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A multimedia university program with relatively equal numbers of male and female students in elective programming subjects provided a rare opportunity to investigate female motivation to study and pursue computer programming in a career. The MSLQ was used to survey 85 participants. In common with research into deterrence of females from STEM domains, females displayed significantly lower self-efficacy and expectancy for success. In contrast to research into deterrence of females from STEM domains, both genders placed similar high values on computer programming and shared high extrinsic and intrinsic goal orientation. The authors propose that the stereotype associated with a creative multimedia career could attract female participation in computer programming whereas the stereotype associated with computer science could be a deterrent.

Contemporary video games are generally designed with the aim of engendering a state of immersion in their players. A sense of 'presence' is considered to be a prerequisite of total immersion, the ultimate level of immersion, and can be directly related to the degree of realism in the simulation presented in a videogame. However, continuously increasing the degree of visual realism in an image could cause adverse effects such as fault amplification and more importantly, emotions like fear and dread of the uncanny. It can also substantially raise the development costs of a game. Consequently, videogame developers would benefit greatly from knowing the threshold beyond which increased realism is counter-productive.This paper details the development of an image processing system that measures the degree of realism of an image using three methods -gradient variance, color variance and shadow softness -derived from existing theories and practices in perceptual psychology, photoforensics and image processing. It then discusses testing of the system on a variety of photographic and video game images.

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