Suchergebnisse

Virtual and Augmented reality systems are rapidly evolving. Their technical development is accompanied by a spreading of applications in fields such as architecture, design, digital marketing, education, entertainment, gaming, robotics, fine arts, military and medicine training, engineering and research. Those tools, requiring 8 years ago investment in the order of tens of thousands of US dollars (Bohil, Alicea, & Biocca, 2011) can boast nowadays easier economical accessibility and predicted market size in the next 5 years ranging from 50 to 300 billion (summary of sources). Having regard to the forthcoming large-scale adoption, it is beyond necessary, from a neuroscientific perspective, to investigate the impact of VR and AR technology on human cognition and performance. Therefore, monitoring the interplay between these devices and our brain dynamics in the short and long term and across their development leaps will be crucial to ensure their correct and safe usage in research and beyond. This could pave the way to new research paradigms and commercial applications, granting users the right experience for their needs whether they will need to train for a complex surgical intervention along with an artificial agent or just get the maximum excitement from an immersive sensorial journey. The first introductory chapter will discuss the contribution of virtual and augmented reality as tools for the study of human cognition and performance and the need, arising from an "embodied" vision of cognition, for a transition towards experimental paradigms that allow neuroscientist to study subjects that interact in a realistic environment through spontaneous and natural actions.

This paper focuses on the topography of communication and investigates the semiotic value of one particular site, where highly significant political actions took place. The different strategies of communication at the time of the late Roman Republic are analysed by matching the memory of ancient sources to the investigation of the cultural value of the domus rostrata in Rome. The house is taken as a legitimising element in the ideology of Pompeius, and one which was also appropriated by the subsequent owners of the house.

The research presented in the work is linked to important production of data over 10 years of activity that allowed us to trace the configuration of Italian urban settlements in the 1950s. Starting from this information, the paper puts forward a uchronian reconstruction of the physiognomy of the national territory asking if&mdash ; instead of the weak urban development policies implemented for over half a century&mdash ; a more purposeful method of planning and designing settlements had been chosen in the Sixties to favor their aggregation and protect the country&rsquo ; s huge landscape heritage. From the model used, important indications emerge for control and management of retrofit (de-sprinkling) policies of which the need has been felt in recent years, as suggested by repeated messages from European bodies, the scientific community, associations and some politicians. The uchronic scenario is constructed starting from the settlement configuration of the 1950s, developing a model of maximum aggregation for the urbanized parts that were intervened in between this period and 2000, simulating a geography that maintains the quantities of soil transformed over the last 50 years. It emerges from the processing of the data that the Italian territory would have retained its low settlement density areas almost intact at the same level as in the 50s, that is to say 73% of the entire peninsular territory. It would also have preserved a large part of its free peninsular and insular coastline at about 60&ndash ; 70%, against the present day 45%.

Changes in land use and land cover represent the main cause of the loss of natural capital and the ecosystem services supply. Analyzing the dynamics and impacts of these changes is also important with respect to the implementation of the D.lgs 34/2018, which recognizes ecosystem services generated by forests and identifies payments for ecosystem services as innovative tools for sustainable forest management. mapping, quantification, and economic valuation of ecosystem services. In our study, we analyzed the change in the supply of ecosystem services in relation to land use and land cover dynamics that occurred between 1960 and 2018 in the Molise Region.
To do this type of analysis, we employed a methodology based on the GIS analysis of the agroforestry landscape transformation processes and qualitative matrices of potential supply of ecosystem services linked to land cover. The results obtained could be functional to the prediction of future scenarios and to the identification of adaptive strategies for the mitigation of impacts due to land cover changes at regional and national scales.

This paper discusses the topic of urban and spatial planning in Italy where decision-making is left almost exclusively to the innumerable, small municipalities present in the country and totaling almost 8000 in number. Projects and actions to transform built areas, infrastructure, and welfare services of all sorts and purposes in a national territory of over 300,000 km2 are supervised by countless mayors, municipal councils, and boards that govern plots of land corresponding to polygons of a few kilometers per side. This is generally achieved by means of town plans developed outside of any general rule or protocol, the contents of which are often ignored as a result of national legislation that weakens them and sometimes makes them uninfluential essentially. This is a European example of urban planning mismanagement that deserves to be brought to the broader attention of the European technical and scientific community, also because the debate developed so far on this topic&mdash ; even by eminent and authoritative urban planners&mdash ; has been published almost entirely in Italian only. Public and political attention towards this issue is extremely limited, although the severe effects of &ldquo ; molecular planning&rdquo ; are beginning to be perceived: unjustified overurbanization and highly patchy, energy-intensive, urban patterns that are destructive for ecosystems and at odds with public interests regarding environmental and urban quality. In this paper, we make some comparisons with other European countries and outline some directions&mdash ; certainly very difficult to follow&mdash ; to reconsider and recover from the adverse effects produced to date.

Rivers have been the hub of economic and social development in the human evolution, because they are essential resources for: agricultural development, infrastructure networks and development of the first urban strategies. Territory has had a radical transformation that led to a national average urbanization of about 10%; but this development has happened with different degrees of awareness and without uniform models and criteria.One of the main causes of this is due to an extreme fragmentation of planning, because the municipalities' plans are a binding power modality, in force in Italy, but they don't have significant and strategic references at regional and territorial scale. In particular, the Italian river areas have undergone a real siege by urban growth, outlining a critical scenario in terms of risks for the population and for the natural system.Some disciplines such as landscape ecology have contributed substantially to the integration of some environmental issues that have led into greater consideration for the protection of the landscape. In the same way the concept of Ecosystem Services combines knowledge, techniques and legislation to achieve the goal of sustainable planning. So, it is necessary that these scientific disciplines, which deal with environmental planning in various ways, find the right devices to guarantee a multi-criteria approach to the problem of consumption of the Natural Capital.