Design and implementation of children’s gesture education games based on AI gesture recognition technology

In order to cultivate children’s imagination and creativity in the cognitive process, combined with the traditional hand shadow game, a children’s gesture education game based on AI gesture recognition technology is designed and developed. The game uses unity development platform, with children’s digital gesture recognition as the content, designs and implements the basic functions involved in the game, including AI gesture recognition function, character animation function, interface interaction function, AR photo taking function and question answering system function. The game is finally released on the mobile terminal. Players can recognize gestures through mobile cameras, interact with virtual cartoon characters in the game, watch cartoon character animation, understand popular science knowledge, and complete the answers in the game. The educational games can better assist children to learn digital gestures, enrich children’s ways of cognition, expand children’s imagination, and let children learn easily with happy educational games.

The Influence of Embodiment as a Cartoon Character on Public Speaking Anxiety

Virtual Reality can be used to embody people in different types of body—so that when they look towards themselves or in a mirror they will see a life-sized virtual body instead of their own, and that moves with their own movements. This will typically give rise to the illusion of body ownership over the virtual body. Previous research has focused on embodiment in humanoid bodies, albeit with various distortions such as an extra limb or asymmetry, or with a body of a different race or gender. Here we show that body ownership also occurs over a virtual body that looks like a cartoon rabbit, at the same level as embodiment as a human. Furthermore, we explore the impact of embodiment on performance as a public speaker in front of a small audience. Forty five participants were recruited who had public speaking anxiety. They were randomly partitioned into three groups of 15, embodied as a Human, as the Cartoon rabbit, or from third person perspective (3PP) with respect to the rabbit. In each condition they gave two talks to a small audience of the same type as their virtual body. Several days later, as a test condition, they returned to give a talk to an audience of human characters embodied as a human. Overall, anxiety reduced the most in the Human condition, the least in the Cartoon condition, and there was no change in the 3PP condition, taking into account existing levels of trait anxiety. We show that embodiment in a cartoon character leads to high levels of body ownership from the first person perspective and synchronous real and virtual body movements. We also show that the embodiment influences outcomes on the public speaking task.

Protection of Animated Cartoon Character: Copyright or Trademark?

Animated cartoon character is a character created or depicted in an animated story with the aim of supporting the story in an animated film. Currently, many children's clothes, bags, shoes or accessories include animated pictures from cartoons with the aim of attracting buyers' attention to increase sales of these products. The purpose of this writing is to identify, analyse and elaborate legal protections for animated cartoon characters based on the provisions in the copyright law, as well as legal protection for animated cartoon characters used as brands. This was normative legal research using a statutory, conceptual and analytical approaches. Animated cartoon characters as one of the objects of copyright protection, namely images, receive automatic protection based on the Copyright Law and can also be registered as Trademarks, as long as the image has distinctive power and has no similarity in substantial or in its entirety. However, if any parties who intend to use the animated cartoon characters that already classified as a well-known trademark, that party can propose a License to the owner of the trademark as regulated under the provision of Article 42 paragraph (1) of Trademark Law

Detecting protagonists and antagonists in the voice quality of American cartoon characters: a quantitative LTAS-based analysis

The voices of heroes and villains in cartoons contribute to their uniqueness and helps shape how we perceive them. However, not much research has looked at the acoustic properties of character voices and the possible contributions these have to cartoon character archetypes. We present a quantitative examination of how voice quality distinguishes between characters based on their alignment as either protagonists or antagonists, performing Principal Component Analysis (PCA) on the Long-term Average Spectra (LTAS) of concatenated passages of the speech of various characters obtained from four different animated cartoons. We then assessed if the categories of “protagonists” and “antagonists” (determined via an a priori classification) could be distinguished using a classification algorithm, and if so, what acoustic characteristics could help distinguish the two categories. The overall results support the idea that protagonists and antagonists can be distinguished by their voice qualities. Support Vector Machine (SVM) analysis yielded an average classification accuracy of 96% across the cartoons. Visualisation of the spectral traits constituting the difference did not yield consistent results but reveals a low-versus-high frequency energy dominance pattern segregating antagonists and protagonists. Future studies can look into how other variables might be confounded with voice quality in distinguishing between these categories.

