Search results

This book addresses the topic of playable cities, which use the 'smartness' of digital cities to offer their citizens playful events and activities. The contributions presented here examine various aspects of playable cities, including developments in pervasive and urban games, the use of urban data to design games and playful applications, architecture design and playability, and mischief and humor in playable cities.The smartness of digital cities can be found in the sensors and actuators that are embedded in their environment. This smartness allows them to monitor, anticipate and support our activities and increases the efficiency of the cities and our activities. These urban smart technologies can offer citizens playful interactions with streets, buildings, street furniture, traffic, public art and entertainment, large public displays and public events. Anton Nijholt studied mathematics and computer science at the Technical University of Delft, the Netherlands and received a Ph.D. degree in theoretical computer science from the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in 1980. He is a Professor of Computer Science in the Human Media Interaction group, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands. He held positions at various universities in and outside The Netherlands.His main research interests are entertainment computing, multimodal interaction, affective computing, and brain-computer interfacing. He has hundreds of scientific publications, including (edited) books on the history of computing, language processing, and brain-computer interfacing. Recently he edited three books: 'Playful User Interfaces', 'More Playful User Interfaces' and 'Entertaining the Whole World', all with Springer. He has been a guest-editor for Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces, International Journal of Arts and Technology, Entertainment Computing, International Journal of Creative Interfaces and Computer Graphics (IJCICG) and the Brain-Computer Interfaces journal.Presently, he is editing a section on Brain-computer Interaction and Games in a Springer Handbook on Digital Games and Entertainment. Professor Nijholt is also Specialty Chief Editor of Frontiers in Human-Media Interaction and (associate) editor of several other journals. He has also served as Program Chair and General Chair for the main international conferences on affective computing, multimodal interaction, virtual agents, and entertainment computing.

For generations, humans have fantasized about the ability to create devices that can see into a person's mind and thoughts, or to communicate and interact with machines through thought alone. Such ideas have long captured the imagination of humankind in the form of ancient myths and modern science fiction stories. Recent advances in cognitive neuroscience and brain imaging technologies have started to turn these myths into a reality, and are providing us with the ability to interface directly with the human brain. This ability is made possible through the use of sensors that monitor physical p.

Persuasive technology refers to research after and development of instruments that can support people, society, institutions or governments to persuade other people of a particular opinion or to behave in a particular way. A digital lifestyle coach is a behavior change support system, a special type of persuasive technology. Rhetoric and social psychology are basic sciences that inform technologists about the principles, strategies and tactics of persuasive communication and about the factors that determine the successfulness of the use of persuasive technologies. We present the main requirements for these technologies and show how they motivate the use of information and communication technology, services, sensors and new mobile hardware devices. Digital coaches play the role of a human coach and clients experience the system as a social actor. This motivates to present the system on the user interface as a graphical virtual human that addresses her messages verbally to the client. Research has shown that this may have a positive effect on the successfulness of the system. As an illustration we present a digital coach that is developed to support diabetes patients to adhere to a more healthy lifestyle. We present results of a comparative experiment to see if the use of a virtual human improves the eectiveness of the digital coach compared to presenting the message by a simple text message.