University of Canterbury, New Zealand
Visual Design (Part 2) from Christoph Bartneck on Vimeo.
The second session deals with the color and its management in a digital workflow. We discuss color calibration, color profiles, and color spaces. Next, we discuss the anatomy of typefaces and their families before discussing legibility. In particular we introduce guidelines for typeface sizes, line spacing, viewing distances and alignment.
Alan Turing proposed a test for the intelligence of machines in 1950. Despite great efforts, not computer has passed this test so far. Each year, chat bots compete for the Loebner Prize, the first formal instantiation of a Turing Test. No contender was able to fool the jury yet. Major problems of the chat bots are the lack of common knowledge and the logical consistency of a dialogue.
We explore a new approach to chat bots by focusing on non-logical conversation topics: mysticism. The founding books of the major religions are widely acknowledged examples of mystical topics. We selected the New Testament, the Koran and Rigveda as the knowledge base for our conversational robots.
The robots are able to autonomously talk to each other and to humans about their religious believe. Each robot represents a belief, but we do not reveal their convictions. This ambiguity forces observers to follow the actual conversations instead of quickly applying stereotypes.
We hope that the peaceful conversation amongst the robots inspires an open dialogue amongst the religions. By focusing on a discussion of the original texts, we hope to emphasize our shared believes.
This first introduction to visual design deals with the underlying concepts of any visual design. The different units of measurements, sizes, proportion, file formats and software standards are being discussed.
Some years ago I visited Egypt and took panoramic photos of Egyptian temples with my old analogue camera. Upon my return I scanned the slides and turned the panoramic photos in a QuickTime VR scenes. Technology moved on and today the available bandwidths and screen sizes have increased dramatically. It was time to revisit my panoramas.
Luckily, the original scans survived on CD-ROMs and I used Kolor’s AutoPano Pro to generate new scenes. The web viewer is now based on the omnipresent Flash. Enjoy the digitally remasters director cut of the Temples of Egypt.
Today I was very pleased when I submitted my manuscript to Springer. I received the following notice:
Open Access at no cost to authors due to institutional arrangement
You’ve identified yourself as affiliated to the Eindhoven University of Technology. A special arrangement between Springer-SBM and the Eindhoven University of Technology – Netherlands allows all articles from affiliated authors to be published as Open Access, and any payments for Open Access will be automatically covered by that arrangement.
It is great that the Universities in the Netherlands have come to an agreement with Springer!