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Head mounted display technology allows the addition (augment) of computer generated images, overlaid on the natural visual scene. The principal difficulty is registering the artificial image elements with the ordinary scene. The specific nature of the marine environment reduces the difficulty of the registration problem. Marine applications include sonar, bathyrythmic, radar and ECDIS (navigational chart) information which can be imposed on the mariner's view. Current project problems include the application of image analysis and feature extraction techniques to the registration issue, and the design and development of practical 3D rendering techniques for the composition of different surface-feature information.
This work is an attempt to replicate successful techniques in applying multimedia technology in the k-12 classroom. With the large variation in classroom resources, prescriptive methods for the use of multimedia in instructional delivery are difficult to produce. Instead, our project (visit http://www.cs.mun.ca/k12media) encourages teachers to draw inspiration from an overview of successful strategies, each accompanied with a description of their setting. In our current research, we are investigating strategies for teachers who have little or no experience with computing technology. We provide guidance, specific techniques and examples of successful approaches, so the teacher can incorporate multimedia work in their classroom practice without personal skills or knowledge regarding the specifics of multimedia production.
Conventional approaches to agent based interfaces assume user problems should be resolved and an optimal solution be presented by the agent. However, there are circumstances in which the user actually prefers to be presented with alternative solutions, perhaps in an argumentative form. This research attempts to identify situations in which multiple advocates (in the form of interface personalities), each with alternative solutions, would be preferable to a single solution presented by a single agent.
Conventional complexity analysis offers little help in studying problems with a finite domain. New notions of tractability are needed. We have attacked this area by developing genetic algorithms to solve scheduling problems which are NP-hard in the general case, but have a finite domain in practice. It is our hope that by studying the character of the solution space for the optimization problem, we will be able to derive a useful notion of problem difficulty. This work is collaborative with Dr. Mata-Montero.
By providing a hypertext system with powerful linking mechanisms, but weak semantics for the link actions, end users are able to create application-like hypermedia documents, including mail systems, annotation systems, collaboration protocols, and other applications that are conventionally believed to require specialized software. Where these applications are limited in terms of specialized features, they are useful for studying the interaction within the community of users. This is a new method for studying the evolving relationship between the application domain and the users.