Esteban Clua

Fluminense Federal University | UFF · Departamento de Ciência da Computação (DCC)

Immersive experiences within public spaces offer significant educational and recreational potential, yet they remain unexplored in developing optimal experiences. The aim of this work is to pinpoint pertinent user experience elements crucial for user engagement in such interactions. Furthermore, this investigation establishes correlations between i...

The usage of game data to analyze relevant information and possibilities about the game has been widely explored by academia and industry. Hence, numerous techniques exist for collecting data with distinct objectives. Among the strategies employed for analyzing gameplay sessions, the collection and analysis of provenance data emerge as prominent. I...

The Metaverse, an immersive virtual environment enabling real-time interactions, presents a novel opportunity to enhance workflows in healthcare, particularly in clinical sessions. The necessity for immersive, collaborative, and device-friendly environments has become increasingly apparent in the age of remote work and the rapid advancement of XR t...

Game Provenance has been proposed and employed for Game Analytics tasks as they capture game session data in detail and allow exploratory analysis and visualizations. Games are highly heterogeneous models with several interacting agents and game-world environment elements. Game Provenance Graphs can accommodate the heterogeneous nature of such appl...

Extended Reality as a consolidated game platform was always a dream for both final consumers and game producers. If for one side this technology had enchanted and called the attention due its possibilities, for other side many challenges and difficulties had delayed its proliferation and massification. This paper intends to rise and discuss aspects...

The success of an oil well drilling process depends, among other factors, on the borehole stability, which is closely related to fractures. Borehole imaging tools are commonly used to identify this kind of feature. Visually, fractures can be identified as sinusoidal curves in the 2D data obtained by the ultrasonic borehole imager (UBI). Their autom...

Unmanned vehicles keep growing attention as they facilitate innovative commercial and civil applications within the Internet of Things (IoT) realm. In this context, autonomous sailing boats are becoming important marine platforms for performing different tasks, such as surveillance, water, and environmental monitoring. Most of these tasks heavily d...

Intelligent agents are critical components of the current game development state of the art. With advances in hardware, many games can simulate cities and ecosystems full of agents. These environments are known as multi-agent environments. In this domain, reinforcement learning has been explored to develop artificial agents in games. In reinforceme...

Virtual reality has been increasingly widely used in teaching applications, various knowledge areas, and scientific dissemination. Based on this, a collaboration emerged between Casa da Descoberta the Federal Fluminense University's science museum, based at the Physics Institute, and MediaLab, a laboratory specializing in Virtual Reality content at...

To non-experts, balancing consciousness is even harder concerning their perception of how their decisions possibly affect employees. In this work, we interviewed three managers to understand their knowledge of balancing and their level of perception of the theme. Our results indicate they know it can affect user satisfaction, but they do not know p...

Strategic management and production of internal energy in autonomous robots is becoming a research topic with growing importance, especially for platforms that target long-endurance missions, with long-range and duration. It is fundamental for autonomous vehicles to have energy self-generation capability to improve energy autonomy, especially in si...

Gamification has emerged as a technology trend that attempts to bring different characteristics from games to various services and systems. However, some gamified applications in the business context fail to their objectives and still cause adverse effects on their users. Recent research has proposed gamification analytics to understand user behavi...

Virtual reality (VR) and head-mounted displays are continually gaining popularity in various fields such as education, military, entertainment, and health. Although such technologies provide a high sense of immersion, they can also trigger symptoms of discomfort. This condition is called cybersickness (CS) and is quite popular in recent virtual rea...

Virtual reality (VR) and head-mounted displays are constantly gaining popularity in various fields such as education, military, entertainment, and health. Although such technologies provide a high sense of immersion, they can also trigger symptoms of discomfort. This condition is called cybersickness (CS) and is quite popular in recent virtual real...

Virtual reality (VR) and head-mounted displays are constantly gaining popularity in various fields such as education, military, entertainment, and bio/medical informatics. Although such technologies provide a high sense of immersion, they can also trigger symptoms of discomfort. This condition is called cybersickness (CS) and is quite popular in re...

Game agents are efficiently implemented through different AI techniques, such as neural network, reinforcement learning, and evolutionary search. Although there are many works for each approach, we present a critical analysis and comparison between them, suggesting a common benchmark and parameter configurations. The evolutionary strategy implement...

