Technologies for E-Learning and Digital Entertainment

In this paper we consider the role of story in digital technology enhanced learning and the issues involved in constructing digital narrative learning environments. We will see that story has played an important role in education for a very long time, well pre-dating the use of digital technologies, and can be closely related to a number of theoretical approaches to learning. However story has recently become a much more significant topic for research, not only in education and digital technology, but also in other fields, such as knowledge management, and we examine why it has become such a central concern. The paper then looks at the existing use of story in fielded educational applications, and questions how far it has actually been used as an essential mechanism producing a narrative learning environment – rather than merely as motivational support. The relationship between story and computer games is an important issue here. We argue that the interactivity of digital media raises fundamental problems for the use of story which are still challenging researchers, and look at the various approaches to dealing with these problems, citing a number of example systems. Finally, we discuss the direction in which the technology is moving what it offers now and what it may offer in the near future, and what technology support is currently available for creating digital narrative learning environments.

In this post-genome era, structural and functional biology is playing an increasingly important role in Life Science research and development. Transforming current bio education for future research biologists is therefore a challenging task. Learning structural biology starting from K-12 year or in pre-university education is an issue of strategic importance. This paper presents our experimental work on bio edutainment for structural biology learning in secondary schools. Through playing, students will have a more intuitive way to understand better bio-molecular structures. Immersive and interactive games may potentially motivate students to explore the wonders of Life Science. The bio edutainment solution developed is powered by the Virtual Reality technology.

In this paper, we present strategies and approaches used to implement a synthetic learning environment which includes distributed interactive simulation, computational steering, interactive visualization, and artificial intelligence for learning abstract scientific concepts and entertainment. We use Navier-Stokes equations as a case study to show our ideas and methods. Students are allowed to interact with one another and engage in realistic collaborative exercises. The resulting technology is a testbed that reflects the benefits of a schoolhouse for training and education, especially for scientific abstract concepts, yet does not have the physical limitation that instructors, students and resources be collocated both spatially and temporally. Our innovative use of computational steering and interactive visualization allows students to visualize and manipulate the physical process, and understand the abstract concept through entertainment.

This paper explores educational uses of virtual learning environment (VLE) concerned with issues of learning, training and entertainment. We analyze the state-of-art research of VLE based on virtual reality and augmented reality. Some examples for the purpose of education and simulation are described. These applications show that VLE can be means of enhancing, motivating and stimulating learners’ understanding of certain events, especially those for which the traditional notion of instructional learning have proven inappropriate or difficult. Furthermore, the users can learn in a quick and happy mode by playing in the virtual environments.

Intelligent tutorial planning (ITP) is an important component of intelligent tutorial system (ITS). Models of domain knowledge, models of tutorial methods and models of learner are three key elements of ITS. In this paper, the concept of extended knowledge structure graph (EKSG) is presented. An EKSG integrates models of domain knowledge, models of tutorial methods and models of learner organically. Based on the EKSG, algorithms JUDGE and TPLAN are put forward to resolve ITP problems. The algorithm JUDGE calculates the optimal solution graph when there is a solution, and the algorithm TPLAN calculates optimal tutorial plan based on the solution graph. Both algorithms are proved to be correct, the efficiency of them is also discussed.

In this paper, we propose a novel method of perceptual evaluation of pronunciation quality for Computer Assisted Language Learning used in e-learning. The overall score of the pronunciation quality is the combination of the matching score, the perceptual score and the asymmetric score. The matching score is the measure of the acoustic distortion of the test speech, the perceptual score models the perceived distortion by human in perception domain and the asymmetric score describes the asymmetric effect of the sensation of the deletion error and the insertion error in spoken English. The correlation coefficient between the predicted objective score and the subjective score by the experts is 0.75, which is advantageous over current methods based on HMM.

Social navigation in a community of practice (CoP) is an approach of locating information through increased social awareness. Designing support for social navigation requires precise knowledge about the users’ needs and wishes so as to meet user participatory design methodology. User requirement definition on social navigation is, however, difficult to elicit. On the one hand, without the context of the CoP, it is hard to collect the user requirements on navigation, especially when the concept of virtual community is new to the target user group. On the other hand, to set up such a virtual community, preliminary studies on social navigation is however necessary. This paper presents the experiences how we dealt with such a chicken and egg problem. Different approaches were used: performing a theoretical study, administering an online questionnaire, observing on an existing virtual society, analyzing similar systems, prototyping, and conducting an expert walk-through.

