. Interactive Spaces - Jeffrey Huang, Muriel Waldvogel

31. From Electric Devices to Electronic Behaviour - Stijn Ossevoort

32. Scentsory Design: Scent Whisper and Fashion Fluidics - Jennifer Tillotson

33. Advances in Expressive Animation in the Interactive Performance of a Butoh Dance - Jürg Gutknecht, Irena Kulka, Paul Lucowicz, Tom Stricker

34. Anthropocentrism and the Staging of Robots - Louis-Philippe Demers, Jana Horakova

VI Digital Performance in Urban Spaces

35. Imaging Place: Globalization and Immersive Media - John Craig Freeman

36. About… Software, Surveillance, Scariness, Subjectivity (and SVEN) - Amy Alexander

37. The NOVA Display System - Simon Schubiger-Banz, Martina Eberle

38. Four Wheel Drift - Petra Watson, Julie Andreyev

Publication Information

Collection: Digital Art Weeks and Interactive Futures 2006/2007, Zürich, Switzerland and Victoria, BC, Canada, Selected Papers
Publisher: Springer, Berlin Heidelberg
Series: Communications in Computer and Information Science , Vol. 7
Editors: Adams, Randy; Gibson, Steve; Arisona, Stefan (Eds.)
Year: 2008
ISBN: 978-3-540-79485-1
Link: https://www.springerlink.com/content/978-3-540-79485-1

The interactive installation Digital Marionette impressively shows the audience the look and feel of a puppet in the multimedia era: The nicely dressed wooden marionette is replaced by a Lara Croft - like character; the traditional strings attached to puppet control handles emerge into a network of computer cables. The installation is currently exhibited at the Ars Electronica Center in Linz.

The installation consists of a projection of a digital face, which can be controlled by the visitors. The puppet can be made talking via speech input, and the classical puppet controls serve as controllers for head direction and face emotions, such as joy, anger, or sadness. The whole artistic concept was designed and realised in an interdisciplinary manner, incorporating art historical facts about marionettes, the architectural space, interaction design, and state of the art research results from computer graphics and speech recognition.

Concept

The translation from old to new, from analogue to digital, takes place via the most popular computer input device: the mouse. The puppet control handles are attached to sliding strips of mousepads and eight computer mice track movements of the individual strings. This approach is at the same time efficient, low-cost and easily understandable by the non-expert visitor. Speech input is realised via speech recognition, where the recognised phonemes are mapped to a set of facial expressions and visemes.

Exhibition at Museum Bellerive, Zurich, Switzerland, 2004

The first exhibition of the Marionette was realised in 2004 by the Corebounce Art Collective in cooperation with Christian Iten (interface realisation), Swisscom Innovations (Swiss-German voice recognition), and ETH Zürich (real-time face animation), and Eva Afuhs and Sergio Cavero (Curators, Museum Bellerive, Zürich).

Exhibition at Ars Electronica Centre, Linz, Austria, 2006 - 2008

An augmented permanent version of the installation was presented in the entrace hall of the world-famous Ars Electronica Center in Linz. It was realised by the Corebounce Art Collective with technical support from Gerhard Grafinger of the Ars Electronica Center. Furthermore we thank Ellen Fethke, Gerold Hofstadler and Nicoletta Blacher of Ars Electronica; and Jürg Gutknecht and Luc Van Gool of ETH Zürich.

Bellerive Installation Video

https://youtu.be/RDblsvIg5xk

3D Concept Video

https://youtu.be/6rAy1iRgQAI

Additional Information

Exhibition: Museum Bellerive
Location: Zurich, Switzerland
Period: Jun 11 - Sep 12 2004

Exhibition: Ars Electronic Centre
Location: Linz, Austria
Period: Sep 2006 - Sep 2008

Concept and realisation: Corebounce Art Collective (Pascal Mueller, Stefan Arisona, Simon Schubiger, Matthias Specht)

PhD Thesis - Stefan Arisona, 2004

The process of music performance has been the same for many centuries: a work was perceived by the listening audience at the same time it was performed by one or a group of performers. The performance was not only characterised by its audible result, but also by the environment and the physical presence of the performing artists and the audience. Further, a performance was always unique in the sense that it could not be repeated in exactly the same way. The evolution of music recording technology imposed a major change to this situation and to music listening practise in general: a recorded performance suddenly became available to a dramatically increased number of listeners, and one could listen to the same performance as many times as desired. However, in a recorded music performance, the environmental characteristics and the presence of the performing artists and the audience are lost. This particularly includes the loss of musical gestures, which are an integral part of a music performance. The availability of electronic music instruments even enforces this loss of musical gestures because the previously strict connection between performer, instrument, and listener is blurred.

This thesis deals with the problem of the construction of musical gestures from a given music performance. A mathematical model where musical gestures are represented as high-dimensional parametric gesture curves is introduced. By providing a number of mathematical operations, the model provides mechanisms for the manipulation of those curves, and for the construction of complex gesture curves out of simple ones. The model is embedded into the existing performance model of mathematical music theory where a musical performance is defined as a transformation from a symbolic score space to a physical performance space.

While gestures in the symbolic domain represent abstract movements, gesture curves in the physical domain reflect “real” movements of a virtual performer, which can be rendered to a computer screen. For the correctness of the movements one has to take into account a number of constraints imposed by the performer’s body, the instrument’s geometry, and the laws of physics. In order to satisfy these constraints a shaping mechanism based on Sturm’s theorem for cubic splines is presented.

A realised software module called the PerformanceRubette provides a framework for the construction and manipulation of gesture curves for piano performance. It takes a music performance and given constraints based on a virtual hand model as input. The resulting output consists of sampled physical gesture curves describing the movements of the virtual performer’s finger tips. The software module has been used to create animated sequences of a virtual hand performing on a keyboard, for the animation of abstract objects in audio-visual performance applications, and for gesture-based sound synthesis.

Keywords: Gestural Performance, Performance Interfaces, Performance Theory, Computer Animation.

PhD Thesis: Multimedia Laboratory, University of Zurich, 2001 - 2004
PhD Candidate: Stefan Arisona
PhD Advisors: Prof. Dr. Peter Stucki and Prof. Dr. Guerino Mazzola