Visual perception is becoming increasingly important in computer graphics. Research on human visual perception has led to the development of perception-driven computer graphics techniques, where knowledge of the human visual system (HVS) and, in particular, its weaknesses are exploited when rendering and displaying 3D graphics. Findings on limitations of the HVS have been used to maintain high perceived quality but reduce the computed quality of some of the image without this quality difference being perceived. This article investigates the amount of time for which (if at all) such limitations could be exploited in the presence of smell. The results show that for our experiment, adaptation to smell does indeed affect participants’ ability to determine quality difference in the animations. Having been exposed to a smell before undertaking the experiment, participants were able to determine the quality in a similar fashion to the “no smell” condition, whereas without adaptation, participants were not able to distinguish the quality difference.

Summary form only given. We present a method how to create locally and globally interesting stories for virtual museums in a relatively short time. The local interestingness is understood in a Koestlerian way (AH, AHA, HAHA bisociation effects). Global interestingness is achieved by discovering, within the given unique material, options for relating unrelated contexts, internal poetry and/or change of the narration mode. The craft of storytelling resulted in five short movies, completed during the South-East European Virtual Heritage School: Digital Storytelling for Virtual Museums. These intereStories“ are intentionally aimed at overcoming multiple limitations of backtelling, frequent in virtual museums. The five themes include Bosnian blues Sevdah, fate of Sephardic Jews, existing and nonexisting urban area, and traditional Bosnian coffee. The stories were coauthored by 15 beginners storytellers in groups (24 authors) in 5 days alongside with the 12 lectures on theory and narrative case studies from V-must network good practice. Besides the brainstormings, speed-up focused brainwritting feedback was provided twice: once for preexistent stories, second for betaversions. The final creations were produced in Adobe Premiere Pro and published at YouTube.

The cross-modal interaction between vision and other senses is a key part of how we perceive the real world. Significant stimulation to hearing, sense of smell, taste or touch can reduce the cognitive resources the brain is able to allocate to sight, and thus limit what the Human Visual System (HVS) can actually perceive at that moment. Selective rendering is able to exploit such knowledge of the HVS, to render those parts of a virtual environment a viewer is attending to at a high quality and the rest of the scene at a much lower quality, and thus at a substantially reduced rendering time, without the viewer being aware of this quality difference. This paper investigates how the presence of the modalities of sound, smell and ambient temperature in a virtual environment significantly affects a viewer's ability to perceive the quality of the graphics used for that environment. Experiments were run with a total of 356 participants to determine the graphics quality thresholds across the different cross-modal interactions. The results revealed a significant effect of strong perfume, high temperature and audio noise on perceived rendering quality. Under given conditions, this particular combination of modalities can be thus exploited when rendering virtual environments, to substantially reduce rendering time without any loss in the user's perception of delivered visual quality.

Due to the recent technological developments and advancements in the field of computer graphics, and by following the great leap of the web-based technologies such as the greatest iteration and upgrade yet of the HTML to its new variant HTML5, we are experiencing a burst on the scene of the new architectural representation methods that aid in the visualization process. New technologies, both web-based and methodological-based, have not been fully understood and implemented so far, leaving a great unexplored space for the developers and the people involved with the process of the digitalization and 3D visualization to grasp in order to use the full potential of the today’s technological advances. This paper is dedicated towards introducing the new technologies available for the 3D visualization and investigates their implementation on the web, with a focus on the comparative analysis of the emerging web technologies for the 3D rendering and visualization, as oppose to the current methods of 3D graphics implementation (Flash).Additionaly, the purpose of this paper is to empower the usage of the new HTML5 supported tool called WebGL and to use its full potential while delivering the 3D visualization to the web. The user study was carried out and the results revealed that HTML5 had a significantly higher impact as opposed to Flash. This indicates that Flash is no longer meeting the purpose of rendering demanding 3D graphics content and providing quality user interactivity, whilst HTML5/WebGL should be highly utilized in the future as the primary technologies for delivering 3D graphics to the web.

The computer graphics industry is constantly demanding more realistic images and animations. However, producing such high quality scenes can take a long time, even days, if rendering on a single PC. One of the approaches that can be used to speed up rendering times is Visual Perception, which exploits the limitations of the Human Visual System, since the viewers of the results will be humans. Although there is an increasing body of research into how haptics and sound may affect a viewer's perception in a virtual environment, the in uence of smell has been largely ignored. The aim of this thesis is to address this gap and make smell an integral part of multi-modal virtual environments. In this work, we have performed four major experiments, with a total of 840 participants. In the experiments we used still images and animations, related and unrelated smells and finally, a multi-modal environment was considered with smell, sound and temperature. Beside this, we also investigated how long it takes for an average person to adapt to smell and what affect there may be when performing a task in the presence of a smell. The results of this thesis clearly show that a smell present in the environment firstly affects the perception of object quality within a rendered image, and secondly, enables parts of the scene or the whole animation to be selectively rendered in high quality while the rest can be rendered in a lower quality without the viewer noticing the drop in quality. Such selective rendering in the presence of smell results in significant computational performance gains without any loss in the quality of the image or animations perceived by a viewer.

Bosnia and Herzegovina always has been a place where the East meets the West. Over 1000 years, different cultures, religions and civilizations have left their remains in this small country in Western Balkans. Despite all wars and tragic destructions, today in the heart of Sarajevo one can find mosques, Catholic and Orthodox churches and Jewish synagogues next to each other and people of different nations and religions living together in mutual respect and friendship. Multiethnic spirit of Bosnia and Herzegovina lives through its cultural heritage. Therefore our task is to ensure its presentation and preservation using Information and Communications Technologies (ICT). So far researchers have achieved significant results by creating several virtual museums. In this paper we will present the Museum of Bosnian Traditional Objects, Digital Catalogue of Stecaks and the Virtual Museum of Sarajevo Assassination, giving an overview of the process of creating virtual environments from multiple data sources based on various 3D digitization technologies: some based on traditional 3D modeling, other based on laser scanning or photogrametric techniques.

Bosnia and Herzegovina always has been a place where the East meets the West. Over 1000 years, different cultures, religions and civilizations have left their remains in this small country in Western Balkans. Despite all wars and tragic destructions, today in the heart of Sarajevo one can find mosques, Catholic and Orthodox churches and Jewish synagogues next to each other and people of different nations and religions living together in mutual respect and friendship. Multiethnic spirit of Bosnia and Herzegovina lives through its cultural heritage. Therefore our task is to ensure its presentation and preservation using Information and Communications Technologies (ICT). So far researchers have achieved significant results by creating several virtual museums. In this paper we will present the Museum of Bosnian Traditional Objects, Digital Catalogue of Stecaks and the Virtual Museum of Sarajevo Assassination, giving an overview of the process of creating virtual environments from multiple data sources based on various 3D digitization technologies: some based on traditional 3D modeling, other based on laser scanning or photogrametric techniques.

Smell is a key human sense. In the real world, smell plays a leading role in helping us appreciate an environment, for example the smell of fresh coffee, or the dead body. High-fidelity virtual environments are being increasingly used as an accurate representation of the real world for a wide variety of applications, including training, phobia treatment and virtual archeology. This paper compares the diffusion and perception of smell in real and virtual environments. Although airflow can be computed within a virtual environment using, for example a computational fluid dynamic simulator, the results do not necessarily predict how smell may be perceived in the real-world. Virtual smell needs to take into account the type of smell being considered and how humans may perceive this smell.