Luís Torrão | University of Hull (original) (raw)

Papers by Luís Torrão

Stoicism is a philosophy that considers the object of life to be ataraxia (αταραξία), a state of ... more Stoicism is a philosophy that considers the object of life to be ataraxia (αταραξία), a state of psychological stability which is undisturbed by exposure to phenomena and circumstances that lie outside one's control. Such circumstances may include ill health, poverty, natural disasters, corrupt social orders, unpopularity, and unrequited love, and may cause loss of composure and mental balance through feelings of pain, humiliation, insufficiency, envy or greed. Stoicism is a coherent system of powerful ideas about how to pursue a life of equanimity in the face of adversity which has inspired philosophy and psychology to this day. The founders of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy have cited Stoicism as their main inspiration. Stoicism flourished in ancient Athens and Rome at a time when ancient democracy was dying and people experienced loss of control over their lives under authoritarian and imperial regimes. In an age of serious global economic, environmental and psychological unce...

This project was motivated as an exploration of the capabilities provided by new digital media fo... more This project was motivated as an exploration of the capabilities provided by new digital media for creativity, art creation and art therapy. In the ancient Greek world, technē, the word for art, used to refer to both art and technology. The expression, imagination, creation, aesthetics, beauty, thought and emotions which are integral to " technē " " were not confined to " fine arts ". However, this connection between technology and art has been weakened through gradual separation of fine art from artisanship through time. This connection, we believe, is particularly relevant today that digital technology becomes pervasive. We return to this ancient tradition of technē with Timaeus, a futuristic art studio that enables creation of personalized, customisable and generative digital sculptures. Our goal with Timaeus is to provide a new tool for artistic expression. Beyond a general contribution to art, one particular application we envision is enabling the creat...

Energy for Life is a web-based game intended to be played in schools all over Europe. Its goals a... more Energy for Life is a web-based game intended to be played in schools all over Europe. Its goals are to achieve the youth's attention and interest in environmental problems promoting ecological consciousness and stimulating pro-active behaviours within quotidian life.

Several studies have shown very positive results regarding the use of serious games as rehabilita... more Several studies have shown very positive results regarding the use of serious games as rehabilitation tools for individuals with physical disabilities, mainly because the game environment gives them the necessary motivation to continue their treatment with enthusiasm. Thus, the objective of this paper is to describe the first steps on the development of a 3D game for physical therapy of patients with motor disabilities as a result of neurological disorders.

2013 IEEE 2nd International Conference on Serious Games and Applications for Health (SeGAH), 2013

Figure 1: Palco makes use of Microsoft Kinect or Asus/Primesense WAVI Xtion sensor for simultaneo... more Figure 1: Palco makes use of Microsoft Kinect or Asus/Primesense WAVI Xtion sensor for simultaneous capture of both body and facial expression, introduces a cartoonification transform applied to the actor captured movements to reproduce exaggerated animations in cartoon characters and combines these factors into a real-time production software.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014

XXII Generative Art Conference, 2019

For over 25 years, Athenian painter Stefanos Zannis has been painting Homer’s Odyssey but with a ... more For over 25 years, Athenian painter Stefanos Zannis has been painting Homer’s Odyssey but with a twist: delving into verses of the original poem who many would find obscure. This ancient poem has always been a quintessential symbol of the journey of life that we all go through, complete with the monsters we face and the longing for a spiritual home, or end-goal, symbolised by Odysseus island home, Ithaka. We take inspiration from Stefanos’s work on this epic poem to create an ‘alternative virtual Odyssey’ in multimedia form, an artistic reinterpretation of the poem that throws light on unheroic but important and emotionally loaded aspects of this journey. This virtual Odyssey takes place in a navigable virtual gallery of Stefanos’s works which are projected on multimedia sculptures created with the Timaeus art studio [1]. Sculptures are customized with media including images, videos, music, and narration, can be hollow and translucent, illuminated, and navigated either externally or internally. These become curved spaces or ‘worlds’ where projected episodes of the Odyssey can be experienced in three dimensions. Timaeus is thus a medium for creating spaces appropriate for experiencing the elements of this alternative Odyssey. Apart from Stefanos’s paintings, we integrate relevant poetry by Greek poets Konstantinos Cavafy and Alexandros Vanargiotis. In section 2, we give some background on the original epic. In section 3 we discuss the inspiration for this work in the art of Zannis and the poetry of Cavafy and Vanargiotis. In section 4, we present the architecture and progress of this alternative virtual Odyssey and finally, in section 5 we draw conclusions and outline future work.

