A pervasive augmented reality serious game

This paper presents a pervasive augmented reality serious game that can be used to enhance entertainment using a multimodal tracking interface. The main objective of the research is to design and implement generic pervasive interfaces that are user-friendly and can be used by a wide range of users including people with disabilities. A pervasive AR racing game has been designed and implemented. The goal of the game is to start the car and move around the track without colliding with either the wall or the objects that exist in the gaming arena. Users can interact using a pinch glove, a Wiimote, through tangible ways as well as through I/O controls of the UMPC. Initial evaluation results showed that multimodal-based interaction games can be beneficial in serious games

New media and education

In the last thirty years we witnessed to a number of relevant innovations and changes. Some of them belong to the information technology domain and parts of them were the reason why the IT domain became the ICT domain. In order to better understand problems and issues related to education and learning it is useful to outline some of the most relevant achievements and milestones in the technological domain. If we focus on the European approach to the spread of information technology termed in the ‘90ies “Information Society” we can find initiatives such as i2015 the EU policy framework for the information society and media for the 1 next decade and, at global level, the WSIS+10 a ten years activity aimed to draw the guidelines for an harmonious and fruitful development of the information society. It promotes the positive contribution that information and communication technologies can make to the economy, society and personal quality of life. Everyone experienced in “ICT based innovation” knows that “It is not only a matter of technology”. Of course technology advances are one of the potential actors as in the case of the diffusion of personal computing or easy access to digital networking. Anyway different parameters are actively influencing e-Services success or failure: cultural aspects, organisational issues, bureaucracy and workflow, infrastructure and technology in general, user’s habits, literacy, capacity, market models, interaction design or merely mind-set! Before looking in detail how all these aspects are impacting on education and learning let’s take into account some additional relevant aspects

Building Empathy and Developing Instructional Design Experience and Skills: A Case Study of Using Personas to Design Open Education Resources

This single case study involves the authors’ participation and observation of a massive open online course. To help instructional designers (IDs) develop open education resources for adults attempting to pass a United States high school equivalency exam, we constructed six personas that helped IDs put themselves in the users’ shoes. We begin by providing an overview of the scholarship that connects empathy, empathic design, persona construction, and meaning-making. After presenting our case study methodology and how we constructed six authentic personas, we present eight themes that demonstrate how IDs used the personas to build empathy for users and to develop instructional design skills and experience

Virtual Reality Games for Motor Rehabilitation

This paper presents a fuzzy logic based method to track user satisfaction without the need for devices to monitor users physiological conditions. User satisfaction is the key to any product’s acceptance; computer applications and video games provide a unique opportunity to provide a tailored environment for each user to better suit their needs. We have implemented a non-adaptive fuzzy logic model of emotion, based on the emotional component of the Fuzzy Logic Adaptive Model of Emotion (FLAME) proposed by El-Nasr, to estimate player emotion in UnrealTournament 2004. In this paper we describe the implementation of this system and present the results of one of several play tests. Our research contradicts the current literature that suggests physiological measurements are needed. We show that it is possible to use a software only method to estimate user emotion