Extended Reality as a consolidated game platform was always a dream for both final consumers and game producers. If for one side this technology had enchanted and called the attention due its possibilities, for other side many challenges and difficulties had delayed its proliferation and massification. This workshop intends to rise and discuss aspe...

Gamification has become increasingly popular in business contexts. This approach suggests long-term sustainable persistent systems as it increases engagement at all organizational levels. However, a gamified system generates a series of events, decisions, and interactions from the users that need to be monitored and captured for analysis. Therefore...

Virtual reality (VR) and head-mounted displays are constantly gaining popularity in various fields such as education, military, entertainment, and health. Although such technologies provide a high sense of immersion, they can also trigger symptoms of discomfort. This condition is called cybersickness (CS) and is quite popular in recent VR publicati...

Extended Reality as a consolidated game platform was always a dream for both final consumers and game producers. If for one side this technology had enchanted and called the attention due its possibilities, for other side many challenges and difficulties had delayed its proliferation and massification. This paper intends to rise and discuss aspects...

The representation of consistent mixed reality (XR) environments requires adequate real and virtual illumination composition in real-time. Estimating the lighting of a real scenario is still a challenge. Due to the ill-posed nature of the problem, classical inverse-rendering techniques tackle the problem for simple lighting setups. However, those a...

The representation of consistent mixed reality (XR) environments requires adequate real and virtual illumination composition in real-time. Estimating the lighting of a real scenario is still a challenge. Due to the ill-posed nature of the problem, classical inverse-rendering techniques tackle the problem for simple lighting setups. However, those a...

Virtual reality (VR) and head-mounted displays are constantly gaining popularity in various fields such as education, military, entertainment, and bio/medical informatics. Although such technologies provide a high sense of immersion, they can also trigger symptoms of discomfort. This condition is called cybersickness (CS) and is quite popular in re...

Virtual reality (VR) and head-mounted displays are constantly gaining popularity in various fields such as education, military, entertainment, and bio/medical informatics. Although such technologies provide a high sense of immersion, they can also trigger symptoms of discomfort. This condition is called cybersickness (CS) and is quite popular in re...

Virtual reality (VR) and head-mounted displays are continually gaining popularity in various fields such as education, military, entertainment, and health. Although such technologies provide a high sense of immersion, they can also trigger symptoms of discomfort. This condition is called cybersickness (CS) and is quite popular in recent virtual rea...

Game Analytics is an important research topic in digitalentertainment. Data log is usually the key to understand players’behavior in a game. However, alpha and beta builds may need aspecial attention to player focus and immersion. In this paper, wepropose t he us e of player’s focus detection, through theclassification of pictures. Results show tha...

Virtual reality has become popular in games and training applications because of the mass use of head-mounted displays for audiences in various segments such as education, military, entertainment, and games. Despite such devices producing a high sense of immersion and presence, they also cause discomfort to users in uncomfortable sensations called...

Game analytics became a very popular and strategic tool for business intelligence in the game industry. One of the many aspects of game analytics is predictive analytics, which generates predictive models using statistics derived from game sessions to predict future events. The generation of predictive models is of great interest in the context of...

Foveation is a technique that allows real-time image processing by drastically reducing the amount of visual data without loosing essential information around some focused area. When a robot needs to pay attention at two or more regions of the image at the same time, e.g., for tracking two or more objects, multifoveation is necessary. In this case,...

Abnormal heart function is one of the largest causes of death in the world. Understanding and simulating its contraction and relaxation movements may reduce this mortality and improve specific treatments. Due the high processing time to compute propagation of an electrical wave through cardiac tissue, interactive and real time simulations are a cha...

Most of the m-health available on the market today aims to promote a healthy lifestyle and to increase the well-being of adults 50+, but few are specifically designed for them. Thus, keeping users engaged for long periods of usage is a constant challenge, especially in cases of diseases that cannot be cured, such as diabetes and cardiac insufficien...

Virtual reality (VR) is an imminent trend in games, education, entertainment, military, and health applications, as the use of head-mounted displays is accessible to everyone. While VR provides immersive experiences, it still does not offer an entirely perfect situation, mainly due to cybersickness (CS) issues. In this work, we propose a novel appr...

First person videos and games are the central paradigms of camera positioning when using Head Mounted Displays (HMDs). In these situations, the user’s hands and arms play a fundamental role in self-presence feeling and interface. While their visual image is trivial in Augmented Reality devices or when using depth cameras attached to the HMDs, their...

