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Museums have missions to increase accessibility and share cultural assets to the public. The National Palace Museum intends to be a pioneer of utilizing novel interpretative installations to reach more diverse and potential audiences, and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) technology has been selected as the new interpretative approach. The pilot project in partnership with the National Taiwan University has successfully completed four interactive installations. To consider the different nature of collections, the four systems designed against different interpretation strategies are uPoster, i-m-Top, Magic Crystal Ball and Virtual Panel. To assess the feasibility of the project, the interactive installations were exhibited at the Taipei World Trade Center in 2008. The purpose of this paper is to present the development of the “Treasure Transformers” exhibition, design principles, and effectiveness of installations from the evaluation. It is our ambition that the contributions will propose innovative media approaches in museum settings.

Previous studies have outlined the advantages of multi-resolution large-area displays over their fixed-resolution counterparts, however the mobility of the focus region has up until the present time received little attention. To study this phenomenon further, we have developed a multi-resolution tabletop display system with a steerable high resolution focus region to compare the performance between steerable and fixed focus region systems under different working scenarios. We have classified these scenarios according to region of interest (ROI) with analogies to different eye movement types (fixed, saccadic, and pursuit ROI). Empirical data gathered during the course of a multi-faceted user study demonstrates that the steerable focus region system significantly outperforms the fixed focus region system. The former is shown to provide enhanced display manipulation and proves especially advantageous in cases where the user must maintain spatial awareness of the display content as is the case in which, within a single session, several regions of the display are to be visited.

Multi-camera systems have been widely used in many video surveillance applications. When an event happens and is monitored across multiple cameras, it is easy for an expert to generate the corresponding spatial representation to comprehend the series of event. However, it is not trivial for users new to the environment. With support from psychological evidences, we propose an approach to mimic generating pictorial-based representation of mental images when a target is moving across the views of cameras. First we conduct a ball-rolling experiment to compare this approach with others. The empirical results demonstrate that the performance of users with this approach is significantly better than others. We suggest that it is because this approach is better for users to preserve spatial representation of the environment while transiting views between cameras. Then we propose a framework to realize this approach. The demonstrations in different situations indicate the validity of such framework.

Due to the bandwidth constraints of multi-view autostereoscopic display that severely restrict number of views simultaneously displayed without degrading resolution or increasing display cost unacceptably. The alternative way is the eye tracking technology, which can fluently rendering and accurately projecting the stereo video to the viewer. In order to render stereo content with respect to user's view points and to optically project the content onto the left and right eyes of the user accurately, the real-time viewer tracking technique that allows the user to move around freely when watching the autostereoscopic display is developed in this study. It comprises the face detection by using multiple eigenspaces of various lighting conditions, fast block matching for tracking four motion parameters of the user's face region. The Edge Orientation Histogram (EOH) on Real AdaBoost to improve the performance of original AdaBoost algorithm using Haar feature in OpenCV library developed by Intel is also applied in this study. Since performance of the viewer tracking autostereoscopic display is still influenced under variant environmental conditions, the robustness and efficiency of the viewer-tracking system are evaluated in this study.

An autostereoscopic display provides users great enjoyment of stereo visualization without uncomfortable and inconvenient drawbacks of wearing stereo glasses. However, bandwidth constraints of current multi-view 3D display severely restrict the number of views that can be simultaneously displayed without degrading resolution or increasing display cost unacceptably. An alternative to multiple view presentation is that the position of observer can be measured by using viewer-tracking sensor. It is a very important module of the viewer-tracking component for fluently rendering and accurately projecting the stereo video. In order to render stereo content with respect to user's view points and to optically project the content onto the left and right eyes of the user accurately, the real-time viewer tracking technique that allows the user to move around freely when watching the autostereoscopic display is developed in this study. It comprises the face detection by using multiple eigenspaces of various lighting conditions, fast block matching for tracking four motion parameters of the user's face region. The Edge Orientation Histogram (EOH) on Real AdaBoost to improve the performance of original AdaBoost algorithm is also applied in this study. The AdaBoost algorithm using Haar feature in OpenCV library developed by Intel to detect human face and enhance the accuracy performance with rotating image. The frame rate of viewer tracking process can achieve up to 15 Hz. Since performance of the viewer tracking autostereoscopic display is still influenced under variant environmental conditions, the accuracy, robustness and efficiency of the viewer-tracking system are evaluated in this study.

There are lots of handicaps and elders in the world. Many of them are not able to move as easily as normal people. It is useful if we develop an automatic wheelchair to help them move more freely. In this paper we proposed a design of small-area automatic wheelchair to help handicaps or elders be able to move easily in a small area. The most concern in this project is low cost with acceptable performance rather than high velocity or high accuracy. The design integrates several technologies to apply on the wheelchair, including wireless positioning, automatic mobile technology, and wireless communication. On the other hand, we proposed a design that duplicable information can be computed on server side, and information which is not duplicable can be computed in constant time. Therefore, our design of small-area automatic wheelchair can cost very little. We also proposed a design of building map information to make the whole design more complete.