19614 research outputs found
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The Glass House: Creating and Maintaining Investment in Stories through Interactive Narrative
No full textThe Glass House is a board game built with the focus of researching how to create and maintain investment in stories through interactive narrative. There are several elements of effective interactive narratives including theme, mechanics, meaningful choices, balance, and motivation. Interactive narratives should have a strong and cohesive theme, with mechanics that align with that theme. The narrative should contain meaningful choices so that players feel like their impact on the world matters. The challenges within the game should not actually be balanced, but instead contain the correct amount of imbalance to ensure a rewarding experience. The narrative must also compel players to care about the story to motivate them to move forward in the game. Furthermore, successful interactive narratives must employ transportation immersion, which is the process of figuratively transporting players into another world. Players must buy into the world of the narrative, and therefore become invested in the story.
The Glass House also involved playtests. Participants played through an Alpha version of the game and gave feedback, which then had to be translated into actionable steps to improve player experience and investment. Those next steps include art, simplified mechanics, and narrowed themes for replayability.Jamie Cassels Undergraduate Research Awards (JCURA)UndergraduateReviewe
Legal borderlines: Theorising rupture in the realm of interlegality - The potential for radical legal change in the face of ecological collapse
No full textThe IPCC has issued increasingly stark warnings that climate breakdown and ecological collapse are inevitable if radical action is not taken in the coming decade. To date, the legal academy seems dangerously impervious to this warning. And yet, any “radical action” will also demand radical legal change. Is it possible for law to do more than simply edge forward with piecemeal legal reform? Is radical legal change possible in a legal order that values stability above all else? And if it is, what might it look like?
I start by considering radical change in the form of ruptural events and the ways in which such events question the foundations on which our legal systems are built (Chapter 1). I then consider the origins of ruptural events. It seems that they emerge in the spaces of friction between legal orders, understood in the broadest, pluralist sense. But when the meaning of legal order is understood so broadly – as it is among legal pluralists – it is easy to lose one’s footing: what distinguishes one legal order from another (Chapter 2)? what is specifically legal about each order (Chapter 3)? and, crucially, what does it mean for legal orders to overlap (Chapter 4)? These detours through legal theory are not accessory; we cannot begin to envisage radical legal change without clarifying law’s potential. Together these chapters provide one possible understanding of the “distinctness”, “legalness”, and “intersectingness” of legal orders. With these theoretical tools in hand, I then consider how they help us grapple more constructively with the potential for change in the form of ruptural events (Chapter 5).
The result is an experiment in legal theorising: How might we think about law’s role in times of ecological crisis? And what are the consequences of this thinking for our understanding of what the law can do? My conclusion is that ecological collapse changes the way we should be thinking about law. Indeed, it may not be the only modern development that will push us to reconsider the potential for change in the context of law...Graduat
On your marks, headset, go! Understanding the building blocks of metaverse realms
Get PDFIn 2011, Business Horizons published the social media honeycomb article to help managers and scholars understand what was, then, a new form of media, its various platforms, and how to engage with it and learn to use it. Today, we face similar challenges and opportunities with the metaverse as we try to discover how to attract, enable, serve and capture value from users in some form of virtual world. In this article, we introduce the concept of a ‘metaverse realm’ (i.e., a specific type of metaverse space and community) and present the metaverse honeycomb model to explain the functionalities and affordances for different metaverse realms. We present two applications of the honeycomb model to show how different attention to immersive functionalities can characterize different metaverse realms. To conclude, we outline how the model could be used to strategically evaluate metaverse realms in terms of their external fit (i.e., the who-what-how of realms), internal fit (i.e., the trade-offs and synergies of realm functionalities), and life-cycles (i.e., roadmapping and directing realm evolution).FacultyReviewe
Accounting for Pacific climate variability increases projected global warming
Get PDFObservational constraint methods based on the relationship between the past global warming trend and projected warming across climate models were used to reduce uncertainties in projected warming by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Internal climate variability in the eastern tropical Pacific associated with the so-called pattern effect weakens this relationship and has reduced the observed warming trend over recent decades. Here we show that regressing out this variability before applying the observed global mean warming trend as a constraint results in higher and narrower twenty-first century warming ranges than other methods. Whereas the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessed that warming is unlikely to exceed 2 °C under a low-emissions scenario, our results indicate that warming is likely to exceed 2 °C under the same scenario, and hence, limiting global warming to well below 2 °C will be harder than previously anticipated. However, the reduced uncertainties in these projections could benefit adaptation planning.This study was supported by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (grant RGPIN-2017-04043) and the China Scholarship Council (grant 202008180022).FacultyReviewe
Implementing the Variational Quantum Eigensolver for Materials