XXI Generative Art Conference, 2018

20th Generative Art Conference, 2017

TIMAEUS is a digital art studio environment that enables creation of personalised 3-dimensional s... more TIMAEUS is a digital art studio environment that enables creation of personalised 3-dimensional sculptures built with expanding spherical volumes or interconnected tetrahedra and possibly other atomic blocks in the future. These sculptures can be customised with media, e.g, pictures, videos and music which are overlaid or seeded in the sculpture. Media can represent memories or more generally facts, including live internet feeds, that can be used to create artistic narratives in space. Such facts are embedded in the sculpture and can be experienced in different ways with the capability of zooming in and out, rotating, viewing from different angles, and applying sounds and soundtracks. Sculptures are hollow and translucent. They can be illuminated, and the space that they enclose can be viewed internally. TIMAEUS incorporates genera-tive components. Features of images, videos or music can be algorithmically extracted and used to modify the shape or movement of a perpetually mutating or dancing sculpture where these media have been applied. We are currently designing a study in art therapy of dementia patients where TIMAEUS will be applied. One hypothesis is that artistic memory sculptures can both aid reminiscence and create a much needed sense of well-being. Reviewing one's life in an artistic manner may help to place fragments in perspective as well as work out gaps and conflicts. This could nurture feelings of relaxation through artistic creation and of stronger more coherent self. TIMAEUS was inspired by the homonymous Platonic dialogue and its geometric, atomic cosmogony and cosmology. The above image is of a relief created in TIMAEUS in a style which is reminiscent of sumptuous Byzantine silk fabrics and which, we hope, connects this paper to the Byzantine art for which Ravenna is renowned.

Videojogos 2014 - Conferência de Ciências e Artes dos Videojogos, 2014

RESUMO Vários estudos têm mostrado resultados muito positivos no que se refere à utilização de jo... more RESUMO Vários estudos têm mostrado resultados muito positivos no que se refere à utilização de jogos sérios como ferramentas de reabilitação de pessoas com deficiências físicas, principalmente porque o ambiente que eles criam estimula a motivação necessária para que continuem o seu tratamento com entusiasmo. Assim, o objetivo deste artigo é descrever os primeiros passos no desenvolvimento de um jogo em ambiente 3D, para a fisioterapia de pacientes com deficiências motoras, em consequência de distúrbios neurológicos. Palavras-chave Jogos sérios; ferramentas de reabilitação; deficiência motora; motivação; fisioterapia; doenças neurológicas. INTRODUÇÃO Embora não deixando de lado o entretenimento, os jogos sérios são projetados para resolver problemas em diversas áreas. Considerando-se a área de saúde, é possível destacar a importante contribuição destes jogos em fisioterapia e reabilitação de pacientes com deficiências motoras, que podem ter várias causas, nomeadamente doenças neurológicas. Esses pacientes necessitam de programas de fisioterapia adequados aos seus problemas, de forma a melhorarem, tanto quanto possível, a sua qualidade de vida. No entanto, os exercícios que a fisioterapia tradicional oferece são muitas vezes enfadonhos e repetitivos, o que desencoraja os pacientes, levando-os a abandonar os seus programas de reabilitação antes de terem terminado, especialmente se não são sentidas melhorias a curto prazo [5, 23]. Portanto, estes programas devem ser desenvolvidos em ambientes que incentivam os pacientes a realizá-los com entusiasmo e relaxamento, parecendo que a solução para tal se encontra nos jogos sérios. [19, 22].

