Violent video games are increasingly popular, raising concerns by parents, researchers, policy makers, and informed citizens about potential harmful effects. Chapter 1 describes the history of ...violent games and their explosive growth. Chapter 2 discusses research methodologies, how one establishes causality in science, and prior research on violent television, film, and video games. Chapter 3 presents the General Aggression Model, focusing on how media violence increases aggression and violence in both short and long-term contexts. Important scientific questions are answered by three new studies. Chapter 4 reports findings from a laboratory experiment: even children's games with cartoonish violence increased aggression in children and college students. Chapter 5 reports findings from a survey study of high school students: frequent violent game play leads to an angry and hostile personality and to frequent aggression and violence. Chapter 6 reports findings from the first longitudinal study video game effects: elementary school children who frequently played violent games early in the school year became more verbally and physically aggressive, and less helpful. Chapters 7 and 8 compare a host of risk factors for development of aggression, and find video game effects to be quite important. Chapter 9 describes the role of scientific findings in public policy, industry responses to scientific findings, and public policy options. Chapter 10 recommends that public policy debates acknowledge the harmful effects of violent video games on youth, and urges a more productive debate about whether and how modern societies should act.
The precarious reality of videogame production beyond the corporate blockbuster studios of North America.The videogame industry, we're invariably told, is a multibillion-dollar, high-tech business ...conducted by large corporations in North America, Europe, and East Asia. But, in reality, most videogames today are made by small clusters of people working on shoestring budgets, relying on existing, freely available software platforms, and hoping, often in vain, to rise to stardom—in short, people working like artists. Aiming squarely at this disconnect between perception and reality, The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist presents a more accurate and nuanced picture of how the vast majority of videogame-makers work.Drawing on insights from over 400 game developers, Brendan Keogh develops a new framework for understanding videogame production as a cultural field in all its complexity. Part-time hobbyists, aspirational students, client-facing contractors, struggling independents, artist collectives, and tightly knit local scenes—all have a place within this model. But proponents of non-commercial game-making don't exist in isolation; Keogh shows how they and their commercial counterparts are deeply interconnected and codependent in the field of videogame production. A cultural intervention, The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist challenges core assumptions about videogame production and reveals the diverse and precarious communities, identities, and approaches that make it a significant cultural practice.
Temporal sentence grounding in videos (TSGV), a.k.a. natural language video localization (NLVL) or video moment retrieval (VMR), aims to retrieve a temporal moment that semantically corresponds to a ...language query from an untrimmed video. Connecting computer vision and natural language, TSGV has drawn significant attention from researchers in both communities. This survey attempts to provide a summary of fundamental concepts in TSGV and current research status, as well as future research directions. As the background, we present a common structure of functional components in TSGV, in a tutorial style: from feature extraction from raw video and language query, to answer prediction of the target moment. Then we review the techniques for multimodal understanding and interaction, which is the key focus of TSGV for effective alignment between the two modalities. We construct a taxonomy of TSGV techniques and elaborate the methods in different categories with their strengths and weaknesses. Lastly, we discuss issues with the current TSGV research and share our insights about promising research directions.
The development of technologies that can generate Deepfake videos is expanding rapidly. These videos are easily synthesized without leaving obvious traces of manipulation. Though forensically ...detection in high-definition video datasets has achieved remarkable results, the forensics of compressed videos is worth further exploring. In fact, compressed videos are common in social networks, such as videos from Instagram, Wechat, and Tiktok. Therefore, how to identify compressed Deepfake videos becomes a fundamental issue. In this paper, we propose a two-stream method by analyzing the frame-level and temporality-level of compressed Deepfake videos. Since the video compression brings lots of redundant information to frames, the proposed frame-level stream gradually prunes the network to prevent the model from fitting the compression noise. Aiming at the problem that the temporal consistency in Deepfake videos might be ignored, we apply a temporality-level stream to extract temporal correlation features. When combined with scores from the two streams, our proposed method performs better than the state-of-the-art methods in compressed Deepfake videos detection.
Video compression is the core technology in mobile (mHealth) and electronic (eHealth) health video streaming applications. With global video traffic projected to reach 82% of all Internet traffic by ...2022, there is a strong need to develop efficient compression algorithms to accommodate expected future growth. For the first time in decades, and especially since ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU-T VCEG expert groups strategically joined forces to develop the highly successful H.264/AVC standard, we have two distinct initiatives competing for the best performing video codec. On the one hand, we have the Alliance for Open Media (AOM) that support a new, royalty free video codec generation, termed AV1, based on VP8 and VP9 efforts. On the other hand, the Joint Video Exploration Team (JVET) has been developing the Versatile Video Codec (VVC) as the successor of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard. At the same time, the breadth of applications utilizing video codecs, involving significant content variability and moving across the video resolution ladder, to satisfy different constraints, have resulted in mixed literature results, with respect to the best performing codec. In this paper, we compare the performance of emerging VVC and AV1 codecs, along with popular HEVC implementations, namely the HEVC Test Model (HM) and x265, as well as earlier, VP9 codec, and investigate their suitability for medical applications. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first performance comparison of emerging VVC and AV1 video codecs for use in the healthcare domain. Experimental evaluation based on three datasets (ultrasound, emergency scenery, and general-purpose videos) demonstrate that VVC outperforms all rival codecs while AV1 achieves better compression efficiency than HEVC in all cases but low-resolution (560\times448 @40Hz) ultrasound videos of the common carotid artery. Furthermore, the use of video despeckling prior to ultrasound video compression can provide significant bitrate savings.