Because cooperative learning and Internet technologies are increasingly universal, how to help learners to learn effectively using the on-line learning systems and adopting teaching processes is increasingly important. Based on conceptual graph theory, this study proposed a strategy for efficiently storing learner knowledge structure and producing learning materials. By following the teaching process involved in giving lessons, the strategy uses the stored knowledge structure to produce adaptive group learning material for group learning activities. Additionally, this study used a curriculum to implement an experiment, and then used the experimental results to prove the ability of the proposed strategy to help learners to learn more efficiently.

Due to the advance of e-community, collaborative learning becomes popular on the Web. Among the learning models for collaborative learning on the Web, there are seminar-based model and project-based model. The objective of this paper is to compare the two learning models by analyzing learners’ activities. Among learners’ activities, we focus on learners’ interaction level, their collaborability, and their accountability. Also, we propose new assessment items for evaluating learners fairly. In this paper, the existing evaluation items in traditional classroom-based collaborative learning are firstly analyzed in order to develop new evaluation criteria for the Web. Based on these analyzed items, we propose new items for assessing learners’ activities in Web-based collaborative learning. After two Web-based classes, each of which has a different learning model, are performed, the proposed items are applied to compare the two learning models in terms of learners’ interaction level, collaborability, and accountability. By performing this research, we can understand learners’ activities clearer and can develop a better instructional technique to make improved academic achievement, improved attendance, and increased self-confidence in collaborative e-learning.

Distant e-learning emerges as one of promising means for people to learn online. Although there is a substantial increase in computer and network performance in recent years, mainly as a result of faster hardware and more sophisticated software, there are still problems in the fields of integrating various resources towards enabling distant e-learning. This paper provides an on demand e-learning platform based on Service Grid technologies. In this platform, the virtual learning services for students, instructors and course providers are provided leveraging on Service Grid resource management capabilities on group collaboration, ubiquitous data access, and computing power.

Since three-dimensional computer graphics (3D-CG) technology and interaction technology should be applied to e-learning as well as games, it is important that people are able to easily create interactive contents based on 3D-CG even if they are not 3D-CG professionals. In this paper, we propose a concept for a support system for creating interactive contents. The system runs on MS Windows and uses Direct X as the file format. A content creator, by describing a script using two kinds of script files prepared by the system, can easily create 3D-CG scenes and can also control the interactions between a user and the system. As an example of content creation, we present and explain an interactive content in which a user can enter the virtual Todaiji Temple, built more than one thousand years ago, and through the interactions with computer characters can learn about the many historical events of that time.

In this paper we report on an interdisciplinary course ”Computing and Art” taught at the Sabanci University, Istanbul for the first time in fall of 2004. We also present research activities initiated by the course activities and continued to graduate work. The two faculty members teaching the course as well as the students are an equal mix from the visual communication design and computer science departments. The course’s objective is to create interactive 3D virtual environments by multiple teams of students comprised of one computer science and one design student each. The students are challenged to develop real-time graphics software and well designed virtual spaces and/or interfaces as part of the course project. However the primary mission for both domain members is to create meaningful content that is to be implemented into a non-linear spatial structure, possessing non-linear narrative; thus necessitating content development, scenario and dialogue writing, as well as research, such as relevant social, historic, art historic, audial or scientific data, when and as needed. In this paper we present the structure of the course, as well as some of the projects and lessons learned.

The Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) specification has been playing an important role in sharing and distributing contents among e-learning systems as well as in tracking the learner of the contents. Nonetheless, its limitations hinder its application to actual fieldwork particularly the inadequacy of the flexible contents structure, e-learning system performance, utilization of the necessary auxiliary resources together with the contents, support for collaborative learning, and utilization of contents linked to the external assessment system. Therefore, this study proposed the addition of "Jump Control" and expansion of "Auxiliary Resources" to the SCORM 2004 specification in order to improve the flexibility of the learning object-based e-learning contents structure and enhance e-learning system performance. A prototype was also developed to show the benefits of the improved efficiency of the manifest file describing the contents structure by adding the jump control concept. The processing of the auxiliary resource description and utilization in the standardization specification was also described.

