Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games have shown to be very resilient to standard adversarial tree search techniques. Recently, a few approaches to tackle their complexity have emerged that use game state or move abstractions, or both. Unfortunately, the supporting experiments were either limited to simpler RTS environments (μRTS, SparCraft) or lack testing against state-of-the-art game playing agents...

When a child is engaged in improvisational play, representations of the activity are transient. Thus, to reflect on or change what has been done requires great effort of memory. This paper argues that by recording aspects of children’s activity while they are engaged in improvisational play, virtual environments can provide powerful tools to support children’s reflection about aspects of narrat...

This paper presents an approach to realize a tool for interactive and intuitive deformation of 3D shapes, to be used, for example as a character animation tool. The approach combines a fast algorithm for 3D free form deformation that employs compactly supported radial basis function (CSRBF) with a high degrees-of-freedom input device of hand joint angles, namely, the CyberGlove. While shape def...

In this paper we describe the graphical realization and authoring of a semi-autonomous animated persona, called a Digital Puppet. Digital Puppets augment on-line educational materials with assistance, commentary and summaries, and have been used in both the tutoring and presentation domains. Limited animation, 2D "cartoon" characters are useful for some pedagogical applications, particularly fo...

Two experiments with one hundred and fourteen 3- to 5-year-old children examined whether children understand that a printed word represents a specific spoken word and that it differs in this way from a drawing. When an experimenter read a word to children and then a puppet used a different but related label for it, such as "dog" for the word ‹puppy›, children often stated the puppet's label was...

Diverse applications of the versatile bacterial cytochrome P450 enzymes (P450s) are hampered by their requirement for the auxiliary proteins, ferredoxin reductases and ferredoxins, that transfer electrons to P450s. Notably, this limits the use of P450s as immobilized enzymes for industrial purposes. Herein, we demonstrate the immobilization of a bacterial P450 and its redox protein partners by ...

In this article we describe our efforts to develop an Improvisational Platform that provides a possibility for real-time interaction between a user-controlled avatar and a group of synthetic actors in a 3D virtual world. The platform will allow to play around with different improvisational rules and even different settings. This will be accomplished by having a repertoire of basic behaviours fo...

This paper presents a motion description language (MDLp) for specifying and encoding autonomous puppetry plays in a manner that is faithful to the way puppetry choreography is currently formulated. In particular, MDLp is a formal language whose strings, when parsed by a dynamical system (the puppet) produces optimized, hybrid control laws corresponding to strings of motions, locations, and temp...