Evaluation Report of Prospero’s Island: an Immersive Approach to Literacy at Key Stage 3.

Prospero's Island is an immersive theatre project created by Punchdrunk Enrichment and sponsored by Learning Partner, London Borough of Hackney (Hackney Learning Trust). The project sought to inspire and motivate students’ engagement with the English curriculum, and to develop an immersive approach to teaching literacy that would improve students’ learning. Prospero’s Island took place in a secondary academy in Hackney, London over two school terms (autumn 2014-spring 2015). The project was embedded in existing schemes of work, and included the following elements: • An immersive theatre installation for Year 7-8 students (aged 11-13 years); this took the form of an interactive game based on The Tempest; over a two-week period groups of students participated in this experience for a morning or afternoon (autumn term); • A Teaching and Learning Day (TALD) and eight twilight CPD sessions on immersive learning techniques for school staff and teachers across London (autumn term); • A return to the installation for one lesson, led by English teachers (autumn term); • Follow-on work by teachers to develop immersive learning in English lessons (spring term); • An independent evaluation of the project (autumn and spring terms)

"Hegelian Buddhist Hypertextual Media Inhabitation, or, Criticism in the Age of Electronic Immersion"

What can it mean to criticize when you are inside the work itself? In a immersive electronic or digital environment critic is not distanced on a platform based on firm principles. Yet criticism self-awareness and commentary remain possible. This essay examines various techniques for dealing with immersive environments critically

Immersive video conferencing architecture using game engine technology

This paper introduces the use of gaming technology for the creation of immersive video conferencing systems. The system integrates virtual meeting rooms with avatars and life video feeds, shared across different clients. Video analysis is used to create a sense of immersiveness by introducing aspects of the real world in the virtual environment. This architecture will ease and stimulate the development of immersive and intelligent telepresence systems

Comparison of head gaze and head and eye gaze within an immersive environment

For efficient collaboration between participants, eye gaze is seen as being critical for interaction. Teleconferencing systems such as the AcessGrid allow users to meet across geographically disparate rooms but as of now there seems no substitute for face to face meetings. This paper gives an overview of some preliminary work that looks towards integrating eye gaze into an immersive Collaborative Virtual Environment and assessing the impact that this would have on interaction between the users of such a system. An experiment was conducted to assess the difference between users abilities to judge what objects an avatar is looking at with only head gaze being viewed and also with eye and head gaze data being displayed. The results from the experiment show that eye gaze is of vital importance to the subjects correctly identifying what a person is looking at in an immersive virtual environment. This is followed by a description of how the eye tracking system has been integrated into an immersive collaborative virtual environment and some preliminary results from the use of such a system

Exploring the Design Space of Immersive Urban Analytics

Recent years have witnessed the rapid development and wide adoption of immersive head-mounted devices, such as HTC VIVE, Oculus Rift, and Microsoft HoloLens. These immersive devices have the potential to significantly extend the methodology of urban visual analytics by providing critical 3D context information and creating a sense of presence. In this paper, we propose an theoretical model to characterize the visualizations in immersive urban analytics. Further more, based on our comprehensive and concise model, we contribute a typology of combination methods of 2D and 3D visualizations that distinguish between linked views, embedded views, and mixed views. We also propose a supporting guideline to assist users in selecting a proper view under certain circumstances by considering visual geometry and spatial distribution of the 2D and 3D visualizations. Finally, based on existing works, possible future research opportunities are explored and discussed.Comment: 23 pages,11 figure

3-D immersive screen experiments

We are currently piloting a range of computer simulated science experiments as 3-D virtual environments. These are rendered on a PC in 3-D and use photographs of specic parts of the actual apparatus as textures to add realism to the simulation. In particular, photographs are used to represent the consequential views of an experiment. These particular views may also be animated depending on the state of the experiment. The work combines the photographic approach of the Interactive Screen Experiments (ISEs) with the advantages of a fully simulated 3-D environment where the user can interact with the apparatus in a more natural and intuitive way. The potential advantages are that users can quickly adapt to the environment and in particular the controls. They gain realistic views of the physicality of the experiment as they are not just seeing it from a particular viewpoint, but from wherever they see t to place themselves within the experiment's scene. They are immersed in the experiment in a way that mitigates some of the objections to online as opposed to real laboratory experimentation. It is also the case that the results of an initial calibration or setup carry over into the main part of the experiment. This is perceived as an extremely important teaching element of Physics practicals as the user learns that care in setting up an experiment is an essential part of being able to get good results. Furthermore there is no need to represent scales, read-outs or controls as separate parts of the interface; these can all be rendered at their correct physical positions within the experiment. The rst of these experiments based on the use of a diffraction grating has been fully implemented and has been evaluated with a Physics A level class. The application and its evaluation will be presented. A more complicated experiment using a spectrometer has also been modelled which raises issues of complexity. These issues will also be discussed

Immersive and non immersive 3D virtual city: decision support tool for urban sustainability

Sustainable urban planning decisions must not only consider the physical structure of the urban development but the economic, social and environmental factors. Due to the prolonged times scales of major urban development projects the current and future impacts of any decision made must be fully understood. Many key project decisions are made early in the decision making process with decision makers later seeking agreement for proposals once the key decisions have already been made, leaving many stakeholders, especially the general public, feeling marginalised by the process. Many decision support tools have been developed to aid in the decision making process, however many of these are expert orientated, fail to fully address spatial and temporal issues and do not reflect the interconnectivity of the separate domains and their indicators. This paper outlines a platform that combines computer game techniques, modelling of economic, social and environmental indicators to provide an interface that presents a 3D interactive virtual city with sustainability information overlain. Creating a virtual 3D urban area using the latest video game techniques ensures: real-time rendering of the 3D graphics; exploitation of novel techniques of how complex multivariate data is presented to the user; immersion in the 3D urban development, via first person navigation, exploration and manipulation of the environment with consequences updated in real-time. The use of visualisation techniques begins to remove sustainability assessment’s reliance on the existing expert systems which are largely inaccessible to many of the stakeholder groups, especially the general public

Immersion on the Edge: A Cooperative Framework for Mobile Immersive Computing

Immersive computing (IC) technologies such as virtual reality and augmented reality are gaining tremendous popularity. In this poster, we present CoIC, a Cooperative framework for mobile Immersive Computing. The design of CoIC is based on a key insight that IC tasks among different applications or users might be similar or redundant. CoIC enhances the performance of mobile IC applications by caching and sharing computation-intensive IC results on the edge. Our preliminary evaluation results on an AR application show that CoIC can reduce the recognition and rendering latency by up to 52.28% and 75.86% respectively on current mobile devices.Comment: This poster has been accepted by the SIGCOMM in June 201