As a locomotion interface for virtual reality, swimming afloat in water, is an unfamiliar and intriguing paradigm. We propose to bring our virtual swimming apparatus to SIGGRAPH 2004 Emerging Technology. In our exhibit, we will showcase the swimming apparatus and the virtual ocean environment. The swimming participant will be suspended in the apparatus, an 8ft cubic frame mounted with pulleys a...

As a locomotion interface for virtual reality, swimming afloat in water, is an unfamiliar and intriguing paradigm. We propose to bring our newly developed virtual swimming apparatus to SIGGRAPH 2002 Emerging Technology. In our exhibit, we will showcase the swimming apparatus and the virtual ocean environment. The swimming participant will be suspended in the apparatus, an 8ft cubic frame mounte...

Good quality water supplies and safe sanitation in urban areas are a big challenge for governments throughout the world. Providing adequate water quality is a basic requirement for our lives. The colony forming units of the bacterium Legionella pneumophila in potable water represent a big problem which cannot be overlooked for health protection reasons. We analysed several methods to program a ...

Most of MAS methodologies and infrastructures do not consider direct human participation even though humans can be seen as autonomous entities (i.e. human agents). Virtual Worlds (VW) provide all the necessary means for direct human inclusion into software systems. Virtual Institutions (VI) take advantage of this and combine Electronic Institutions (EI) and VWs to engineer MAS applications wher...

Most of MAS methodologies and infrastructures do not consider direct human participation even though humans can be seen as autonomous entities (i.e. human agents). Virtual Worlds (VW) provide all the necessary means for direct human inclusion into software systems. Virtual Institutions (VI) take advantage of this and combine Electronic Institutions (EI) and VWs to engineer MAS applications wher...

according to the changing business, nowadays teams are cornerstones of successful organizations, in addition, with the developments and technological innovations in communication and information, virtual teams are playing more critical role in today's business. on this basis, determining factors which affect virtual team's performance are important to both scholars and practitioners. ...

This paper presents a rapid method to render dynamic water surfaces with penetrating obstacles in real-time. Taking the surface boundary into account, our method allows the rendering of single reflections and single refractions of objects even intersecting the water surface, including a physically approximative perspective refraction mapping. Thereby, water surfaces are represented as 2.5D heig...

[1] Climate change and socio-economic development place an increasing pressure on essential natural resources, such as arable land and freshwater. The international food trade can save water globally by redistributing commodities produced relatively more water-efficiently. We focus on the global virtual water trade network associated with international staple food trade from 1986–2008. This stu...

Disentangling the relations between human migrations and water resources is relevant for food security and trade policy in water-scarce countries. It is commonly believed that human migrations are beneficial to the water endowments of origin countries for reducing the pressure on local resources. We show here that such belief is over-simplistic. We reframe the problem by considering the interna...