Lecture Notes in Computer Science - SERIOUS GAMES DEVELOPMENT AND APPLICATIONS, SGDA 2014, 2014

PROCEEDINGS OF THE 8TH EUROPEAN CONFERENCE ON GAMES BASED LEARNING (ECGBL 2014), 2014

Recently, Alice Medalia et Al. published a new therapeutic approach to mental impairments problem... more Recently, Alice Medalia et Al. published a new therapeutic approach to mental impairments problems by using video-games in treatment sessions (Medalia et Al. 2009), the Neuropsychological Educational Approach to Cognitive Remediation (NEAR). According to the World Health Organization one in every four people in the world is affected by mental or neurological disorder some time in their life (WHO 2013), in what appears to be an humanitarian emergency, considering the disproportion between this figure and the actual number of patients under treatment worldwide (WHO 2013). The NEAR method is used worldwide in learning centers where patients can play commercially available games specifically selected according to their mental training needs and assisted by clinicians. The NEAR method is the basis for the research work presented, which is focused on the creation of a novel genre of games, the 'NEAR game', materialized in the form of Albalyna (Torrao 2012), an augmented reality game that serves the purpose of training the patient's mental abilities. Game demands can be calibrated according to the condition or training needs, allowing the clinician to monitor the skill evolution the player makes inside the game. To make this possible, Albalyna is a goal driven game where levels of Attention, Memory, Problem Solving, Abstract Reasoning, Visual-Spatial Analysis and Processing Speed initially defined by or for the player conduct the overall playability. The main contribution of this research is the design of a game that fits the NEAR practice and opens the possibility of distributing professionally assisted therapeutic gameplay to mentally impaired patients that are at home. In this paper the set of technologies used in order to achieve the solution is also described. The game was constructed by means of the creation of a 3D engine displaying a world with polar and Cartesian coordinates where the game creatures can move and act. An Artificial Intelligence engine underlies the game logic, applying a goal driven technique that conducts the gameplay. The Kinect TM depth sensor, RGB camera and microphone array are used so that the game can involve the player, in an augmented reality environment. The player can see herself using a helmet that illuminates the world and the creatures where and with the player can interact by means of gestures and voice commands. The first tests and evaluation results are widely positive, and more tests are needed to determine Albalyna's efficacy.

Videojogos 2010, 2010

“Patrulha SEPNA!” is an advergame created in colaboration between DIGARC and the Portuguese Natio... more “Patrulha SEPNA!” is an advergame created in colaboration between DIGARC and the Portuguese National Republican Guard. Meant for youngsters aged between 6 and 10, the game’s specification was centered in the goal of trasmitting an advertising and institutional message about SEPNA (Nature and Environment Protection Service). Its development looked forward to building an attractive playful tool with simple game logic.

Serious Games and Applications for Health (SeGAH), 2013 IEEE 2nd International Conference, 2013

This paper presents Palco, a prototype system specifically designed for the production of 3D cart... more This paper presents Palco, a prototype system specifically designed for the production of 3D cartoon animations. The system addresses the specific problems of producing cartoon animations, where the main objective is not to reproduce realistic movements, but rather animate cartoon characters with predefined and characteristic body movements and facial expressions. The techniques employed in Palco are simple and easy to use, not requiring any invasive or complicated motion capture system, as both body motion and facial expression of actors are captured simultaneously, using an infrared motion detection sensor, a regular camera and a pair of electronically instrumented gloves. The animation process is completely actor-driven, with the actor controlling the character movements, gestures, facial expression and voice, all in realtime. The actor controlled cartoonification of the captured facial and body motion is a key functionality of Palco, and one that makes it specifically suited for the production of cartoon animations.

Books by Luís Torrão

Generative Art – Futuring Past, selected works from the Letterature International Festival in Rome, 2019

