Records on recovery after cholecystectomy of patients in a suburban Pennsylvania hospital between 1972 and 1981 were examined to determine whether assignment to a room with a window view of a natural setting might have restorative influences. Twenty-three surgical patients assigned to rooms with windows looking out on a natural scene had shorter postoperative hospital stays, received fewer nega...

In previous work the authors developed algorithms to navigate a robot based on sequences of visual memories stored into a Sparse Distributed Memory—a kind of associative memory suitable to work with high-dimensional binary vectors. In that system, the robot’s localisation is based on similarity between the robot’s view and one previously stored image. In that system, prediction errors occur fro...

We present free-space transparency, a method that renders unimportant regions of a window as transparent. This allows users to view screen content that lies beneath these regions. By maximizing the amount of simultaneously visible content, while keeping window sizes and locations constant, users can be made more productive with minimal window layout manipulation.

In indoor environments, having a view from a window plays an important role in human physical and psychological well-being – particularly if the view contains natural elements. In places where physical windows are absent or the view is highly artifact-dominated, virtual windows can potentially play a beneficial role. The current paper presents a research experiment on the efficacy of three mono...