Fusion of Smart, Multimedia and Computer Gaming Technologies

The chapter summarizes the contents of this book highlighting recent advances in smart systems, multimedia, and serious gaming technologies through a fusion of these approaches. Such fusion is a nascent area that potentially can hybridize the features and advantages of the relevant areas, and, as a result, provide users with advanced and enhanced functionality and features, which currently does not exist.

The nascent technologies—smart serious games and smart gamification—potentially present an effective fusion of smart technology and smart systems on one side, and applications of computer game mechanics in “serious” areas and gamification of business processes on the other side. They can combine the features and advantages of both areas, and, as a result, provide the end users with non-existing functionality, features and advances. This chapter is aimed to analyze current status of serious games and gamified applications in industry, examine “smartness” maturity levels of smart objects and systems, classify main components and features and present conceptual design model of smart serious games and smart gamified applications, identify technical skills required for a design and development of smart serious games and smart gamification of business, research and development processes and simulations.

An application of IPsec stack of data exchange protocols in virtual private networks proved to be one of the most reliable and efficient security technologies to provide data protection, confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and access control in computer networks. This chapter presents the outcomes of multi-aspect research project aimed to design and develop IPsec-based mobile virtual private network environments for highly effective, in terms of both security and performance, communications in Web-based rich multimedia systems, including conceptual, design, architectural, and performance modeling of those systems.

In the era of technological advances, the rapid development of network connected objects, cloud computing, software development methodologies, and teaching techniques direct us to the smart solutions. The objective of the chapter is to propose a methodology for teaching and promoting smart internet of things solutions based on the serious-game approach. In the serious-games approach, the simulations of real-world events or processes are used to analyze complex situations and propose solutions. The usage of serious games is entertaining, but their primary goal is to train and educate people; simultaneously, this approach may have other purposes such as marketing or advertisement.

This chapter introduces the concept of adding a fuzzy logic classifier to e-Learning framework. This conceptual model uses Fuzzy Logic Evaluation Sub-systems (FLESs) to implement “Theory of probability” curriculum. The customized sub-system is used to dynamically evaluate student knowledge. It is essential that the FLES-PRobabilty (FLES-PR) capture’s the students’ interest to maintain their motivation and increase the effectiveness of the learning experience. Given that interactive systems increase the education efficiency and the individual abilities of student, the routine actions of teacher are must be delegated to e-Learning system. In this chapter, artificial intelligence concepts, techniques, and technologies are used to deliver the e-Learning requirements. For instance, a fuzzy logic scheme is created to evaluate student knowledge when using the FLES-PR. The curriculum is delivered using two FLES modules instantiated using the “Matlab” 6.5 fuzzy toolbox environment. Each sub-system provides structured lessons, representing topics, content, and additional contextual parameters. The FLES is designed to gain the students attention, highlights the lesson objective(s), stimulates recall of prior knowledge, and progressively elicits new material to guide increased performance by providing feedback using benign assessment to enhance retention. The proposed evaluation system is designed as a functioning plug-into the universities “Moodle” server to leverage from the existing course management, learning management and virtual learning environment. It also recommends the pace and complexity of learning as the student progresses through the curriculum. This chapter case study discusses the success of the FLES-PR software tool and explains how it has been validated against the manual results of three human experts.

In the current panorama of education across Europe we find that technology is increasingly present in the classroom. On the one hand, we have government programs that provide classrooms with a technological infrastructure. On the other hand, students themselves, usually have mobile devices—such as smartphones and tablets—and carry them everywhere, including the classroom. In this context, it is born the Innovative Technologies for an Engaging Classroom (iTEC) project, which is the flagship FP7 project in the education area, financed by the European Commission with 12 million Euros. The iTEC tries to contribute to the conception of the classroom of the future, in which technology is complemented with the most innovative pedagogical approaches, which entail a major level of dynamism in the educational practice. Thus, the iTEC promotes an educational practice, in which students interact in small projects including a participation in events, speeches with experts, and all that seasoned with the use of technology. In the iTEC, The Eduteka is a toolkit of technologies for advanced learning activity design. The components of the Eduteka provide support for the iTEC pedagogical approach. Those are thoroughly presented in this chapter.

This chapter discusses 3D virtual worlds as a fusion of technologies for serious applications. A variety of new trends in the area and original findings are discussed and exemplified with methods and features designed. The goal of this chapter is to evaluate and envisage, what benefits can be acquired if such trends and features are fused under a single platform. Specific trends considered in this chapter include increased sense of immersion with virtual reality devices, simplification of control with joysticks, and mobile devices, working with large amounts of multimedia content, and capturing activities using virtual recording. The discussion is supported with the literature review and evaluation of the features developed for vAcademia virtual world. A particular focus of the chapter is on the discussion of how the new properties of 3D virtual worlds can increase their efficiency for serious applications, enable new scenarios of use, and improve user experience.

This chapter introduces software developments targeting visitors in museums. The main idea leading to these projects is to implement low cost systems that would provide visitors with informational contents about paintings, artworks, etc. The first application was achieved by means of a system that sends a multimedia content (images, audio and texts) to a visitor’s mobile phone, when the mobile phone is in communication range of a Bluetooth transmitter. The second application is an authoring tool that does not require any software development skill. Curators can set up easily and quickly contents for the visitors. Experiments took place in a Marine Park, where more than 200 contents had been developed. It is a web-based system. On smartphone side, HTML5, JavaScript, and Ajax technologies enable us to target a wide range of devices. In the last part of the chapter, these two approaches are compared, and also, taking into account the experiences, some new opportunities of developments are declared. In the last part of the chapter we compare these two approaches and we also open some new opportunities of developments taking into account our experiences.