Flavia Sparacino - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Flavia Sparacino
Our aim is to give a complete presentation of the application of Lie Group Theory to the structur... more Our aim is to give a complete presentation of the application of Lie Group Theory to the structural design of manipulator robots. We focused our attention on parallel manipulator robots and in particular those capable of spatial translation. This is justified by many industrial applications which do not need the orientation of the end-effector in the space. The advantage of this method is that we can derive systematically all kinematics chains which produce the desired displacement subgroup. Hence, an entire family of robots results from our investigation. The Y-STAR manipulator is now a working device. H-ROBOT is also being constructed. Both manipulators respond to the increasing demand of fast working rhythms in modern production at a low cost and are suited for any kind of pick and place jobs like sorting, arranging on palettes, packaging and assembly.
Wearable computers offer the street performer powerful tools with which to create innovative expe... more Wearable computers offer the street performer powerful tools with which to create innovative experiences for the audience. As wearable technology moves computation from the desktop onto the user's body, it provides an invitation to free performance from the indoor stage, bringing a new adaptive richness to the mobile world of street theater. We find it therefore compelling to explore several application contexts in which wearable technology enhances, extends and creates new examples of street performance. In this paper we offer a taxonomy of different genres of street performance and we describe how the wearable computer transforms, augments and enriches the traditional form in an original and witty manner.
Digital media and networked, two-way communication channels are rapidly transforming our access t... more Digital media and networked, two-way communication channels are rapidly transforming our access to knowledge, our inventions, and our artistic messages. In the past, artistic practice focused on the construction of fixed, static "expressive objects" which stood as intermediaries between the artist and her audience. Today, technology allows us to make computerassisted artworks "with a sense of themselves." These works incorporate behaviors and real-time responses patterned after those of living things: creatures, communities, and ecosystems.
Multimedia Tools and Applications, 2008
The rapid evolution of computers' processing power, progress in projection and display technology... more The rapid evolution of computers' processing power, progress in projection and display technology, and their low cost, accompanied by recent advances in mathematical modeling, make available to space designers today sophisticated technologies which were once accessible only to research institutions or large companies. Thanks to wireless sensing techniques it is possible to endow a space with perceptual intelligence, and make it aware of how people use it, move in it, or react to it. Intelligent Spaces are relevant for several applications or tasks which range from surveillance to entertainment, from medical rehabilitation to artistic performance, from museum exhibit design to commerce. The author's work focuses on Narrative Spaces which are storytellers, able to articulate an informative or entertaining audiovisual narration for people interactively. Narrative Spaces communicate by use of large scale coordinated projections, sounds and displays whose contents are choreographed by the natural body movements or physical gestures of the people in them. This paper describes the guiding principles and modeling approaches that, according to the author, enable a robust modeling of user input and communication strategies for digital content presentation in Intelligent Narrative Spaces. It then provides examples of applications built according to the specified criteria.
IBM Systems Journal, 2000
This paper describes motivations and techniques to extend the expressive grammar of dance and the... more This paper describes motivations and techniques to extend the expressive grammar of dance and theatrical performances. We first give an outline of previous work in performance, which has inspired our research, and explain how our technology can contribute along historical directions of exploration. We then present real-time computer vision based body tracking and gesture recognition techniques which is used in conjunction with a Media Actors software architecture to choreograph digital media together with human performers. We show applications to dance and theater which augment the traditional performance stage with images, video, music, text, able to respond to movement and gesture in believable, esthetical, and expressive manners. Finally, we describe a scenario and work in progress, which allow us to apply our artistic and technological advances to street performance.
Ars Electronica Festival, …, 1997
... Page 5. Architects aspiring to place their constructs within the non space of cyberspace wil... more ... Page 5. Architects aspiring to place their constructs within the non space of cyberspace will have to learn to think in terms of genetic engines of artificial life Marcos Novak ORGANIC ARCHITECTURE ... Page 9. Novak Marcos. Transmitting Architecture. ...