Heterogeneous systems employing CPUs and GPUs are becoming increasingly popular in large-scale data centers and cloud environments. In these platforms, sharing a GPU across different applications is an important feature to improve hardware utilization and system throughput. However, under scenarios where GPUs are competitively shared, some challeng...

Virtual reality (VR) is an imminent trend in games, education, entertainment, military, and health applications, as the use of head-mounted displays is becoming accessible to the mass market. Virtual reality provides immersive experiences but still does not offer an entirely perfect situation, mainly due to Cybersickness (CS) issues. In this work,...

Project comprehension questions, such as “which modified artifacts can affect my work” and “how can I identify the developers who should be assigned to a given task” are difficult to answer, require an analysis of the project and its data, are context specific, and cannot always be pre-defined. Current research approaches are restricted to post hoc...

Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) became an important platform to general purpose computing, thanks to their high performance and low cost when compared to CPUs. Modern GPU architectures are constantly evolving with growing resources. In order to take advantage of all the resources available and increase the GPU efficiency, new generation GPUs incl...

Game analytics became a very popular and strategic tool for business intelligence in the game industry. One of the many aspects of game analytics is predictive analytics, which generates predictive models using statistics derived from game sessions to predict future events. The generation of predictive models is of great interest in the context of...

Making artificial agents that learn how to play is a long-standing goal in the area of Game AI. Recently, several successful cases have emerged driven by Reinforcement Learning (RL) and neural network-based approaches. However, in most of the cases, the results have been achieved by training directly from pixel frames with valuable computational re...

Over the last decade, most of studies were focused on assessments of presence, degrees of immersion and user involvement with virtual reality, few works, however, addressed the mixed reality environments. In virtual reality, mostly through an egocentric point of view, the user is usually represented by a virtual body. In this work, we present an ap...

Head Mounted Display (HMD) became a popular device, drastically increasing the usage of Virtual, Mixed, and Augmented Reality. While the systems’ visual resources are accurate and immersive, precise interfaces require depth cameras or special joysticks, requiring either complex devices or not following the natural body expression. This work present...

Virtual Reality is an upcoming trend in games and entertainment applications as the use of head-mounted displays becomes accessible for the mass market. These systems aim to provide immersive experiences, but they still do not offer a completely seamless experience, mostly due to sickness symptoms that can be experienced by the players. Cybersickne...

Virtual Reality (VR) is an upcoming trend in games and entertainment applications as the use of head-mounted displays becomes accessible for the mass market. These systems aim to provide immersive experiences, but they still do not provide a completely seamless experience, mostly due to sickness symptoms that can be experienced by the players. Cybe...

Game Analytics comprises a set of techniques to analyze both the game quality and player behavior. To succeed in Game Analytics, it is essential to identify what is happening in a game (an effect) and track its causes. Thus, game provenance graph tools have been proposed to capture cause-and-effect relationships occurring in a gameplay session to a...

Simulations of cardiac electrophysiological models in tissue, particularly in 3D require the solutions of billions of differential equations even for just a couple of milliseconds, thus highly demanding in computational resources. In fact, even studies in small domains with very complex models may take several hours to reproduce seconds of electric...

Morphological classification is a key piece of information to define samples of galaxies aiming to study the large-scale structure of the universe. In essence, the challenge is to build up a robust methodology to perform a reliable morphological estimate from galaxy images. Here, we investigate how to substantially improve the galaxy classification...

We propose a versatile method for estimating the RMS error of depth data provided by generic 3D sensors with the capability of generating RGB and depth (D) data of the scene, i.e., the ones based on techniques such as structured light, time of flight and stereo. A common checkerboard is used, the corners are detected and two point clouds are create...

The recent developments in virtual and mixed reality by the video game and entertainment industries are responsible for increasing user's visual immersion and provide a better user experience in games and other interactive simulations. However, the interaction between the user and simulated environment still relies on game controllers or other unna...

Different solutions present the usage of bicycles with Head Mounted Display (HMD) in which virtual scenarios are visualized as background for athletes training or as cardiac patient rehabilitation systems. However, assessments on presence, degrees of immersion and user involvement with real bicycles in those virtual scenarios still are rare. In thi...

Game controllers design is undergoing a major shift due to the disruptive forces of new paradigms of interaction and a wide set of game genres. With so many approaches involving this device, in this work we want to address the challenge of generating ideas for a totally new and innovative game controller that pleases its players. In order to achiev...