Aiming at solving the problems of interactions among students, teacher and system in a virtual learning environment, this paper puts forward IMDM model based on the constructivism, and gives some advice on how to use VRML and Java to construct the intelligent system with an example about incising the cylinder’s section.

In this paper, Petri net theory is taken into analyzing the Virtual Experiment (VE) in the Virtual Experiment Environment (V.E.E.). After applied the Petri net to V.E.E., the V.E.E. then can monitor the experiment progress and measure the learning effects of students when the students are doing experiment. Petri net is an approach that can be used as a visual-communication aid similar to flow charts, block diagrams, and networks. Therefore, the experiment steps are easily modeled by Petri net. According to the data which is collected by the V.E.E., there are two major error types that a student might make during an experiment. The first error type is the procedural error and the other one is measuring error. In the end of this paper, an experiment system is implemented. There were 72 3

rd

year students in junior high school involved in the experiment. In this experiment, we did both of pre-test and post-test in order to make sure the Petri net-enhanced V.E.E. is useful.

The self-learning is completely student-centered. In this mode of learning, the learners decide their learning goals, choose the contents which they want to learn, and arrange the sequences of their learning, etc. In self-learning environment, the learning system must proposes a method for piloting the learning process, so the learners can learn in a correct sequence, and get the goal at last. Based on the characteristics of self-learning, and the fundamental law of cognition based on knowledge points, a novel meta data model of learning resources is proposed, so the knowledge network of learning resources can be constructured. In this way, the knowledge network can make support to the self-learning in E-learning environment.

To meet the needs of education in the learning community, personalized knowledge service system based on community E-learning (PKSSCE) was proposed and realized. The structure of system, workflow and key technologies of realizing feature selection module, user interest module, personalized teaching resources filtering module were introduced in the paper. After the test use of the system by some certain communities, we found that the system could improve the residents initiative participation in the community education and training. Thus, we thought it might be a practical solution to realize self-learning and self-promotion in the life long education age.

In this paper, we present the architecture and function of a Web-based Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS), which incorporates decision tree and fuzzy matching for instruction strategy. ITS contains following components: information collecting system, learner profile analysis system, strategy matching system and strategy updating system; using domain knowledge base, web log base, learner model base and instruction strategy base . The system analyzes learning models of different users and applies different instruction strategies to meet personalized requirements.

Through E-Learning Managment Multimedia and virtual reality Internet Web sites, e-mail, e-governance, e-business, e-banking, video tele coference, smart cards, and digital cameras etc. fastest means of information and communications that have shrunken the world into a global village . Computer mediated video and CD ROM’s are being used to impart distant education programmes. A network of e-health and telemedicine allows the hospital and specialists to recieve and transmit medical records for treatment of the needy patients at remote areas. Akshay -a computer drived e-literacy programme in India, a net work over 600 village telecentres is reaching to more than 3.6 million people. MEDINA project is a unique venture of 14 (MED iterranean countries by INternet Access) to highlight thier cultural identity. Sattelite imegery are used to prepare digitised maps of cultural and heritage sites Humpy. ’Jal Chitra’ is an interactive programe to browse a community based water resource map of the villages . Active techno–pagans like cyber sangha and roman catholic churches are using internet to spread massage of peace, love and non violance. A web-based governance offers a direct link to government services, available to the citizens like G2C: Government to Citizen Interface. G2B: Government to Business tansactions, Company Registrations, Trade Licenses/Permits etc.. between the Government & Businessmen. OPEN, that is’ Online Procedures ENhancement for civil applications allows the citizens to monitor the status of their complains on the Internet.

