This article presents an overview of integrability of procedural modeling techniques needed to create a complete virtual city with streets, roads, building lots, exteriors and interiors with arranged furniture. Techniques are distributed into four hierarchies: urban plan, buildings, interior and furniture. Each technique is analyzed from the aspect of control of space definition, style uniformity, automatic interaction with other hierarchies and ability to procedurally generate a result around existing content. Each paper presented in this survey contributes either as a new control feature that has a potential of integrating with other techniques of higher, lower or same level of hierarchy, or as a new important part for creating a complete procedural city from highest to lowest level of hierarchy. The paper is concluded with a discussion of strong links between each area in the chain and important challenges in procedural generation of a complete city.

In this work we will show a novel method for improving the performance of content-based image retrieval using a deep neural network. The main focus of the method is training the distance function using the deep neural network and transfer learning. An existing pretrained network for image classification is used as a basis. One of the method's benefits is the fact that the existing network is not retrained and features for the distance function are the neural network's layers which were trained and stored before. The method is tested with the publicly available VGG19 deep neural network. Obtained results are comparable or in some cases better than the state of the art methods with a similar approach.

In software engineering courses with many students, it is often impossible for a professor to give a detailed review of the software project for each student. One solution is to give students a task to make reviews for a few projects. One review consists of a comment on a project and a score. The score represents an ordinal number of the project when student sorts all projects in order by quality. The comment can be used as feedback to their colleagues and the score can be used in the final grade prediction. Double-blind peer review is used to prevent favoritism and unfairness. In the paper methods for random projects distribution, reviews gathering and analysis are presented. Methods have been used on over 100 projects and data gathered from them show moderate to high correlation with final grades. Project rank and project points have correlation factors from r=-0.6 to r=-0.66 and significance p<0.001. Projects have been independently graded with automatic tests.

Multi-, many-core, hybrid processors and parallel programming languages are slowly becoming pervasive in main- stream computing. It is expected that they will affect a large spectrum of systems, from embedded and general-purpose, to high-end computing systems. This architectural change has already challenged programmers to efficiently write an application code that can scale over many cores to utilize its computational power. Moreover, many heterogeneous architectures exist today, hence there was an emergent need for a uniform interface to these architectures. Recently, Khronos Group defined the Open Computing Language (OpenCL) for abstracting the underlying hardware, which enables software developers to write a portable code across different shared-memory architectures. In this paper, we introduce a new parallel implementation of one of the fastest image segmentation algorithms known as Simple Linear Iterative Clustering based on OpenCL. We evaluate the effectiveness of this implementation using only multi-core GPCPU. Our implementation is fully compatible with sequential implementation. When the algorithm is executed sequentially it utilizes only 25% of total computational power of a GPCPU for any image resolution, while its modified algorithm is able to utilize close to 100% for high resolution images. The resulting algorithm is up to 5×faster than its sequential counterpart.

Implementation of natural interactive online 3D visualization is difficult process. To keep people interested in virtual heritage the new ways of immersive interaction must be developed. This paper presents a solution for natural interaction with 3D objects in virtual environments using Android device over WiFi. It describes the principles and concepts of functioning of individual components as well as the principles of operation after the integration of all components into a single software solution.

Today most of the users prefer mobile over desktop applications. The majority of current software solutions either do not use all of the benefits from the service-oriented architecture, or do not support mobile devices. Online stored content reduces the size of the application and makes possible to change content without changing the application. This paper presents a web based service oriented mobile solution for interactive digital storytelling with 3D models and videos. The concept is implemented on a case study of White Bastion, a medieval fortress located on hills above Sarajevo. The users can explore the models of the fortress from different time periods and play video stories by clicking on available markers. Marker data and a list of models are stored on Google Drive and accessed via Google web service APIs.

White bastion fortress has been standing in defense of Sarajevo since medieval period. In time it was changing together with various dominations upon the city. 4D virtual presentation aims to display the historical development of this cultural heritage object through digital storytelling combined with interactive 3D models of the Bastion in various time periods. These models contain digitized findings from the site and their 3D reconstructions. In this paper we present a new method of interactive digital storytelling for cultural heritage and its initial user evaluation.

Digital technologies are an efficient tool for visualization and presentation of the virtual objects. Interaction with the virtual objects for their presentation can be very important, especially in a domain of the presentation of cultural heritage. Implementation of natural interactive online 3D visualization is difficult process. This paper describes the interaction techniques for manipulating 3D objects. The paper gives one solution for natural interaction with virtual objects using Leap Motion as a sensor and WebGL for presenting virtual hand and 3D objects.

During the Ottoman period, Taslihan was the largest accommodation complex in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Today, only one wall remains as a memento of its existence. In this paper, we compare user appreciation of an interactive digital story about this building and of a serious game about Taslihan to see which application offers more knowledge and immersion while bringing this monument to life in the collective memory of the people.

Virtual presentation of cultural heritage is significantly enhanced through the interactive digital storytelling. The common approach is to access the digital stories by clicking the interactive nodes within the virtual environment. We introduce a different method which enables the users to interact with the story and branch to hyperlinked digital content, which can contain virtual environments. The hyperlinked structure implementation is done in Unity. Evaluation of the method is performed through the user feedback analysis.