13553 research outputs found
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360° Image Manipulation from Inferred Geometry
No full textThis thesis explores innovative methods for enhancing the manipulation and geometric understanding of 360° images in virtual reality (VR) applications, with a focus on depth estimation, surface normal prediction, and multi-task learning. The research presents a comprehensive approach to improving the manipulation of stereo 360° images, particularly in the context of image composition. A novel method is proposed to seamlessly integrate new visual elements into stereo 360° scenes, thereby enhancing user interaction and immersion in VR environments.To support such advanced editing applications, a new technique for estimating depth maps from monocular 360° images is introduced. This method leverages both local and global scene information, significantly improving the accuracy of depth predictions. This is particularly crucial for applications that require spatial awareness, such as virtual and augmented reality, where accurate depth perception is key to realistic interaction with the virtual environment.Furthermore, the thesis introduces a hybrid approach that combines convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs) to improve surface normal estimation. This method takes advantage of CNNs' ability to capture fine-grained details and ViTs' strength in modeling global context, resulting in more precise surface geometry analysis from 360° imagery. This enhanced surface normal estimation plays a vital role in better understanding the spatial structure of the scene.In addition, the research demonstrates the effectiveness of multi-task learning (MTL) for comprehensive scene geometry understanding. By predicting both depth and surface normals simultaneously from monocular 360° images, the proposed MTL framework delivers a more detailed and coherent geometric representation, further contributing to the realism and immersion of VR used scenarios.Through these contributions, the thesis significantly advances the field of 360° image-based manipulations and scene understanding, offering new tools and methodologies that pave the way for more immersive, interactive, and spatially aware experiences for VR applications.</p
Climate Justice and Heat Inequity in Poor Urban Communities: The Lens of Transitional Justice, Green Climate Gentrification, and Adaptation Praxis
No full textUrban heat stress is becoming increasingly urgent, yet it remains understudied within the broader intersection of climate change and spatial justice. While urban climate scholarship has largely focused on climatic impacts such as flooding, rising sea levels, and prolonged droughts, the socio-spatial lens of urban heat in marginalised and low-income urban communities has received limited attention. This article, grounded in a systematic review of the global literature, foregrounds the mechanisms through which heat functions as a site of socio-environmental injustice. We argue that fragmented urban morphologies, entrenched spatial inequalities, and uneven adaptation strategies collectively produce and sustain heat vulnerability. The article identifies three interrelated conceptual framings that elucidate the production and persistence of heat inequity: transitional injustice, green climate gentrification, and intersectional adaptation praxis. These lenses reveal how heat risk is differentially distributed, governed, and experienced with broader discourses of urban marginalisation, environmental dispossession, and epistemic exclusion. We contend that advancing climate justice in the context of urban heat requires moving beyond technocratic and elite-oriented adaptation, toward multi-scalar planning paradigms that recognise embodied vulnerability, structural inequality, and the socio-political ecologies of thermal exposure. By theorising urban heat through the lens of climate justice, this article contributes to a more expansive and critical understanding of urban climate risk, one that situates heat inequity within the broader structures of power, governance, and spatial exclusion shaping contemporary urban environments
Language Learning Strategy Instruction
No full textThis overview traces the evolution of research on language learning strategy instruction (LLSI) to show how strategies can be optimally implemented to enhance learners’ proficiency and self-regulation. The LLSI teaching cycle provides key steps in pairing strategies for task-appropriate instruction, practice and implementation through modeling and reflection. These steps include cognitive strategies linked to metacognitive training to develop protocols that facilitate language learning
Personal Polychromy