Among the keystones of interactive education are learners’ motivation and visual tools that support learners’ study at their convenient. In this paper we consider the finite state machines (automata) as an example of an interactive e-learning. Because of its abstract nature, automata seem to be less motivating to study despite its importance as a model of several software and hardware applications. This paper tackles the motivation problem and the design of supporting visual tools. We have three goals: motivating learners through several visual examples, introducing interactive visual tools to support interactive e-learning, and to evaluate the performance of several existing tools to Figure out which is practically more useful. To achieve these goals, a set of visual finite state machines examples was designed, an interactive automata simulator is introduced, and a performance evaluation is carried out. The visual examples and the tools are designed as Java applets, using Java 2D interface, so that they can run on any environment. It also enables the learner to easily access the tools through the web which is a support for interactive e-learning of finite state machines.

In this paper, an e-Learning system based on the advanced stereoscopic video is developed. It fully takes advantages of three dimensional (3D) video, provides more interesting and vivid learning content and greatly improves the learning efficiency. It provides communication opportunity to students with their teacher, which is also beneficial to quicken the learning process. Such a system can be very suited to the students majoring in physic, architectonics and so on.

This paper is an interim report on the project to develop and evaluate the curricula in which the unification of rudimentary robotics and English education is aimed for. The intended goal of this project is to turn out the young children that are conversant with the adequate, basic knowledge of robotics and competent in the practical use of English skills. We like to call such children “would-be super engineers”. The “would-be super engineers” will be our nation’s valuable human resources in future.

For e-Learning, traditional navigator or searching engine has inherent weaknesses, so individualized intelligent learning is difficult to be realized. This paper proposed a hybrid knowledge structure reflecting the relationships among knowledge modules. A series of association knowledge items were gathered by standardized inputting and knowledge clustering based on association rules. Based on the mapping of knowledge items to knowledge domain, the proposed knowledge clustering and representation could intelligently provide learner clues of interrelated learning. The simulation results showed that the proposed plan is an effective scheme of intelligent learning.

Recently, a number of instructional design platforms have emerged in educational informatizing process. However, teachers still can not form their individualised instructional design through them, because these platforms lack the combination with a specific subject. Thus, an informatized instructional design platform for physics is programmed in this paper to meet the needs of teachers in physics.

This paper presents a new way to test embedded software with a scenario pattern-based method. It also introduces some concepts of scenario and scenario patterns, and formalizes the embedded software with scenario model ACDATE. The verification patterns are built with embedded system, and are tested with the samples of basic scenario pattern. This paper shows the process about how to verify the embedded software.

In this paper, a framework for individualizing the learning material structure in adaptive learning system is introduced. It aims to utilize the learning characteristics and provide a personalized learning environment that exploit pedagogical model and fuzzy logic techniques. The learning material consists of 4 structures; 1) theory, 2) examples 3) exercises and 4) activities. The pedagogical model and learning characteristics are based on the student’s personality factor (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)), whilst the fuzzy logic techniques are used to classify the structure of learning material which is based on student’s personality factors. This paper tend to illustrate the construction of fuzzy set and fuzzy rules to find the best rules based on combination of two approaches; learning style approach and fuzzy logic approach for adapting the content to the user, allowing a learning system to dynamically adapt the choice of possible learning structure through the learning material based on the user’s personality factor.

E-Learning community is the important component and establishment of e-Learning. Now most e-learning communities have many problems, such as information expanding, low utilized and interacted, because they don’t focus on the knowledge but information. The research on learning organization of knowledge management is used for reference, and the knowledge management system based on semantic Web in e-learning community is proposed. A general knowledge express model is designed,and the relationship between it and content based on topic maps is founded.

This paper presents a platform for interactive VR storytelling with supporting the development of system and content. This platform enables to build more complex and dynamic virtual environments by specifying the spatial and temporal relationship between not only 3D model and multimedia but also human-computer interface.

This paper considers the potential of Virtual Learning Environments in schools focusing on 2 distinct user groups. Firstly, the children and teachers engaged in the learning situation, and secondly, the stakeholders, that is the policy makers and educational authorities. Several VLEs are reviewed identifying high user acceptance and interest. The paper then considers educational policy and approaches in both Europe and China highlighting a strong commitment to ICT in schools. It concludes that the current pedagogical climate provides plentiful potential for the integration of VLEs, into the classroom.

