Generating expressive speech for storytelling applications

Work on expressive speech synthesis has long focused on the expression of basic emotions. In recent years, however, interest in other expressive styles has been increasing. The research presented in this paper aims at the generation of a storytelling speaking style, which is suitable for storytelling applications and more in general, for applications aimed at children. Based on an analysis of human storytellers' speech, we designed and implemented a set of prosodic rules for converting "neutral" speech, as produced by a text-to-speech system, into storytelling speech. An evaluation of our storytelling speech generation system showed encouraging results

Transforming Learning Through Online Storytelling: : 'Making the News' Evaluation Report

This report presents the findings from an independent evaluation undertaken by the University of Hertfordshire of the ‘Making The News project’ as it functioned within the East of England Broadband Network region (E2BN). Making the News represents a set of simple tools that allow teachers and students to rapidly produce ‘news’ stories and publish them on line. It was developed by the Centre for New Media at the Open University in conjunction with E2BNFinal Published versio

Beyond cute: exploring user types and design opportunities of virtual reality pet games

Virtual pet games, such as handheld games like Tamagotchi or video games like Petz, provide players with artificial pet companions or entertaining pet-raising simulations. Prior research has found that virtual pets have the potential to promote learning, collaboration, and empathy among users. While virtual reality (VR) has become an increasingly popular game medium, litle is known about users' expectations regarding game avatars, gameplay, and environments for VR-enabled pet games. We surveyed 780 respondents in an online survey and interviewed 30 participants to understand users' motivation, preferences, and game behavior in pet games played on various medium, and their expectations for VR pet games. Based on our findings, we generated three user types that reflect users' preferences and gameplay styles in VR pet games. We use these types to highlight key design opportunities and recommendations for VR pet games

Motivational teaching activities to develop the speaking skills in english with students from level 10th at Unidad Educativa República del Ecuador in Otavalo.

Strengthen the development of the speaking skills by applying motivational activities with students from level tenth at Unidad Educativa República del Ecuador in Otavalo.El objetivo de esta investigación fue fortalecer el desarrollo de la habilidad oral a través de una guía de actividades didácticas motivacionales con estudiantes del décimo nivel de la Unidad Educativa República del Ecuador en Otavalo. Este estudio se enfoca en actividades didácticas motivacionales para incentivar a los estudiantes a hablar en inglés durante las clases, tomando en cuenta los módulos del Ministerio de Educación incorporados con actividades para hablar en inglés. Además, la recolección de datos se basó en métodos mixtos para garantizar la viabilidad de este estudio; ayudó a recopilar, analizar e ilustrar datos para resolver el problema. En este sentido, una prueba de motivación se centró en las clases de inglés en la primera parte. Además, utilizando una prueba de expresión oral basada en vocabulario, gramática, pronunciación y comunicación. La encuesta y la entrevista para los estudiantes y el profesor se centraron en las actividades de habla en el aula. Este estudio sugiere que: los estudiantes se sienten desmotivados por la repetición de actividades y falta de confianza durante las clases. Por lo tanto, el tema de investigación se tomó de acuerdo a la problemática de la falta de actividades de fortalecimiento y motivación para desarrollar la destreza oral en las clases de inglés. Por esta razón, esta investigación ha propuesto actividades dentro del aula para mejorar el habla en los estudiantes, tales como actividades de concurso, tarjetas de conversación, secuenciación de imágenes, juegos, búsqueda de diferencias, descripción de imágenes y narración de cuentos. Por lo tanto, es necesario crear una guía de actividades enfocada a motivar y brindar confianza para mejorar las habilidades orales en los estudiantes.Licenciatur

Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

Photo Wallet : interface design for simple mobile photo albums

Tese de mestrado. Multimédia (Perfil Tecnologias). Universidade do Porto. Faculdade de Engenharia. 201