Recent studies have shown that the social context in which people play digital multiplayer games has an effect on their experience. Whether co-players are in the same location ("co-located") or in different locations ...

Presence has various definitions, but can be understood as the sensation that a virtual environment is a real place, that the user is actually in the virtual environment rather than at the display terminal, or that the ...

We designed and developed a Collaborative Annotation System for Proteins called DAS Writeback, which extends the Distributed Annotation System (DAS) to provide the functionalities of adding, editing and deleting annotations. ...

This dissertation investigates the challenges that Deaf adults encounter at the task of learning computer literacy skills. Deaf adults who communicate using South African Sign Language (SASL) come from poor socio-economic ...

Within developing countries, there is a digital divide between rural and urban areas. In order to overcome this division, we need to provide locally relevant Information and Communication Technology (ICT) services to these ...

This work investigated making virtual environments easier to program, by designing a suitable distributed shared memory system. To be usable, the system must keep latency to a minimum, as virtual environments are very ...

We describe a data visualisation system which uses spreadsheets as its user interface metaphor. Similar systems implemented in the past were hampered by the contradiction between an imperative formula language and the ...

This dissertation seeks to develop image based animation methods using the technique of optic flow analysis developed for a moving planar object. Image based rendering is presented as a class of algorithm using two dimensional ...

A tool has been designed and implemented to use information extracted from photographs captured using uncalibrated cameras (so-called casual photographs) to fill the occlusions which occur in three-dimensional models of ...

Currently, the standard approach to visibility preprocessing algorithms is to use a form of approximate solution, known as conservative culling. Such algorithms over-estimate the set of visible polygons. This compromise ...

The preferred method of communication amongst Deaf people is that of sign language. There are problems with the video quality when using the real-time video communication available on mobile phones. The alternative is to ...

The research has been based on the thesis that efficient volume rendering of datasets, contained on the Internet, can be achieved on average personal workstations. We present a new algorithm here for efficient incremental ...

Story-telling is being used for the preservation of culture, and interactive story-telling in particular is attractive for its ability to provide the user with a hands-on experience. We explored the feasibility of interactive ...

This dissertation explores the use of a simple model of the human visual system to yield a performance improvement with hierarchical radiosity. Hierarchical radiosity is a physically based rendering algorithm and hence ...

Presence in Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) can be defined into personal presence and co-presence. Personal presence is having a feeling of "being there" in the CVE yourself. Co-presence is having a feeling that ...

This dissertation presents a comparison of the effects of two media, VR and paper (i.e. pamphlets) in communicating supportive information to an HIV+ sample group. We created a VE to provide social and informational support ...

In this dissertation we explore methods of quality control of untextured polygonal models. The tools presented build, evaluate and improve on the field of multiresolution analysis through decimation. We evaluate the quality ...

The ubiquity of mobile phones provides an opportunity to use them for learning programming beyond the classroom. This would be particularly useful for novice learners of programming in resource- constrained environments. ...

SignSupport is a collaborative project between the Computer Science departments of the University of Cape Town (UCT) and the University of the Western Cape (UWC), South Africa. The intention of the software is to assist ...

Computer scientists must align social and technical factors for communication technologies in developing regions yet lack a framework to do so. The novel Softbridge framework comprises several components to address this ...