This paper focuses on our approach to developing a Virtual Learning Environment, CrimCity, aimed at learning about crime and its prevention. We describe the approach taken to gaining information relating to interactivity and the learning potential of CrimCity, presenting a user study involving 27 novice learners. A number of interesting results have emerged, including the clear disinclination and negative perspective of virtual learning environments experienced by women in the 14-19 age range along with the positive response from older adults, particularly women. Responding to the results of this study has resulted in greater clarity for learning approaches within CrimCity and the interaction styles required to support them.

We have developed a learning platform to simplify and improve teaching and practice of Computer Graphics for beginners and advanced students. Our goal is to offer a set of tools to help students having a better mental vision of the abstract notions introduced during the course. Our platform is composed by a pedagogical-oriented, intuitive and user-friendly graphic engine, offering a powerful amount of features with an extremely easy and comfortable interface, and a set of interactive and collaborative applications (called

modules

) to use during lessons and workshop sessions to present complex concepts in an easy and clear way. In this paper we expose how we have built our platform, what it offers and which role will play in our courses.

In this exploratory paper, we propose to develop a new paradigm for teaching virtual dissections–a task prevalent in public schools– 3-D interactive electronic books that blend the state-of-the-art techniques in computer graphics with 3-D hypermedia. Students will learn experientially in this highly innovative environment by employing two powerful modes of interactive inquiry, exploration and guided inquiry. This development effort is designed to greatly improve the quality of the learner’s experience while engaging in the virtual dissection tasks so prevalent in middle school classes in the United States. Our electronic books, enriched with high-fidelity 3-D video, annotations, and illustrations, will allow students to witness and explore a real dissection procedure as if they were there. In this paper, we articulate the technical and pedagogical challenges and present some preliminary results for content creation and visualization.

In today’s new economy, characterized by industrial revolutions, globalization and information technology changes traditional classroom and teaching methods. Calculus is the basic course for the fresher at university. Mathematics has a negative development at universities and colleges. The number of students taking mathematics courses and those successfully passing the exams are rapidly decreasing. To overturn this negative development, it may be necessary to teach in a different way. This is where new technology could play an important role. We create a web browser environment by using the

webMathematica

, which is a new technology based on Java Server Page, Tomcat and Mathematica, in learning calculus. The modules consist of topic modules linked with case study modules, to help learn calculus and see it in context. The aim of our project is to use new technology to present mathematics on the web, and create a pilot course for students and teachers available free on the web. The heart of our approach is the development of mathematical power: understanding, using, and appreciating mathematics. Students can reach any documents for calculus and solve their problems with

webMathematica

to check whether their results are correct or not. It is possible to reach our page at the following URL address: http://galois.iyte.edu.tr/calculus

In a visual world, the ability to sketch is an important asset for communicating complex ideas. However, sketching is a frustrating task for many people, and most never progress beyond a rudimentary skill level. In this paper we present SKIT, a computer-assisted sketch instruction tool. SKIT attempts to teach beginning students one of the important skills of sketching, the ability to perceive effectively. It is based on traditional art instruction techniques, which break the complex task of drawing into smaller tasks. These sub-tasks are combined into a final drawing, which can be then rendered using several different NPR styles. We also present preliminary results from people who have used SKIT.

This paper describes how the concept of four-dimensional world can be introduced to players through series of carefully sequenced games. Starting from playing games in one-dimensional world, and then followed by games in two-dimensional and three-dimensional ones, the players are progressively led to generalized rules that can be applied to the four-dimensional world, in which the generalized rule is tested. Different series of games were designed for players to learn the different features of four-dimensional world and were implemented into a web-based learning system which is now undergone field tests.

With wide spread of recognition of importance on gifted elementary school students in computer, the numbers of public and private institutes recognizing and fostering the gifted elementary school students in computer have been increasing. Keeping pace with these interests, standard curriculum must be developed first and adopted in courses. However, most institutes have developed their own teaching materials with their own curriculum. In evaluating capabilities of the gifted students in computer, how students acquire skills on application software such as word processor and spreadsheet software has been considered an important factor. But, in order to evaluate the gifted students in computer accurately, various factors such as applicability, tenacity, initiativeness, curiosity must be considered. In this paper, we present a curriculum for the gifted elementary school students in computer. Our curriculum can be classified into three categories,

Knowledge, Skill and Morality

, respectively. Our proposed curriculum is designed by considering existing curricula for all elementary school students and various standards for computer contests.

