An immersive theatre experience was designed to raise awareness and question perceptions of 'blindness', through enabling both sighted and blind members to experience a similar reality. A multimodal experience was created, comprising ambient sounds and narratives -heard through headphones -and an assortment of themed tactile objects, intended to be felt. In addition, audience members were each provided with a novel haptic device that was designed to enhance their discovery of a pitch-black space. An in the wild study of the cultural experience showed how blind and sighted audience members had different 'felt' experiences, but that neither was a lesser one. Furthermore, the haptic device was found to encourage enactive exploration and provide reassurance of the environment for both sighted and blind people, rather than acting simply as a navigation guide. We discuss the potential of using haptic feedback to create cultural experiences for both blind and sighted people; rethinking current utilitarian framing of it as assistive technology.

The distributed co-evolution of an on-board simulator and controller for swarm robot behaviours. Evolutionary Intelligence, 7 (2). pp. 95-106. ISSN 1864-5909 Available from: http://eprints.uwe.ac.uk/23450We recommend you cite the published version. The publisher's URL is: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12065-014-0112-8 Refereed: YesThe final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1007/s12065?014?0112?8 Disclaimer UWE has obtained warranties from all depositors as to their title in the material deposited and as to their right to deposit such material. UWE makes no representation or warranties of commercial utility, title, or fitness for a particular purpose or any other warranty, express or implied in respect of any material deposited.UWE makes no representation that the use of the materials will not infringe any patent, copyright, trademark or other property or proprietary rights. UWE accepts no liability for any infringement of intellectual property rights in any material deposited but will remove such material from public view pending investigation in the event of an allegation of any such infringement. PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR TEXT.Noname manuscript No. Abstract We investigate the reality gap, specifically the environmental correspondence of an on-board simulator. We describe a novel distributed co-evolutionary approach to improve the transference of controllers that co-evolve with an on-board simulator. A novelty of our approach is the the potential to improve transference between simulation and reality without an explicit measurement between the two domains. We hypothesise that a variation of on-board simulator environment models across many robots can be competitively exploited by comparison of the real controller fitness of many robots. We hypothesise that the real controller fitness values across many robots can be taken as indicative of the varied fitness in environmental correspondence of on-board simulators, and used to inform the distributed evolution an on-board simulator environment model without explicit measurement of the real environment. Our results demonstrate that our approach creates an adaptive relationship between the onboard simulator environment model, the real world behaviour of the robots, and the state of the real environment. The results indicate that our approach is sensitive to whether the real behavioural performance of the robot is informative on the state real environment.

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The National Gallery in London has recently been testing the potential of 3D scanning technology to record and measure the surface of paintings. To view and interact with the high-resolution scans requires expensive computational hardware. The proposed workflow borrows some of the techniques used in the gaming industry to provide a computationally efficient interactive interface, even suitable for online viewing. The workflow synergises multiple imaging techniques, and therefore provides better texture representation than 3D scanning alone. The process provides a new way of visualising possible relations across paint layers by combining normal maps with existing image based techniques. 3D laser scanning. 3D models. 3D visualisation. Normal maps. Reflectance transformation imaging. Paintings.

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