Edutainment App on Malaysia

The idea of designing content that educates as well as entertains and the rapid growth of development of Android applications contributed to the author’s decision to develop this app. It is an edutainment app that contains facts and general knowledge about Malaysia which will help students in their Geography and History subjects. It acts as the supplementary material to the text books that students are currently using right now. The application can help to improve students’ method of study. Instead of reading a boring, thick text books, they can learn or gain the knowledge through an interactive mobile apps. The study focus on how to design an interactive mobile app which will make the students, particularly or foreign tourists to learn about Malaysia

Some issues on artistic and cultural heritage applications

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are undergoing rapid progress, which is having an increasing impact also on the management, preservation and promotion of arts and cultural heritage. Besides providing solutions for existing problems, new media technologies open up entirely new application scenarios. Based on these technologies, numerous arts and cultural heritage projects have recently been implemented and some relevant technological roadmaps have been identified. In this paper we analyse and discuss some issues related with technological support for artistic and cultural heritage applications and discuss aspects of a technological framework for future applications development that is based on an analysis of existing Information Technology (IT)-based applications and experience acquired recently from projects in the field

Edutainment App on Malaysia

The idea of designing content that educates as well as entertains and the rapid growth of development of Android applications contributed to the author’s decision to develop this app. It is an edutainment app that contains facts and general knowledge about Malaysia which will help students in their Geography and History subjects. It acts as the supplementary material to the text books that students are currently using right now. The application can help to improve students’ method of study. Instead of reading a boring, thick text books, they can learn or gain the knowledge through an interactive mobile apps. The study focus on how to design an interactive mobile app which will make the students, particularly or foreign tourists to learn about Malaysia

The User, The Space and Everything Else in Between: Designing Context-Driven Interactive Spaces through Direct-User Inputs

In this thesis, I present my research project Air + Water. Air + Water is an interactive installation system that detects breath pressure and changes its visualization by detecting the number of users in its space. This project was developed within an exploratory-research design process. It aimed to establish clearer understanding of the user’s input within an interactive installation system through its overall design and visual feedback. The design process used a mixed-method approach, leveraging research through design and user-centered design methodologies along with interaction design methods presented in literature. Building upon related works and existing design frameworks, the idea of a contextualized interactive system came into formation. Through a usability study, Air + Water was evaluated, with and without its context-aware features. This was to see if it was capable of bridging its context-driven design choices to the user’s understanding of the system. The contributions from this research could provide designers in related HCI and interaction design fields to consider these types of design choices when working with direct-user inputs

Synchronized Artificial Natures: The Secret Life of Trees Connecting York, Delft and Alicante

This paper presents an experiment that explored teaching limits in architecture and computational arts. Three universities (York, Tu-Delft and Alicante) collaborated, commissioning and producing three Interactive scenographic spaces. These were formed by visitors, artificial trees as well as reactive technologies and emulated the way in which fungi communicate by connecting their roots underground. Over the four months of duration of the experiment, students learnt about programming resources in contemporary musical scenographic creation; graphic resources and digital manufacturing for 3D printing; component design; Arduino programming; and interfaces such as the “Game of Life” to explain the project in terms of cooperating particles. Theoretical backgrounds such as the architecture of contingency, readings such as “the secret life of the trees” by Wohlleben and performance practices such as “A-volve” by Mignonneau and Sommerer or “Hylozoic series” by Philip Beesley were approached in the workshop. The ultimate goals of this teaching practice described more explicitly in the paper include: understanding the ways in which communities cooperate; synchronous communication between scenic spaces as well as transparent design processes; and efforts to reduce excessive subject learning encapsulation in new Degrees based on the Bologna model

Intelligent Interactive Multimedia by Converging the Intention of Spectator and Multimedia Creator