This paper presents our design and experiment of a computer-assisted class laboratory on vectors in high-school. Our main goal is to improve the acquisition of notions by all pupils, from advanced level to remedial level. Our secondary goal is to improve the motivation of pupils toward maths and sciences.

Our approach consists in making the pupils

practice

the notions included in a given set of pedagogic objectives, and to do it through real world-inspired problems. We draw on

MobiNet

, a platform that simulate programmable mobiles on screen and through the network. Our class laboratory consists of a set of pre-programmed interactive simulations, allowing the pupils to react on their errors and to validate each exercise in an autonomous way. This class laboratory was conducted in the same conditions and constraints than an ordinary math lab: same duration, and no preparation of the pupils (but the ordinary math course). Still, the autonomy of the exercises and the network ability would also allow the use with no teacher on place. In this paper, we describe our vector class laboratory experiment: objectives, design, conduction, and evaluation.

The rapid growth and wide application of distance education have lead to the significant need for multimedia techniques and systems. It is difficult, however, to implement the interactions among the students or/and between the students and the teacher because of the huge volume of multimedia data. This paper presents a framework of the interactive multimedia system for distance learning of higher education with several novel characteristics. First, a hierarchical structure for multimedia system has been proposed to support personalized learning and teaching styles. Second, several feature selection algorithms have been used to support fast video classification and retrieval. Third, a novel asynchronous model has been provided to address the challenges issues of interaction in distance education. We analyze the performance of the system based on a real application of the self-study multimedia web page for the final exam of one university course.

The development of computer, internet and multimedia technology have changed our world to information society and caused great effect to our daily life. Especially in education environment, the traditional teacher-oriented learning is facing various changes due to the introduction of information technology. This new technology allows individual learners to have opportunities for active participation and self-paced learning. Until now, most web-based cyber classes have been developed using passive media such as text, image, sound and video, and thus failed to induce interactivity and active participation from users. The proposed contents development model is consisted of interactive contents, executable contents, process contents, animation contents, and media-oriented contents. This model can be used as a guideline to develop web-based cyber classes which fully exploit the advantages of up-to-date internet and multimedia techniques. A Computer Graphics Cyber Class case is shown to explain how to apply the contents development and implementation model.

The paper analyzes the significance and feasibility of the undertaking of long-range marine cruise mission by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and proposes the composition and major functions of this long-range marine cruise system, which lays foundations to the realization of long-range marine cruise of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and to the establishment of a marine supervision and administration system with all-directional coverage, all-weather operation and rapid response.

The system

Asterix

was developed in the context of distance teaching in order to support the direct feedback of a student’s learning progress.

Asterix

contains different interactive tasks from the area of the formal foundations of computer science. Students can access the system by means of an internet interface. The implementation of the interactive presentation and correction of the tasks is generated automatically from high-level XML specifications. In this work we give an overview of the essential features of the system and the supported task types and show how

Asterix

is used in the context of distance teaching at the FernUniversität in Hagen.

E-learning provides a solution to meet the challenge of enrolments increasing. This paper describes design and implementation of wireless LAN based virtual laboratory (WLANVL) used as an e-learning environment. Users of WLANVL can develop and remotely execute a variety of laboratory experiments over internet. The WLANVL mainly includes end user’s workbench, management server and lab resources which are based on a set of controlled instruments. Wireless LAN based lab resources make this virtual laboratory scalable and redundancy management server makes it robust.

Recently, the research of E-learning system part applies item analysis method for efficient study. Item analysis method used question analysis for increasing of learners study ability. That is, when compiling the data for local programs, item difficulty, one of item analysis, is used for the Intermediate-Level technology education test. But guessing factor for items in learning results has to be considered to apply the relative item difficulty more precisely. In this paper, I have implemented component based E-learning system which learners are able to select study step by item difficulty. This system was implemented by CBD(Component-Based Development) for efficient development. In this applied result, I have shown efficiency of development in E-learning system by CBD and learning operation in this system by item difficulty.