Choice Experiment Method for Sustainable Tourism in Theme Parks

Previous relevant studies on theme parks lack an exploration of various tourism attributes, e.g., recreational facilities, themes, wait times, fast pass drawings, and pricing, etc., all of which inspired the research motivation of this study. First, the Choice Experiment (CE) method explores tourists’ preferences for theme park attributes. Second, the Conditional Logit (CL) and Random Parameter Logit (RPL) models explore the differences in tourists’ willingness to pay (WTP) for various attributes from the perspective of their socioeconomic background. We used purposive sampling to survey questionnaire answers face-to-face in Taiwan, and a total of 680 questionnaires were issued, of which, 549 copies are valid, with an effective recovery rate of 80.7%. The research findings suggest the following: (1) The most valued theme park attributes for consumers are the recreational facilities, followed by theme characteristics, and fast pass drawing. (2) Regarding the respondents’ WTP for various attributes, they are willing to pay the highest price for thrilling recreational facilities, then for unlimited fast pass services, and cartoon character themes. (3) Respondents believe that if thrilling recreational facilities and fast pass drawing are available at the same time, then the overall effectiveness will be improved. (4) Respondents relatively have no purchase intention for fast pass drawing. It is hoped that the research findings can provide theme park operators reference basis for making plans and decisions.

Right Temporoparietal Junction Encodes Mental Experience of Others More Than Evaluating False Versus True Belief

When people make inferences about other people's minds, called theory of mind (ToM), a network in the cerebral cortex becomes active. ToM experiments sometimes use the false belief task, in which subjects decide whether a story character believes A or B. The "false" belief occurs if the character believes A when B is true. We devised a version in which subjects judged whether a cartoon head "believed" a ball to be in box 1 or box 2. The task was a visual, reaction time version of a ToM task. We proposed two alternative hypotheses. In hypothesis 1, cortical regions of interest within the ToM network should distinguish between false and true belief trials, reflecting outside information that the subjects have about the cartoon character. In hypothesis 2, the ToM network should distinguish between conditions only if the subjects think that the cartoon character can distinguish between the conditions, thus reflecting a model of the internal contents of the cartoon character's mind. The results supported hypothesis 2. Events that the cartoon could not "see" did not affect activity in the ToM network; the same events, when the cartoon could apparently "see" them, significantly affected activity in the right temporoparietal junction (TPJ). The results support the view that the right TPJ participates in modeling the mental states of others, rather than in evaluating the accuracy of the beliefs of others, and may help explain why previous experiments showed mixed results when directly comparing false belief to true belief conditions.

The Destiny of a “Baby” Industry: Turkish Animation

The word “destiny” is rooted in the word “destination”, the place where someone is going. In order to draw a map for our journey we have to know where we are standing and we have to have a groundwork. Animation in Turkey dates back to the first animation experimentations of Turkish cartoonists and the first public screening of Disney’s “The Skeleton Dance” in 1932. The pioneering animations are either unfinished, lost or obscure. Just like the doomed faith of the first -unfinished- animated feature film project “Once Upon a Time” that has been carried out for almost 9 years or the questionable and -sued- authenticity of the first highly popular domestic cartoon character on Turkish TV, animation in Turkey have so many low points. Nevertheless there is a growing number of domestic feature films with record breaking number of audiences. Animation education is only 30 years old with little number of departments devoted to it, -yet- the numbers are growing. “Design Centers” are established by the encouragement of Turkish Ministry of Industry and Technology to support animation studios, professional associations are forming, intellectual property rights are the talk of the day, the academy and industry interaction is getting stronger, little festivals flourish... These are indeed turning points for the -baby- animation industry in Turkey. We need to study this map in order to get to our destination: a mature industry with established work ethics, high artistic standards and rich economic outcome and make a good destiny out of it.

Psychological-Clinical Overview on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

Every person agree that health is very important and significant for human well-being. Around the turn of the century, people primarily died from infectious disease and die from lifestyle disease which are related to health damaging personal habits and behavior. Familiar example includes heart disease, stroke, and lung cancer. Clearly some behaviors and lifestyle promote health whereas other lead to illness and death. As the cartoon character Pogo put it "we have met the enemy and he is us.