King's speech: pronounce a foreign language with style

Computer assisted pronunciation training requires strategies that capture the attention of the learners and guide them along the learning pathway. In this paper, we introduce an immersive storytelling scenario for creating appropriate learning conditions. The proposed learning interaction is orchestrated by a spoken karaoke. We motivate the concept of the spoken karaoke and describe our design. Driven by the requirements of the proposed scenario, we suggest a modular architecture designed for immersive learning applications. We present our prototype system and our approach for the processing of spoken and visual interaction modalities. Finally, we discuss how technological challenges can be addressed in order to enable the learner's self-evaluation

A Gesture Elicitation Study for an Armband interacting with Netflix and Spotify

Assessing the overall usability of mid-air and micro-gestures issued from an armband to control video, music, or an extended entertaining environment is still a research ques-tion today. To address this problem, this paper reports on results gained by jointly conducting and comparing two user studies. On one hand, a gesture elicitation study is conducted to measure the effectiveness and the user sub-jective satisfaction of gesture interaction by participants using a Thalmic Myo armband for interacting with NetFlix and Spotify, two plug-ins developed for this purpose. This study suggests new gestures which were not identified be-fore from the initial set of the 5 Myo standard gestures, based on agreement rates. On the other hand, a System Usability Scale (SUS) focusing on the usability and the enables to identify which gestures are considered usable and desirable in this context

Gesture Elicitation and Usability Testing for an Armband Interacting with Netflix and Spotify

Controlling home entertainment devices, like music and video, via an armband could free the user from using remote controls, but assessing their overall usability with mid-air and micro-gestures still represents an open research question today. For this purpose, this paper reports on results gained by jointly conducting and comparing two studies involving participants using a Thalmic Myo armband to control a NetFlix SmartTV and Spotify: (1) a gesture elicitation study to explore a richer set of user-defined gestures, to measure their effectiveness and the user subjective satisfaction of gesture interaction; (2) a System Usability Scale (SUS) to assess the overall usability of this setup and the subjective satisfaction for user-defined gestures

3D Immersive Karaoke for the Learning of Foreign Language Pronunciation

Foreign language pronunciation learning relies on listening, discriminating, identifying, repeating and, finally, pronouncing. Computer assisted pronunciation training requires strategies that capture the attention of the learners and guide them throughout the learning pathway. In this paper, we introduce an immersive scenario for creating appropriate learning conditions. In the creation of this scenario, we explore the usage of virtual reality and 3D audio. The proposed learning interaction is orchestrated by a spoken karaoke. We present our approach for the processing of spoken and visual interaction modalities and discuss how technological challenges are addressed in order to enable the learner's self evaluation. Moreover, we propose an automatic pronunciation assessment based on both audio and visual modalities. The evaluation feedback is returned to the learner using 2D and 3D visualization techniques

Eye-tracking for Sense of Immersion and Linguistic Complexity in the Skyrim Game: Issues and Perspectives

As part of an experimental study aimed at evaluating the linguistic and paralinguistic factors that can influence the sense of immersion in an open-world video game, we have partially opted for an eye-tracking data collection protocol. In doing so, various problems emerged in the course of the research and we therefore propose to report and analyze them in this article in order to provide useful feedback for further research. The first set of problems is of a technical nature and relates to the difficulty of collecting reliable eye tracking data in an open and complex game environment. Our second concern is about the difficulties that may appear depending on the morphological characteristics of the players. The third issue is about player’s familiarity with the game and the experimental parameters. And lastly, we discuss some post-processing issues for the analysis. The reflections raised from these few difficulties allow us to discuss some challenges for future oculometric research in complex video game environments