This work describes methods for content choreography for performance and entertainment spaces, us... more This work describes methods for content choreography for performance and entertainment spaces, using remote sensing technology for interaction, so that the user/performer is not encumbered with wires or sensors. Artificial Life programming methods are used to avoid rigid scripting of user and content interaction. This results in the design of active content endowed with intentionality and autonomous behavior (media creatures). By following this approach I created an Improvisational Theatre Space where autonomous media creatures react to the user's movements, speech etc., to create an improvisational dialog between the user/performer and the performance/entertaintment space's content (images, video, sound, speech, text). This space is the last of a series of experiments in the construction of Interactive Virtual Environmnents (IVEs) that include also DanceSpace and NetSpace. Each of these experiments aims at exploring a specific aspect among those that are essential to crea...
This paper presents a brief summary of body tracking tools and interfaces the author developed, a... more This paper presents a brief summary of body tracking tools and interfaces the author developed, and explains how they have been applied to a variety of interactive art and entertainment projects. The purpose of such grouping of techniques and related applications is to provide the reader with information on some of the tools available today for computer vision based body tracking, how they can be selected and applied to achieve the desired artistic goal, and their limitations. What these computer vision interfaces have in common is low cost, and ease of implementatio n, as they require means which are commonly available today to most individuals/institutions, such as computers and small cameras. They have the additional advantage that they do not require special calibration procedures, they do not limit body movements with cables or tethers, nor do they require wearing special suites with markers for tracking.
This thesis presents a mathematical framework for real-time sensor-driven stochastic modeling of ... more This thesis presents a mathematical framework for real-time sensor-driven stochastic modeling of story and user-story interaction, which I call sto(ry)chastics. Almost all sensor-driven interactive entertainment, art, and architecture installations today rely on one-to-one mappings between content and participant's actions to tell a story. These mappings chain small subsets of scripted content, and do not attempt to understand the public's intention or desires during interaction, and therefore are rigid, ad hoc, prone to error, and lack depth in communication of meaning and expressive power. Sto(ry)chastics uses graphical probabilistic modeling of story fragments and participant input, gathered from sensors, to tell a story to the user, as a function of people's estimated intentions and desires during interaction. Using a Bayesian network approach for combined modeling of users, sensors, and story, sto(ry)chastics, as opposed to traditional systems based on one-to-one ma...
Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, June 1997.
A responsive portrait consists of a multiplicity of views whose dynamic presentation results from... more A responsive portrait consists of a multiplicity of views whose dynamic presentation results from the interaction between the viewer and the image. The viewer's proximity to the image, head movements, and facial expressions elicit dynamic responses from the portrait, driven by the portrait’s own set of autonomous behaviors. This type of interaction reproduces an encounter between two people: the viewer and the character portrayed.
The Improvisational Theater Space is an interactive stage where human actors can perform accompan... more The Improvisational Theater Space is an interactive stage where human actors can perform accompanied by virtual actors. Virtual actors are modeled as animated \Media Creatures" that are behavior-based automous software agents. We used Arti cal Life programming methods ...
Abstract Full-body, unencumbered, gestural interfaces offer new possibilities for com-puter paint... more Abstract Full-body, unencumbered, gestural interfaces offer new possibilities for com-puter painting tools. However, traditional painting metaphors and current ges-tural input technology are not well suited to one another; the user cannot be tracked with sufficient accuracy to support ...
This paper presents sto(ry)chastics, a user-centered approach for computational storytelling for ... more This paper presents sto(ry)chastics, a user-centered approach for computational storytelling for real-time sensor-driven multimedia audiovisual stories, such as those that are triggered by the body in motion in a sensor-instrumented interactive narrative space. With sto(ry)chastics the coarse and noisy sensor inputs are coupled to digital m edia outputs via a user model, which is estimated probabilistically by a Bayesian network. To illustrate sto(ry)chastics, this paper describes the museum wearable, a device which delivers an audiovisual narration interactively in time and space to the visitor as a function of the estimated visitor type. The wearable relies on a custom-designed long-range infrared locationidentification sensor to gather information on where and how long the visitor stops in the museum galleries and uses this information as input to, or observations of, a (dynamic) Bayesian network. The network has been tested and validated on observed visitor tracking data by parameter learning using the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm, and by performance analysis of the model with the learned parameters.