Get PDF'In the past few years quantum computers have seen considerable interest from fields which have problems which are computationally expensive to solve with classical computers. One area that has been a major of source of this interest is the simulation of chemical systems. Materials are one type of system that is important to a variety of industries such as renewable energy and medicine. Among the obstacles faced in simulating materials, materials can have properties which are challenging to calculate on classical computers. The promise of quantum computing for improving the exactness of chemical calculations has been shown with a number of methods for a variety of systems. One such method which has previously been used for materials is the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE). However work doing this is still fairly scarce and also typically uses closed source/paid software or does not publish detailed code. The goal of this research is to implement VQE for materials using the python package Tangelo. This implementation will then be used to perform calculations on simple systems to compare this implementation with existing results.Jamie Cassels Undergraduate Research Awards (JCURA)UndergraduateReviewe
Trans+ people’s experiences of in-hospital gender-affirming surgery: An interpretive description
No full textTrans+ people (an umbrella term encompassing Two-Spirit, transgender, gender non-conforming, agender, gender-diverse, gender queer, or non-binary people) routinely face discrimination and transphobia while accessing health care resources, significantly underusing health services with negative impacts on health and well-being. Despite extensive evidence of discrimination across diverse care settings, there is a concerning gap in research examining Trans+ people’s experiences of acute care. This lack of academic literature upholds normative practices that contribute to the perpetuation of inequity within our health systems. Our research focuses on exploring Trans+ experiences interacting with the health care system when seeking gender-affirming surgery– Gender-affirming surgery is an opportunity for health care providers to facilitate a joyous occasion for Trans+ patients, and yet the interaction with health services is often fraught with increased experiences of discrimination. This qualitative research study aims to examine the pre-surgical and post-surgical acute health care experiences of Trans+ people who have experienced gender-affirming surgery in Victoria or Vancouver within the last 5 years through semi-structured interviews, utilizing interpretive description methodology to develop our thematic analysis. It is hoped that our research will contribute to systemic health care improvements by amplifying Trans+ voices and their experiences in our collective solutions to inequitable access.Jamie Cassels Undergraduate Research Awards (JCURA)UndergraduateReviewe
Validating landsat analysis ready data for nearshore sea surface temperature monitoring in the Northeast Pacific
No full textThank you to the University of Victoria and the Spectral Remote Sensing Lab for providing computational facilities for this study. S.S would like to also thank/acknowledge the Forrest Research Foundation for funding. This research was originally conducted as part of an honours thesis (2022) by A.W. towards a BSc Honours in Geography at the University of Victoria, BC, Canada. Thank you to Alex Guyn for his support during the early stages of the research and initial investigation of the data. Thank you to Lianna Gendall for her advice and mentorship. Thank you to NASA and the USGS for acquiring and providing spaceborne data and Fisheries and Oceans Canada for their in situ monitoring and dissemination of oceanographic data. Special thanks to Andrea Jans Van Rensburg and Connor Dean for their camaraderie during late nights in the Geomatics Lab and GIS troubleshooting.In the face of global ocean warming, monitoring essential climate variables from space is necessary for understanding regional trends in ocean dynamics and their subsequent impacts on ecosystem health. Analysis Ready Data (ARD), being preprocessed satellite-derived products such as Sea Surface Temperature (SST), allow for easy synoptic analysis of temperature conditions given the consideration of regional biases within a dynamic range. This is especially true for SST retrieval in thermally complex coastal zones. In this study, we assessed the accuracy of 30 m resolution Landsat ARD Surface Temperature products to measure nearshore SST, derived from Landsat 8 TIRS, Landsat 7 ETM+, and Landsat 5 TM thermal bands over a 37-year period (1984–2021). We used in situ lighthouse and buoy matchup data provided by Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO). Excellent agreement (R2 of 0.94) was found between Landsat and spring/summer in situ SST at the farshore buoy site (>10 km from the coast), with a Landsat mean bias (root mean square error) of 0.12 °C (0.95 °C) and a general pattern of SST underestimation by Landsat 5 of −0.28 °C (0.96 °C) and overestimation by Landsat 8 of 0.65 °C (0.98 °C). Spring/summer nearshore matchups revealed the best Landsat mean bias (root mean square error) of −0.57 °C (1.75 °C) at 90–180 m from the coast for ocean temperatures between 5 °C and 25 °C. Overall, the nearshore image sampling distance recommended in this manuscript seeks to capture true SST as close as possible to the coastal margin—and the critical habitats of interest—while minimizing the impacts of pixel mixing and adjacent land emissivity on satellite-derived SST.Funds were available from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Alliance grant awarded to MC (Ref. number: ALLRP 566735-21).FacultyReviewe
A new subclass of analytic functions associated with the q-derivative operator related to the Pascal distribution series
Get PDFA new subclass [,,] of analytic functions is introduced by making use of the q-derivative operator associated with the Pascal distribution. Certain properties of analytic functions in the subclass [,,] are derived. Some known results are generalized.FacultyReviewe
My experience on a climate distress research project
Get PDFMy research was conducted working on a research project aiming to learn more about climate distress, specifically on a day to day basis. The project consisted of a daily survey, in which participants would answer questions about their emotions and behaviours relating to climate change. I learned about all of the important steps taken in order to initiate a new research project. I was able to experience the many major, and minor, details that one must pay close attention to. I went through a trial run of the survey and shared my ideas and learned from others about pointers that often bring a survey to higher quality. Along with observing and talking to the team, my main role was to create a website for the survey. The website includes information on the study, eligibility, and how to join. With this I learned more about building a website in general, but more specifically one for a research project, with the audience being potential participants. I also was a part of the weekly meetings, in which I was also able to learn more about the different roles that each person of the team has, and how they work separately, but even more importantly, how they work together.Valerie Kuehne Undergraduate Research Awards (VKURA)UndergraduateReviewe
UVic Convocation June 12, 2024 – 6:00 pm
No full textStudents from the Division of Continuing Studies.UndergraduateUnreviewe