Socrates thought that the most important question one can ask is 'what is'. The philosophers spen... more Socrates thought that the most important question one can ask is 'what is'. The philosophers spent a lot of time in the Athenian marketplace (agora) asking the great and the good of Athens questions such as: 'what is courage', what is virtue 'and' 'what is truth'. The 'what is' question was in the centre of his dialectical method of investigating and clarifying concepts that are widely evoked to steer emotion and action in public life; his hypothesis was that concepts behind words may seem self-explanatory, but the use of words often conceals vague, poor or conflicting moral meanings and interpretations; he was right. Many of the questions posed by Socrates are still fiercely debated and one of them is 'what is education'. Contemporary societies have normalised education as an organised process of teaching and learning which is supported by institutions, schools, technical colleges and universities. This education is typically instrumented towards acquisition of skills that make people useful in the economy and its regulation. Training is focused on linguistic and mathematical skills, sciences and history, the running of business and to a smaller extent culture. In this educational system, little attention is paid on helping people to grow emotionally so that they can cope with the complexities and challenges of life. Much of education is indeed geared towards facilitating business and is not at all focused on the needs of individuals. However, this conception of education is becoming increasingly inadequate as it lacks the capacity to address the increasing number of psychological challenges that people face in a fiercely competitive world. Let us briefly examine these challenges. 1.1 A clash between economy and psychology A key problem today is that the market economy is not driven by the needs, desires, and aspirations of the people who form the labour force. The system is simply driven by economic competition and not designed to deliver many of the things that humanity longs for: job security, better community and family life, more free time, less stressful and more meaningful work. On the contrary, the process of competition, and the acceleration in technology it causes, destroy much of the qualities that we appreciate in life. Take email as an example. This innovation has increased productivity. A company which rejects email and communicates with handwritten notes and letters is likely to go bust. But what is the effect of email on the lives and mental health of individuals who constantly feel the pressure to check and respond to their email outside office hours? In this economy, our longing for stability, calm and peace clashes with a system that by necessity creates perpetual change. Our economy is indeed an anarchic system where multiple agents compete for survival. Agents who invent new products that meet new demands, or fulfil existing demands better or at lower price, survive this competition. In this system, labour is just another factor of production: a commodity bought at a price and incorporated into the price of the product sold. There is always an incentive to reduce the contribution of labour costs within the price of the product. This can be done by keeping wages low or increasing the productivity of labour. The latter is done by better management systems and by introducing automation so that each worker can produce more economic value per unit of time and therefore their wage contributes less to the price of each unit of production. All this creates perpetual innovation and change in society; economic entities go bust and are replaced by other entities; society changes and forces change in the life of individuals at an increasing, often impossible, pace. Let us not forget that humanity has evolved in a very slow pace and therefore such accelerated pace of change may be challenging the very core of our biological nature. There are many problems arising out of these mechanics of a fiercely competitive economy. If competition forces the productivity of each individual to increase annually through use of machines and technology, then fewer and fewer individuals are required to produce an output. Hence ,economic output must perpetually grow to maintain employment, and this threatens to deplete resources and destroy the environment. A second problem is that labour is the ultimate source of demand in this system. However, as people are replaced by technology, there are no guarantees that lost demand will be replaced. The economy is indeed today largely sustained not by demand created by real wages but by an increasing amount of unsustainable debt incurred by individuals and governments. This is in fact accumulated capital which cannot be invested productively in the absence of effective demand and which, through the banking system, is recycled into the economy as unsustainable loans. This debt and the instruments with which it was managed caused the 2008 crisis and will cause similar crises in the future. Finally, there are also severe economic consequences for nations that don't compete well in this system, but also for individuals and groups within wealthy societies that bear failures and systemic pressures personally. Now, there are possibly three individual and collective responses to the above situation: first, an individual may blame themselves for the failures or stresses that they experience, e.g. unemployment or a failure to adapt to change, which is opening the road to mental illness. Second, groups especially disadvantaged ones may be encouraged by demagogues to start blaming smaller groups, the Jews, black people, immigrants, Islam, the 'crusaders', which of course opens the road to fascism. Finally, a more appropriate and reasoned response would be to look for systemic problems and failures that need to be fixed. The first two responses underpin many of the societal and political problems that we observe today: the rise of the far right, the prevalence of conspiracy theories, e.g. antisemitic ones, the increase of mental illness among the young, and perhaps the prevalence of divorce and alcoholism in older generations. There are no easy solutions to these problems, but at least a diagnosis of the real systemic causes will help to identify remedies. Changes in the economic system and effective social policies will certainly be required to address these serious problems. However, how the citizens of this world, individually and collectively, cope with problems does not only depend on external circumstances and policies. It also depends on the way they personally feel and think about external events; this brings us to Stoicism and the view presented in this paper that an expanded view of education that supports emotional development is needed, and can play a part in addressing the psychological challenges arising in the modern world. Education can be delivered in many ways formally and informally, using conventional means and digital technology through instruction and games. Too much of contemporary education but also computing, our own discipline, is focused on enhancing productivity and innovation and overlooks the real psychological needs of people. There is potential to pursue work that fills this gap, so in this paper we describe a system that could help to educate new generations on the ancient but still useful for emotional growth and resilience philosophy of Stoicism. 1.2 Stoicism and the goals of the Infinite Virtual Stoa Stoicism is a philosophy that considers the object of life to be ataraxia (αταραξία), a state of psychological stability which is undisturbed by exposure to phenomena and circumstances that lie outside one's control .Such circumstances may include ill health, poverty, natural disasters, corrupt social orders and unrequited love, and may cause loss of composure and mental balance through feelings of pain, humiliation, insufficiency, envy or greed. Stoicism is a coherent system of powerful ideas about how to pursue a life of equanimity in the face of adversity which has nurtured philosophy and psychology to this day. The founders of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy have cited Stoicism as their main inspiration [1]. Stoicism flourished in ancient Athens and Rome at a time when ancient democracy was dying and people experienced loss of control over their lives under authoritarian and imperial regimes. In an age of serious global economic, environmental and psychological uncertainty and crisis, Stoicism has still pressing and valuable lessons to teach us about calm, composure, resilience and emotional stability, and we are working towards facilitating these goals using digital technologies. Stoicism owes its name to Stoa Poikile ('painted porch' in Greek), a colonnaded building in the Athenian agora where Zeno of Citium founded his school in the 4th century BCE. In this project we develop an 'Infinite Virtual Stoa' to host an expandable online repository of resources about Stoicism. Our repository exists in the space defined by the Stoa, which is a colonnaded building that takes the form of the ancient, and sacred to many cultures, geometrical motif known as 'the flower of life'.