We propose a method of applying P2P network to collaborative GIS environment, particularly targeting exploratory spatial data analysis for small-group brainstorming. Under the hybrid P2P network, we implement and integrate two core components for collaborative GIS environment: P2P GIS super-node and client-node. Using these core components, we build a collaborative GIS application for the exploratory spatial data analysis to discover distribution patterns and spatial associations of geographical phenomena in cooperative way.

We present in this paper researches focussed on training scenario specification. These researches are conducted in the context of a collaboration with Giat-Industries (a French military manufacturer) in order to introduce Virtual Reality(VR) in maintenance training. The use of VR environments for training is strongly stimulated by important needs of training on sensitive equipment, sometimes fragile, unavaiblable, costly or dangerous. Our project, named GVT, is developped in a research/Industry collaboration. A first version of GVT is already available as a final product, which allows maintenance virtual training on GIAT-Industries equipments. Internal models have been designed in order to achieve reusability and standardization for the efficient development of new virtual training environments. In particular, we defined a scenario language named LORA, which is both textual and graphical. This language lets non-computer scientists author various and complex tasks in a virtual scene.

In this paper, we discuss the development of young people’s interactive storytelling skills within a game creation environment. We describe the Gamemaker workshop series, in which young people learn to use a commercial game creation environment to develop interactive, branching stories within a 3D virtual reality role-playing environment. Given this new medium for story expression, we sought to better understand the ways in which the young people choose to express their story ideas, in an attempt to provide further support and scaffolding for their developing narrative skills. In particular, we looked at the plot themes they chose to explore, the ways in which they included interactivity in the story, and their use of characters to tell their stories.

Medieval Asian scrolls are classic storytelling devices, yet these scrolls are rarely available to Western students in their original continuous format. By developing a web-based multimedia scroll viewer we make these Asian scrolls available to students and provide additional features, such as side-by-side scroll comparison, zooming, and appending to the scroll. The paper discusses the pedagogical benefits of narrative and how narrative, along with the scroll viewer, is being used in two college courses.

We report progress on adding affect-detection to an existing program for virtual dramatic improvisation, monitored by a human director. To partially automate the directors’ functions, we have partially implemented the detection of emotions, etc. within users’ text input. The affect-detection module has been used for the development of an automated virtual actor. The work also involves basic research into how affect is conveyed through metaphor.

This essay presents a theoretical framework for studying the educative effects of hypertext narratives. We thus will not present experimental results but theoretical bases for forthcoming experimentations. ‘Educative effects’ are defined as comprehension of narrative related-world. This framework is based on mental model theory and classic structural narratology, mixed with Herman’s cognitive narratology. The concepts of ‘storyworld’ and ‘shadow narrative’ are used to define operational hypotheses for an empiric inquiry into the effects of narratives in two directions : construction of an integrative mental model, and effect of hypertext consciousness on the so-built representation.

Hypermedia Storytelling allows the integration of edutainment aspects on multiple levels. In addition to directly integrating the information to learn into the story, digital media allow to link story elements that create interest in a particular topic to related background information sites. On another level not only the reception of a story can be used to transmit educational content, but also the authoring of a story or the task to produce a storytelling environment itself can be used for educational purposes.

We show how these aspects can be realized in the context of a Hypermedia Novel (HyMN). After describing the underlying generic storytelling paradigm, edutainment aspects are discussed with regard to several practical examples.

This paper explores the nature of player behaviour in game environments in relation to the methodology of the dramatist Bertolt Brecht. Firstly, a conceptualisation of how manipulation of both a player’s actions, and their affective state is achieved by contemporary first-person games will be described. It will be questioned whether such game experiences can be reconfigured as spaces for complex and ethical learning experiences or whether their formal characteristics preclude this. Brecht’s theatre, in particular the Lehrstucke (learning plays); Verfremdung (the alienation effect); and his exposure of the mechanics of the theatre experience will be introduced as a means of further exploring ways of delivering FPS experiences.

The paper constructed an online game for Creativity. The development of the game is based on the Cognitive Affective Interaction Model that was designed to help students develop the skills for divergent and creative thinking. First, we proposed a framework for designing creativity games. Then, an online game system is constructed with the strategies of teaching for creativity. We proved that the creativity of the learners can be improved by the proposed game-based learning system. Conclusively, game-based learning creates a new opportunity for creativity.