No full textThis design thesis aims to challenge the western white architectural preference and chromophobia. This has stemmed from centuries of colour being demonised in art and design, while white has been idealised - a bias rooted in historic colour associations, and the misconception that ancient architecture was entirely white. As a result, interiors and architecture today are commonly presented in white and grey, creating uninspiring, repetitive, unemotional and unmeaningful spaces.This thesis aims to challenge the white architectural preference, through personal colour exploration, informed by modernist concepts, colour psychology and spatial effects, in residential interiors in New Zealand. Colour is vast, subjective and highly personal. Therefore, this design research is based on the author’s personal interpretation and colour relationships, informed by literature discussing colour theory, coloured architecture history, and modernist colour theories and application. Based on analysed key ideas focused on simplicity, colour psychology and function, watercolour explorations are produced. The findings of this thesis serve as a practical example of how individuals can navigate the complexities of colour with personal meaning in a residential context, inspiring creativity.</p
Navigating Acculturation Gaps: Understanding the Experiences of Chinese Second-Generation Immigrants in New Zealand
No full textIn multicultural societies, acculturation is an inevitable challenge faced by immigrants and their families. For second-generation immigrants (SGIs), this process is particularly complex. The pace and manner of cultural adaptation often differ between SGIs and their parents. Parents may prefer to preserve the traditions of their heritage culture, while SGIs, growing up in the host country's environment, are more influenced by mainstream cultural practices. These differences in adaptation are reflected not only in language proficiency but also in values, behaviors, and cultural identities, often create tension within families, influencing parent-child relationships and individual mental health. A defining aspect of SGIs’ experience is the phenomenon of acculturation gaps—an overall discrepancy between parents and children in their acculturation across multiple dimensions, including behaviors, values, and cultural identities. This study focuses on Chinese second-generation immigrants in Auckland, New Zealand, employing Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to explore their lived experiences of acculturation gaps. The research draws on data from semi-structured interviews conducted with 10 participants aged 19 to 24. All participants were born and raised in New Zealand to parents born in Mainland China and self-identify as Chinese. Participants were selected to capture diverse perspectives on how acculturation gaps manifest and are navigated in their lives.The findings highlight how SGIs perceive and understand acculturation gaps with their parents, how these differences affect parent-child relationships and mental health, and how SGIs reconcile these challenges to form a unique, bi-cultural identity. By examining the experiences of this group, the study provides insights into the distinct challenges Chinese SGIs face during the acculturation process, particularly in relation to personal growth, family dynamics, and psychological well-being.</p
People’s Experiences of Psychosocial Support while Living with Lung Cancer
No full textLung cancer has one of the highest mortality rates worldwide, including in Aotearoa New Zealand. People living with lung cancer often face significant psychosocial challenges, with existing literature highlighting their unmet psychosocial needs, largely influenced by the nature of lung cancer, including its causes and its associated stigma. While previous research has explored the experiences of people living with cancer, there remains a critical gap in understanding the psychosocial support experiences of those with lung cancer, and in Aotearoa New Zealand. This study explores how people living with lung cancer experience psychosocial support, based on their recalled experiences of both formal and informal care. This involved analysing a secondary data set of narrative interviews conducted with 15 people with lung cancer and seven nominated family members or friends. Guided by a social constructionist framework and using reflexive thematic analysis, I identified three key themes related to psychosocial support in formal healthcare and four themes related to support through informal care. Findings suggest that person-centred care and self-advocacy are central to the experience of psychosocial support in formal healthcare. These factors help to ensure that people receive care that aligns with their personal values, sociocultural backgrounds, and needs. However, barriers to person-centred care can exist at both individual and systemic levels, while opportunities for self-advocacy and agency are influenced by social and structural factors. Emotional support was identified as a central, highly valued element of psychosocial support within personal relationships, but something that can be overlooked often. Participants’ experiences illustrated how receiving such support is a privilege, which depends on people and their families’ social, cultural, and health capital and resources. This study highlights the importance of considering sociocultural and economic factors that affect people’s access to and experience of psychosocial support while facing lung cancer.</p
Buy Now Pay Later - A Critique Of The 2024 Reforms Report on Stage One of a Research Project on Buy Now, Pay Later Products in New Zealand and of the Regulatory Reforms Effective September 2024
No full textThis is the report of Stage One of a research project that has the overall purpose of investigating whether the changes scheduled to take effect on 2 September 2024 will go far enough to protect consumers in New Zealand, particularly more vulnerable consumers, who may use Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) products to bridge financial gaps