Generative Art Science and Technology hard Journal, 2018

This project was motivated as an exploration of the capabilities provided by new digital media fo... more This project was motivated as an exploration of the capabilities provided by new digital media for creativity, art creation and art therapy. In the ancient Greek world, téchnē, the word for art, used to refer to both art and technology. The expression, imagination, creation, aesthetics, beauty, thought and emotions which are integral to “téchnē” “were not confined to “fine arts”. However, this connection between technology and art has been weakened through gradual separation of fine art from artisanship through time. This connection, we believe, is particularly relevant today that digital technology becomes pervasive. We return to this ancient tradition of téchnē with Timaeus, a futuristic art studio that enables creation of personalized, customisable and generative digital sculptures. Our goal with Timaeus is to provide a new tool for artistic expression. Beyond a general contribution to art, one particular application we envision is enabling the creation of “memory sculptures” for reminiscence in the context of art therapy of dementia patients.

Game \\ Play \\ Society, 2010

2013 IEEE 2nd International Conference on Serious Games and Applications for Health (SeGAH), 2013

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014

XXII Generative Art Conference, 2019

XXI Generative Art Conference, 2018

20th Generative Art Conference, 2017

Videojogos 2014 - Conferência de Ciências e Artes dos Videojogos, 2014

Lecture Notes in Computer Science - SERIOUS GAMES DEVELOPMENT AND APPLICATIONS, SGDA 2014, 2014

PROCEEDINGS OF THE 8TH EUROPEAN CONFERENCE ON GAMES BASED LEARNING (ECGBL 2014), 2014

Videojogos 2010, 2010

Serious Games and Applications for Health (SeGAH), 2013 IEEE 2nd International Conference, 2013

Generative Art – Futuring Past, selected works from the Letterature International Festival in Rome, 2019

Generative Art Science and Technology hard Journal, 2018

This project was motivated as an exploration of the capabilities provided by new digital media fo... more This project was motivated as an exploration of the capabilities provided by new digital media for creativity, art creation and art therapy. In the ancient Greek world, téchnē, the word for art, used to refer to both art and technology. The expression, imagination, creation, aesthetics, beauty, thought and emotions which are integral to “téchnē” “were not confined to “fine arts”. However, this connection between technology and art has been weakened through gradual separation of fine art from artisanship through time. This connection, we believe, is particularly relevant today that digital technology becomes pervasive. We return to this ancient tradition of téchnē with Timaeus, a futuristic art studio that enables creation of personalized, customisable and generative digital sculptures. Our goal with Timaeus is to provide a new tool for artistic expression. Beyond a general contribution to art, one particular application we envision is enabling the creation of “memory sculptures” for reminiscence in the context of art therapy of dementia patients.

Game \\ Play \\ Society, 2010