In this research, we propose a new approach on how human and technology interact with each other. Here, by enhancing the current HCI framework, it will enable interaction between human and technology become more effective and ideally. The aim of this research is to create an Intelligent Interactive Multimedia by converging the intention of spectator and multimedia creator. Several methods are proposed to achieve the conception of Intelligent Interactive Multimedia. Digital Drawing Block is the interactive multimedia with the initial intention of multimedia creator and it forms an interaction with spectator. Spectator intention has been categorized into four common categories, additionally, five features of hand gesture recognition is proposed to deduce the spectator intention. All these five features will be captured by the web-cam during the spectator’s interaction with the Digital Drawing Block. Moreover, captured features will be sent to the machine learning for analyzing. Proposed user models are to assist the machine learning to evaluate the most appropriate category of human behaviour which matches the spectator actual intention. Lastly, graphic that represents spectator intention will be generated together with the initial intention of multimedia creator. The new creation from spectator and multimedia creator will be displayed through the Digital Drawing Block. The conception of Intelligent Interactive Multimedia can represent as 70%'s effort of Multimedia Creator + 30%'s effort of spectator

Tangible user interfaces : past, present and future directions

In the last two decades, Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) have emerged as a new interface type that interlinks the digital and physical worlds. Drawing upon users' knowledge and skills of interaction with the real non-digital world, TUIs show a potential to enhance the way in which people interact with and leverage digital information. However, TUI research is still in its infancy and extensive research is required in or- der to fully understand the implications of tangible user interfaces, to develop technologies that further bridge the digital and the physical, and to guide TUI design with empirical knowledge. This paper examines the existing body of work on Tangible User In- terfaces. We start by sketching the history of tangible user interfaces, examining the intellectual origins of this field. We then present TUIs in a broader context, survey application domains, and review frame- works and taxonomies. We also discuss conceptual foundations of TUIs including perspectives from cognitive sciences, phycology, and philoso- phy. Methods and technologies for designing, building, and evaluating TUIs are also addressed. Finally, we discuss the strengths and limita- tions of TUIs and chart directions for future research

A semantic memory bank assisted by an embodied conversational agents for mobile devices

Alzheimer’s disease is a type of dementia that causes memory loss and interferes with intellectual abilities seriously. It has no current cure and therapeutic efficiency of current medication is limited. However, there is evidence that non-pharmacological treatments could be useful to stimulate cognitive abilities. In the last few year, several studies have focused on describing and under- standing how Virtual Coaches (VC) could be key drivers for health promotion in home care settings. The use of VC gains an augmented attention in the considerations of medical innovations. In this paper, we propose an approach that exploits semantic technologies and Embodied Conversational Agents to help patients training cognitive abilities using mobile devices. In this work, semantic technologies are used to provide knowledge about the memory of a specific person, who exploits the structured data stored in a linked data repository and take advantage of the flexibility provided by ontologies to define search domains and expand the agent’s capabilities. Our Memory Bank Embodied Conversational Agent (MBECA) is used to interact with the patient and ease the interaction with new devices. The framework is oriented to Alzheimer’s patients, caregivers, and therapists

La Vida Secreta De Los Árboles: espacios escénicos sincronizados y naturalezas reactivas (Game of Life 1970 versión Alicante 2017)

Esta comunicación explica un experimento de colaboración y exploración de límites docentes disciplinares en arquitectura y artes computacionales llevado a cabo por tres universidades (York, Tu-Delft y Alicante) mediante la puesta en servicio de espacios escenográficos interactivos formados por visitantes, árboles artificiales y tecnologías reactivas que emulaban el modo de comunicación de hongos que conectan raíces bajo tierra. Durante cuatro meses que duró la experiencia, se produjeron aprendizajes en recursos de programación provenientes de la creación escenográfica musical contemporánea; en recursos gráficos y de fabricación digital para impresora 3D; en diseño de componentes; en programación mediante Arduino; en interfaces como el "Game of Life" para explicar el proyecto en clave de partículas que cooperan. Respaldos teóricos como la arquitectura de la contingencia, lecturas como "la vida secreta de los árboles" de Wohlleben y prácticas performaticas como "A-volve" de Mignonneau y Sommerer o "Hylozoic series" de Philip Beesley acompañaron el taller. Objetivos últimos de esta práctica docente son la comprensión de modos de cooperar de las comunidades; la comunicación sincrónica entre espacios escénicos; el énfasis en los procesos de diseño; y la búsqueda de fórmulas para reducir el encapsulamiento de aprendizajes del modelo Bolonia