Our aim is to give a complete presentation of the application of Lie Group Theory to the structur... more Our aim is to give a complete presentation of the application of Lie Group Theory to the structural design of manipulator robots. We focused our attention on parallel manipulator robots and in particular those capable of spatial translation. This is justified by many industrial applications which do not need the orientation of the end-effector in the space. The advantage of this method is that we can derive systematically all kinematics chains which produce the desired displacement subgroup. Hence, an entire family of robots results from our investigation. The Y-STAR manipulator is now a working device. H-ROBOT is also being constructed. Both manipulators respond to the increasing demand of fast working rhythms in modern production at a low cost and are suited for any kind of pick and place jobs like sorting, arranging on palettes, packaging and assembly.
Wearable computers offer the street performer powerful tools with which to create innovative expe... more Wearable computers offer the street performer powerful tools with which to create innovative experiences for the audience. As wearable technology moves computation from the desktop onto the user's body, it provides an invitation to free performance from the indoor stage, bringing a new adaptive richness to the mobile world of street theater. We find it therefore compelling to explore several application contexts in which wearable technology enhances, extends and creates new examples of street performance. In this paper we offer a taxonomy of different genres of street performance and we describe how the wearable computer transforms, augments and enriches the traditional form in an original and witty manner.
Digital media and networked, two-way communication channels are rapidly transforming our access t... more Digital media and networked, two-way communication channels are rapidly transforming our access to knowledge, our inventions, and our artistic messages. In the past, artistic practice focused on the construction of fixed, static "expressive objects" which stood as intermediaries between the artist and her audience. Today, technology allows us to make computerassisted artworks "with a sense of themselves." These works incorporate behaviors and real-time responses patterned after those of living things: creatures, communities, and ecosystems.
Multimedia Tools and Applications, 2008
The rapid evolution of computers' processing power, progress in projection and display technology... more The rapid evolution of computers' processing power, progress in projection and display technology, and their low cost, accompanied by recent advances in mathematical modeling, make available to space designers today sophisticated technologies which were once accessible only to research institutions or large companies. Thanks to wireless sensing techniques it is possible to endow a space with perceptual intelligence, and make it aware of how people use it, move in it, or react to it. Intelligent Spaces are relevant for several applications or tasks which range from surveillance to entertainment, from medical rehabilitation to artistic performance, from museum exhibit design to commerce. The author's work focuses on Narrative Spaces which are storytellers, able to articulate an informative or entertaining audiovisual narration for people interactively. Narrative Spaces communicate by use of large scale coordinated projections, sounds and displays whose contents are choreographed by the natural body movements or physical gestures of the people in them. This paper describes the guiding principles and modeling approaches that, according to the author, enable a robust modeling of user input and communication strategies for digital content presentation in Intelligent Narrative Spaces. It then provides examples of applications built according to the specified criteria.
IBM Systems Journal, 2000
This paper describes motivations and techniques to extend the expressive grammar of dance and the... more This paper describes motivations and techniques to extend the expressive grammar of dance and theatrical performances. We first give an outline of previous work in performance, which has inspired our research, and explain how our technology can contribute along historical directions of exploration. We then present real-time computer vision based body tracking and gesture recognition techniques which is used in conjunction with a Media Actors software architecture to choreograph digital media together with human performers. We show applications to dance and theater which augment the traditional performance stage with images, video, music, text, able to respond to movement and gesture in believable, esthetical, and expressive manners. Finally, we describe a scenario and work in progress, which allow us to apply our artistic and technological advances to street performance.
Ars Electronica Festival, …, 1997
... Page 5. Architects aspiring to place their constructs within the non space of cyberspace wil... more ... Page 5. Architects aspiring to place their constructs within the non space of cyberspace will have to learn to think in terms of genetic engines of artificial life Marcos Novak ORGANIC ARCHITECTURE ... Page 9. Novak Marcos. Transmitting Architecture. ...