Pratyahara Paradox: Sense Withdrawal and a Contemporary Yoga Aesthetic
No full textThis thesis develops an understanding of the Pratyahara Paradox. Pratyahara (withdrawal of the senses) is a core tenet of yoga philosophy. Through pratyahara, a yoga practitioner can transcend the material world and unite with spiritual consciousness. While a withdrawal from the sensory-material world is embedded in the aims of yoga, it isn’t clear how, and if, pratyahara is part of contemporary yoga. Today, yoga is connected to a multi-billion-dollar industry that sells health and wellbeing through sensory-material experiences. Branded clothing, lean bodies, and curated spaces are all part of a modern re-interpretation of yoga shaped by Western health ideals. As a yoga teacher, and autoethnographic subject of this research, I am troubled by how the people, places, and things of yoga create an aesthetic that reproduces neoliberal health imperatives and neglect yoga’s spiritual purpose. The aim of this thesis is thus to understand the apparent contradiction between the withdrawal of the senses and sensory-material engagements in yoga practice today.To address this paradox, I integrate Karen Barad’s ethico-onto-epistemology with pratyahara’s onto-epistemology to craft a “spiritual posthumanist” auto/ethno/graphy. This methodology navigates inward and outward awareness, using site visits to yoga spaces, object interviews, and crafting practices to examine how sensory encounters with yoga’s material “things” shape experiences and identities in yoga practice today. In my approach, observations, reflections, interview excerpts, and yoga pants are re-configured into three narratives and a make-shift yoga mat. These creative processes bring both author and audience into the sensory, affective, and intellectual experience of the research process. Further, through this process, latent power structures such as whiteness, body-centricity, and neoliberal feminism are made more visible, audible, and tangible in everyday yoga settings. By engaging with the more-than-human world, I reveal how sensory-material engagements reinforce Western health ideals. I also offer pathways to reimagine pratyahara’s role in withdrawing from hegemonic norms. Ultimately, this thesis positions pratyahara and self-study as tools for critical praxis within yoga spaces, encouraging scholar-practitioners to reflect upon, and potentially withdraw from, dominant power structures in contemporary yoga.</p
Radon-Nikodym derivative for Bayesian smoothing density and novel explicit recursion for nonlinear least mean squares smoother
No full textThis is just a new version of earlier posted preprints (see below) with slightly extended title and results. </p
How Call-Takers Respond to Emotional Displays in Family Harm Emergency Calls
No full textReports of family harm are often made through emergency calls, in which callers may be distressed since they may be victims or witnesses of a traumatic event. Distressed callers often display emotionality, creating challenges for gathering information and timely police assistance. My research analyses how call-takers orient to and respond to callers’ emotional displays during family harm reports to New Zealand’s emergency police line. I use a conversation analysis and discursive psychology approach to study a set of emergency police calls.I answer the research question of where and how call-takers respond to callers’ emotional displays in family harm emergency calls, focusing on the openings and interrogative series phases. I identify how call-takers use various interactional practices depending on what phase the call is in. During call openings, call-takers prioritise securing location information and, thus, often use directives to focus the caller on the institutional goal. In contrast, during interrogative series, call-takers often use assessments or make the caller’s emotional state the topic of the call, addressing emotionality to realign the interaction with the institutional goal. In some cases, these practices also aim to ensure the caller’s safety while waiting for police to arrive.My research findings demonstrate that emotional displays are not directly what creates interactional challenges. Instead, emotional displays can create difficulties for the caller in understanding the call-taker’s information requests or providing appropriate answers, which is when trouble arises. My research contributes to the literature on emergency call-taking practices and captures distress in naturally occurring interactions within an institutional setting. Additionally, it contributes to conversation analysis research on displays of emotion within emergency call-taking settings. Research findings can inform call-taker training improvements, ensuring better support for emotional family harm callers without delaying assistance. Furthermore, my findings highlight the importance of using interactional practices that balance institutional efficiency with caller support. Through the examination of call-takers’ practices to respond to callers’ emotional displays, research findings provide insights for call-taker training upholding principles of procedural justice.</p
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