Consumer Preference for Virtual Reality Advertisements with Human-Scene Interaction: An Intermediary Based on Psychological Needs.

Consumption is undergoing a digital revolution brought about by virtual technology, and the emergence of virtual spokespersons has changed the pattern of advertising endorsement sales. Are virtual character spokespersons better than real celebrity spokespersons? This article aims to explore the relationships between different types of advertising spokespersons, different types of advertising scenarios, and consumers' purchase intentions. The results of 2 pilot experiments and 4 formal experiments show that compared with spokespersons by real people, virtual character spokespersons have a greater positive impact on consumers' purchase intentions, which is achieved through the mediating role of psychological need satisfaction. In addition, different advertising scenarios provided by virtual technology have a moderating effect on this process. This empirical study investigates the possible positive effects of virtual character spokesperson compared with real character spokesperson and expands the results of spokesperson category based on self-determination theory.

The Impact of Consumers' Choice Deferral Behavior on Their Intertemporal Choice Preference.

The purpose of this study is to explore the influence of consumers' choice deferral behavior on their intertemporal choice preference. The empirical study shows that consumers' choice deferral behavior can significantly affect their intertemporal decision preference through the level of hopefulness. Compared with non-choice deferral behavior, choice deferral behavior can improve the level of consumers' sense of hopefulness, which then makes them prefer larger-longer interests in intertemporal decision-making. The effect of consumers' sense of hopefulness on their intertemporal choice preference is moderated by their perceived information integrity. When the perceived information integrity is low, the effect of hopefulness on intertemporal decision preference will be enhanced, but when the perceived information integrity is high, the effect of hopefulness on intertemporal decision preference will not be affected. In addition, the theoretical and practical significance of this study and the prospect of future research are also discussed.

Efficient 3-D medical image registration using a distributed blackboard architecture.

A major drawback of 3-D medical image registration techniques is the performance bottleneck associated with re-sampling and similarity computation. Such bottlenecks limit registration applications in clinical situations where fast execution times are required and become particularly apparent in the case of registering 3-D data sets. In this paper a novel framework for high performance intensity-based volume registration is presented. Geometric alignment of both reference and sensed volume sets is achieved through a combination of scaling, translation, and rotation. Crucially, resampling and similarity computation is performed intelligently by a set of knowledge sources. The knowledge sources work in parallel and communicate with each other by means of a distributed blackboard architecture. Partitioning of the blackboard is used to balance communication and processing workloads. Large-scale registrations with substantial speedups, when compared with a conventional implementation, have been demonstrated.

Adopting the DICOM standard for medical infrared images.

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the application of infrared thermal imaging in medicine. Yet fairly little effort has been spent towards standardisation of the field and a common communication and exchange format for thermal images. Most other medical areas where digital imaging is employed have subscribed to DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine) as a common standard for storing and retrieving medical imagery. In this paper we investigate how the DICOM standard in its current form can be adopted to store and communicate medical infrared images.

Overlay of thermal and visual medical images using skin detection and image registration.

Thermography captures the temperature distribution of the human skin and is employed in various medical applications. Often it is useful to cross-reference the resulting thermograms with visual images of the patient, either to see which part of the anatomy is affected by a certain disease or to judge the efficacy of the treatment. An attractive approach to provide this information is to overlay the two image types and show a composite image to the clinician. Producing such an overlay however is a non-trivial task due to differences in image capturing conditions of the two modalities. In this paper we introduce an approach that produces accurate overlays of thermal and visual medical images. First unnecessary background information of the visual part are removed by an image segmentation step based on skin detection. The thermal image is then aligned through an intensity based image registration technique. Experimental results based on an set of visual-thermal image pairs demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.