This work describes methods for content choreography for performance and entertainment spaces, us... more This work describes methods for content choreography for performance and entertainment spaces, using remote sensing technology for interaction, so that the user/performer is not encumbered with wires or sensors. Artificial Life programming methods are used to avoid rigid scripting of user and content interaction. This results in the design of active content endowed with intentionality and autonomous behavior (media creatures). By following this approach I created an Improvisational Theatre Space where autonomous media creatures react to the user's movements, speech etc., to create an improvisational dialog between the user/performer and the performance/entertaintment space's content (images, video, sound, speech, text). This space is the last of a series of experiments in the construction of Interactive Virtual Environmnents (IVEs) that include also DanceSpace and NetSpace. Each of these experiments aims at exploring a specific aspect among those that are essential to crea...
This paper presents a brief summary of body tracking tools and interfaces the author developed, a... more This paper presents a brief summary of body tracking tools and interfaces the author developed, and explains how they have been applied to a variety of interactive art and entertainment projects. The purpose of such grouping of techniques and related applications is to provide the reader with information on some of the tools available today for computer vision based body tracking, how they can be selected and applied to achieve the desired artistic goal, and their limitations. What these computer vision interfaces have in common is low cost, and ease of implementatio n, as they require means which are commonly available today to most individuals/institutions, such as computers and small cameras. They have the additional advantage that they do not require special calibration procedures, they do not limit body movements with cables or tethers, nor do they require wearing special suites with markers for tracking.
This thesis presents a mathematical framework for real-time sensor-driven stochastic modeling of ... more This thesis presents a mathematical framework for real-time sensor-driven stochastic modeling of story and user-story interaction, which I call sto(ry)chastics. Almost all sensor-driven interactive entertainment, art, and architecture installations today rely on one-to-one mappings between content and participant's actions to tell a story. These mappings chain small subsets of scripted content, and do not attempt to understand the public's intention or desires during interaction, and therefore are rigid, ad hoc, prone to error, and lack depth in communication of meaning and expressive power. Sto(ry)chastics uses graphical probabilistic modeling of story fragments and participant input, gathered from sensors, to tell a story to the user, as a function of people's estimated intentions and desires during interaction. Using a Bayesian network approach for combined modeling of users, sensors, and story, sto(ry)chastics, as opposed to traditional systems based on one-to-one ma...
Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, June 1997.
A responsive portrait consists of a multiplicity of views whose dynamic presentation results from... more A responsive portrait consists of a multiplicity of views whose dynamic presentation results from the interaction between the viewer and the image. The viewer's proximity to the image, head movements, and facial expressions elicit dynamic responses from the portrait, driven by the portrait’s own set of autonomous behaviors. This type of interaction reproduces an encounter between two people: the viewer and the character portrayed.
The Improvisational Theater Space is an interactive stage where human actors can perform accompan... more The Improvisational Theater Space is an interactive stage where human actors can perform accompanied by virtual actors. Virtual actors are modeled as animated \Media Creatures" that are behavior-based automous software agents. We used Arti cal Life programming methods ...
Abstract Full-body, unencumbered, gestural interfaces offer new possibilities for com-puter paint... more Abstract Full-body, unencumbered, gestural interfaces offer new possibilities for com-puter painting tools. However, traditional painting metaphors and current ges-tural input technology are not well suited to one another; the user cannot be tracked with sufficient accuracy to support ...
This paper presents sto(ry)chastics, a user-centered approach for computational storytelling for ... more This paper presents sto(ry)chastics, a user-centered approach for computational storytelling for real-time sensor-driven multimedia audiovisual stories, such as those that are triggered by the body in motion in a sensor-instrumented interactive narrative space. With sto(ry)chastics the coarse and noisy sensor inputs are coupled to digital m edia outputs via a user model, which is estimated probabilistically by a Bayesian network. To illustrate sto(ry)chastics, this paper describes the museum wearable, a device which delivers an audiovisual narration interactively in time and space to the visitor as a function of the estimated visitor type. The wearable relies on a custom-designed long-range infrared locationidentification sensor to gather information on where and how long the visitor stops in the museum galleries and uses this information as input to, or observations of, a (dynamic) Bayesian network. The network has been tested and validated on observed visitor tracking data by parameter learning using the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm, and by performance analysis of the model with the learned parameters.