EVA 2009 – Natural Interaction

This paper presents the media interaction systems implemented at the Mont'Alfonso Fortress, close to Castelnuovo Garfagnana (Lucca). The stronghold was built at the end of the 16th century and after being abandoned for decades it was recently submitted to a complete restoration. A multimedia environment, made of large projections, was developed in one of the buildings inside the fortress. Users can interact with natural body gestures: the multimedia contents of two tables are driven by user's hands, while projections on walls and floor are activated by motion detection. All the sensing is made using near-IR cameras.

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EVA 2006 - Cruscle search engine

This paper presents the advanced search tecniques implemented for the Accademia della Crusca on-line vocabularies. The five vocabularies represent the origin and evolution of the Italian language during the last centuries. They have been completely transcripted and annotated in a standard XML/TEI format. The transcription has been indexed with a complex structure that allows advanced search queries, including: full text query, context and micro- context queries, case sensitiveness, accented characters, search of word roots and punctuation marks. The search algorithms are based on the open source indexing and search engine Apache Lucene with heavy modifications.

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IEEE Multimedia 2005 - Natural Interfaces

The authors present a multimedia system that really works in a cultural public space. Indeed, if you go to Florence and visit the museum of Palazzo Medici Riccardi, you might see a queue of worldwidetourists waiting for their turn to play with a digital version of the famous fresco The Journey of the Magi, appearing on two large screens. Visitors stand in front of the screens and point with their hands to the part of the painting theyýre interested in. Two cameras grab this point and analgorithm calculates the exact part of the painting the person selected. In response to the pointing, an audio response gives information on the subjects or objects. Visitors seem to deeply enjoy theirinteraction with the system, which does feel natural. Visitors wear no special equipment and use no complex hardware; the fresco is extremely well displayed, and typically the information is precise and interesting, with different levels of information available.

Link to ACM Portal reference.

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