Integration of a Spanish-to-LSE machine translation system into an e-learning platform

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21657-2_61This paper presents the first results of the integration of a Spanish-to-LSE Machine Translation (MT) system into an e-learning platform. Most e-learning platforms provide speech-based contents, which makes them inaccessible to the Deaf. To solve this issue, we have developed a MT system that translates Spanish speech-based contents into LSE. To test our MT system, we have integrated it into an e-learning tool. The e-learning tool sends the audio to our platform. The platform sends back the subtitles and a video stream with the signed translation to the e-learning tool. Preliminary results, evaluating the sign language synthesis module, show an isolated sign recognition accuracy of 97%. The sentence recognition accuracy was of 93%.Authors would like to acknowledge the FPU-UAM grant program for its financial support. Authors are grateful to the FCNSE linguistic department for sharing their knowledge in LSE and performing the evaluations. Many thanks go to María Chulvi and Benjamín Nogal for providing help during the imple-mentation of this system. This work was partially supported by the Telefónica Móviles España S.A. project number 10-047158-TE-Ed-01-1

A Study of the Effects of First Person versus Third Person View in Educational Animation

The paper reports a study that investigated the effect of egocentric versus exocentric view in an educational animation whose goal was to teach undergraduate students the various tasks that a construction manager performs in the field. Specifically, the study aimed to determine the effect of perspective view on students’ subject learning and preference. Findings show that while students have a preference on perspective view, the perspective view does not have a significant effect on students’ learning outcomes

The Impact of Visual Style on User Experience in Games

The visual style in a game is an aspect of user experience that is often neglected in user experience studies. Visual style is reflective of the tone that a game designer intends to convey or the assumption of what the intended audience would prefer, and it is an important aspect of how a player experiences a game. This paper reports a study that investigated the effect of two elements of visual style, e.g. form and color, on user’s moment and memory-based experiences (engagement and enjoyment). While the impact of color and form on experience is inconclusive, visual preference by a player does appear to be indicative of whether or not the player will be engaged and enjoy an experience. In order to control the experience, the game being used for this study was created by one of the authors

The Graph Camera

Figure 1 Maze (left) rendered in parallel with 9 cameras (right). The camera placement is indicated with white pins. The matrix of images does not provide complete coverage and suffers from discontinuities across boundaries of individual images. Figure 2 Visualization of graph camera model (top), and graph camera image (bottom). The graph camera rays (white lines) sample the entire maze recursively starting from the bottom left entrance. The resulting graph camera image has a single layer and it is mostly continuous and non-redundant, yet it shows longitudinally all mare corridors. The graph camera image is rendered at 40fps. In interactive 3-D graphics applications the user typically explores the scene by positioning and orienting a virtual camera. When the experience of actual locomotion in the virtual space is unnecessary, such sequential exploration is undesirable since it is inefficient-the user has to cover large distances in the scene, and ineffective-the user can only see a small fraction of the scene at any given time, which is particularly inadequate for dynamic scenes. The conventional solution is to employ several stationary cameras that render the scene in parallel. However, a large number of cameras is required for adequate scene coverage and there is no continuity between individual images, which requires the user to adapt to a multitude of contexts, one at the time. We introduce the graph camera, a non-pinhole camera with rays that circumvent occluders to sample most or all of a 3-D scene. The graph camera image has a single layer, it is mostly continuous and non-redundant, yet it shows simultaneously all regions of interest in a complex 3-D scene. The graph camera is constructed from a planar pinhole camera through a series of view frustum bending, splitting, and merging operations. The graph camera has tens or even hundreds of frusta, yet rendering is efficient due to a fast projection operation that allows rendering in a single pass and allows resolving visibility automatically