Video-based person re-identification (re-id) is an important application in practice. Since large variations exist between different pedestrian videos, as well as within each video, it is challenging ...to conduct re-id between the pedestrian videos. In this paper, we propose a simultaneous intra-video and inter-video distance learning (SI 2 DL) approach for the video-based person re-id. Specifically, SI 2 DL simultaneously learns an intra-video distance metric and an inter-video distance metric from the training videos. The intra-video distance metric is used to make each video more compact, and the inter-video one is used to ensure that the distance between truly matching videos is smaller than that between wrong matching videos. Considering that the goal of distance learning is to make truly matching video pairs from different persons be well separated with each other, we also propose a pair separation-based SI 2 DL (P-SI 2 DL). P-SI 2 DL aims to learn a pair of distance metrics, under which any two truly matching video pairs can be well separated. Experiments on four public pedestrian image sequence data sets show that our approaches achieve the state-of-the-art performance.
The first video cassette recorders were promoted in the 1970s as an extension of broadcast television technology--a time-shifting device, a way to tape TV shows. Early advertising for Sony's Betamax ...told potential purchasers "You don't have to miss Kojak because you're watching Columbo." But within a few years, the VCR had been transformed from a machine that recorded television into an extension of the movie theater into the home. This was less a physical transformation than a change in perception, but one that relied on the very tangible construction of a network of social institutions to support this new marketplace for movies. In From Betamax to Blockbuster, Joshua Greenberg explains how the combination of neighborhood video stores and the VCR created a world in which movies became tangible consumer goods. Greenberg charts a trajectory from early "videophile" communities to the rise of the video store--complete with theater marquee lights, movie posters, popcorn, and clerks who offered expert advice on which movies to rent. The result was more than a new industry; by placing movies on cassette in the hands (and control) of consumers, video rental and sale led to a renegotiation of the boundary between medium and message, and ultimately a new relationship between audiences and movies. Eventually, Blockbuster's top-down franchise store model crowded local video stores out of the market, but the recent rise of Netflix, iTunes, and other technologies have reopened old questions about what a movie is and how (and where) it ought to be watched. By focusing on the "spaces in between" manufacturers and consumers, Greenberg's account offers a fresh perspective on consumer technology, illustrating how the initial transformation of movies from experience into commodity began not from the top down or the bottom up, but from the middle of the burgeoning industry out.Joshua M. Greenberg is Director of Digital Strategy and Scholarship at the New York Public Library.
Codename Revolution Jones, Steven E; Thiruvathukal, George K
2012, 20120224, 2012-02-24, 20120101
eBook
The Nintendo Wii, introduced in 2006, helped usher in a moment of retro-reinvention in video game play. This hugely popular console system, codenamed Revolution during development, signaled a turn ...away from fully immersive, time-consuming MMORPGs or forty-hour FPS games and back toward family fun in the living room. Players using the wireless motion-sensitive controller (the Wii Remote, or "Wiimote") play with their whole bodies, waving, swinging, swaying. The mimetic interface shifts attention from what's on the screen to what's happening in physical space. This book describes the Wii's impact in technological, social, and cultural terms, examining the Wii as a system of interrelated hardware and software that was consciously designed to promote social play in physical space. Each chapter of Codename Revolution focuses on a major component of the Wii as a platform: the console itself, designed to be low-powered and nimble; the iconic Wii Remote; Wii Fit Plus , and its controller, the Wii Balance Board; the Wii Channels interface and Nintendo's distribution system; and the Wii as a social platform that not only affords multiplayer options but also encourages social interaction in shared physical space. Finally, the authors connect the Wii's revolution in mimetic interface gaming--which eventually led to the release of Sony's Move and Microsoft's Kinect--to some of the economic and technological conditions that influence the possibility of making something new in this arena of computing and culture.
Vidding is a well-established remix practice where fans edit an existing film, music video, TV show, or other performance and set it to music of their choosing. Vids emerged forty years ago as a ...complicated technological feat involving capturing footage from TV with a VCR and syncing with music—and their makers and consumers were almost exclusively women, many of them queer women. The technological challenges of doing this kind of work in the 1970s and 1980s when vidding began gave rise to a rich culture of collective work, as well as conventions of creators who gathered to share new work and new techniques. While the rise of personal digital technology eventually democratized the tools vidders use, the collective aspect of the culture grew even stronger with the advent of YouTube, Vimeo, and other channels for sharing work. Vidding: A History emphasizes vidding as a critical, feminist form of fan practice. Working outward from interviews, VHS liner notes, convention programs, and mailing list archives, Coppa offers a rich history of vidding communities as they evolved from the 1970s through to the present. Built with the classroom in mind, the open-access electronic version of this book includes over one-hundred vids and an appendix that includes additional close readings of vids.