Weight is perceived through the combination of multiple sensory systems, and a wide range of factors – including touch, visual, and force senses – can influence the perception of heaviness. There have been remarkable advancements in the development of haptic interfaces throughout the years. However, a number of challenges limit the progression to enable humans to sense the weight in virtual reality (VR). This article presents an overview of the factors that influence how weight is perceived and the phenomenon that contributes to various types of weight illusions. A systematic review has been undertaken to assess the development of weight perception in VR, underlying haptic technology that renders the mass of a virtual object, and the creation of weight perception through pseudo-haptic. We summarize the approaches from the perspective of haptic and pseudo-haptic cues that exhibit the sense of weight such as force, skin deformation, vibration, inertia, control–display ratio, velocity, body gestures, and audio–visual representation. The design challenges are underlined, and research gaps are discussed, including accuracy and precision, weight discrimination, heavyweight rendering, and absolute weight simulation. This article is anticipated to aid in the development of more realistic weight perception in VR and stimulated new research interest in this topic.

Periocular recognition remains challenging for deployments in the unconstrained environments. Therefore, this paper proposes an RGB-OCLBCP dual-stream convolutional neural network, which accepts an RGB ocular image and a colour-based texture descriptor, namely Orthogonal Combination-Local Binary Coded Pattern (OCLBCP) for periocular recognition in the wild. The proposed network aggregates the RGB image and the OCLBCP descriptor by using two distinct late-fusion layers. We demonstrate that the proposed network benefits from the RGB image and thee OCLBCP descriptor can gain better recognition performance. A new database, namely an Ethnic-ocular database of periocular in the wild, is introduced and shared for benchmarking. In addition, three publicly accessible databases, namely AR, CASIA-iris distance and UBIPr, have been used to evaluate the proposed network. When compared against several competing networks on these databases, the proposed network achieved better performances in both recognition and verification tasks.

The complex nature of the foreign exchange (FOREX) market along with the increased interest towards the currency exchange market has prompted extensive research from various academic disciplines. With the inclusion of more in-depth analysis and forecasting methods, traders will be able to make an informed decision when trading. Therefore, an approach incorporating the use of historical data along with computational intelligence for analysis and forecasting is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the Gaussian Mixture Model method is applied for data partitioning on historical observations. While the antecedent part of the neuro-fuzzy system of AnYa type is initialised by the partitioning result, the consequent part is trained using the fuzzily weighted RLS algorithm based on the same data. Numerical examples based on the real currency exchange data demonstrated that the proposed approach trained with historical data produce promising results when used to forecast the future foreign exchange rates over a long-term period. Although implemented in an offline environment, it could potentially be utilised in real-time application in the future.

Previous studies in computer science education show that game playing is negatively correlated with success in introductory programming classes in (Wilson, Shrock ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, vol 33, pp 184–188, 2001). However, informally, we observed that students who have previous gaming experience take to programming tasks easier than those without gaming experience. There have also been recent studies that show that playing strategic video games can improve problem-solving skills which is an essential skill in program design. This chapter presents the findings of our study to identify if a correlation between previous gaming experience (game playing) and individual computational thinking (CT) skills exists. To achieve this, a survey was administered on undergraduate students undertaking an introductory computing course to collect data on their gaming history and an individual assignment on Scratch. Each project was subsequently analysed to determine the level of mastery of core CT skills. Cochran–Armitage test of trend was then executed on each CT skill category with respect to the coded gaming experience. The results obtained during our analysis shows a correlation between gaming experience and specific categories of the CT skills domain particularly in the area of abstraction and problem-solving and user interactivity. The outcome of our study should be beneficial as ways to leverage on students’ gaming experience in the classroom will also be discussed. Keywords Computational thinking Game-based learning Games and learning Scratch assignment Introductory programming

Foreign Exchange (Forex) market is a complex and challenging task for prediction due to uncertainty movement of exchange rate. However, these movements over timeframe also known as historical Forex data that offered a generic repeated trend patterns. This paper uses the features extracted from trend patterns to model and predict the next day trend. Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) is applied to learn the historical trend patterns, and use to predict the next day movement trends. We use the 2011 Forex historical data of Australian Dollar (AUS) and European Union Dollar (EUD) against the United State Dollar (USD) for modeling, and the 2012 and 2013 Forex historical data for validating the proposed model. The experimental results show outperforms prediction result for both years.

Recent research has been devoted to detecting people in images and videos. In this paper, a human detection method based on Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HoG) features and human body ratio estimation is presented. We utilized the discriminative power of HoG features for human detection, and implemented motion detection and local regions sliding window classifier, to obtain a rich descriptor set. Our human detection system consists of two stages. The initial stage involves image preprocessing and image segmentation, whereas the second stage classifies the integral image as human or non-human using human body ratio estimation, local region sliding window method and HoG Human Descriptor. Subsequently, it increases the detection rate and reduces the false alarm by deducting the overlapping window. In our experiments, DaimlerChrysler pedestrian benchmark data set is used to train a standard descriptor and the results showed an overall detection rate of 80% above.