This paper discusses timing and pacing issues in Interactive Storytelling applications at the conceptual level. Herein, aspects of both, the authoring process and the experiencing of interactive stories are considered. Undoubtedly, interactive stories and Interactive Storytelling applications provide a huge potential as basis for any kind of dialogue based, game based, or ‘serious’ edutainment application. On the other hand – and in contrast to linear, pre-scripted and less interactive applications, such as films, books or life performances – the challenge of developing applications based on interactive stories lies in the interactivity and possible ‘free scenes’. By free scenes we refer to interactive elements such as chatting with a virtual character, ‘playing’ with an interactive installation in a museum, or performing on-site rallies (‘un-guided’ tours), enabling users to interactively explore the content space and acquire knowledge in their individual style and pace. Hereby, these free scenes might disturb the fluent continuation of the underlying story plot, and harmfully influence the dramaturgy and suspense of the story model. Chapter 1 further introduces and motivates the topic, while Chapter 2 provides a comprehensive overview of related research work along with some examples from the edutainment domain. Chapter 3 and 4 introduce a new approach conceptualized by the authors of this paper in the context of the EU funded project INSCAPE. Finally the main aspects are summarized and an outlook indicates open issues to be addressed in future research.

In E-learning, structure analysis of lecture video is the first step for effective and efficient indexing, browsing and retrieval. A hierarchical model of narrative structure for lecture video is introduced. The root is lecture video; the next is layer of narrative elements conveying meaningful information in semantics; then is narrative features layer closely to both visual and auditory physical features. A framework is proposed to analyze narrative structure. Extraction of narrative features is described as well. Hierarchical hidden Markov model is introduced to determine the parameters and detect narrative elements automatically.

This main target of this paper is to present an interaction model allowing the user to feel immersed to the VR content with a storytelling factor. The storytelling factor allows the user to be presented with a series of interaction environment in a narrative form about the task domain. Finding out about how the VR content can be delivered in a more narrative form has produced a method of ’controlling the time factor’ within the VR application. This interaction model allows the player action to result in the change of the scenery of the virtual environment as well as the progression of the environment in time. By adding the time controlling factor, a more complex environment can be presented where a novice user may not be overwhelmed by the complexity of the virtual environment. The content designer can maximize the storytelling factor within the VR to gracefully acquaint the novice user and provide a compelling and effective content for the task domain of the VR contents.

Excessive game play of adolescents is one of the serious problems faced by the information society. This paper reviews the related work and programs of this field first, and then explores the mechanism which leads to Game Addiction (GA) from the perspective of inner architecture of game. We find that game addiction is due to the PS-DA cycle embedded in games, and provide a method to control and utilize GA from the source of edutainment game development. Furthermore, we discuss the possibilities of implanting the PS-DA mechanism into instruction and general activities.

In 21st Century, through the E-learning, students can be fostered the abilities of critical thinking and skills of problem solving. Resulting from this learning, learners can apply their learned knowledge in daily problem solving and can create a new attitude to their living. This study is to develop a new computer Role-Playing Game (RPG). In the game, it will blend the ideas of RPG and theory of Problem-Based Learning (PBL), which leads the players to develop their learning strategy and strengthen their problem solving ability. The spectrum ideas of this game will focus on the daily life problems and common knowledge. In a RPG, the player can use learned knowledge to solve problems. Furthermore, in the process of problem solving, players learn to know the concepts implied in the game.

When designing a game, one of the major tasks is to design a game of exciting and challenging difficulty levels to maintain the interest level of a player throughout the game. This is especially important when designing an educational game. This paper proposes the use of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), specifically the Backpropagation Neural Networks (BPNNs) for handling the gaming experience. The BPNNs can provide targeted learning experience for the user or the student. This will achieve personalized learning that is an important issue for student relationship management. The proposed frameworks will provide motivation for the student as the difficulty level progresses and adjusts to suit individual users.

Dance is one of the entertainments where the physical movement is the key factor. On the other hand, the main reason why robots are kind of boom is that they have physical body. Combining there two element, a concept of a dancing robot is proposed. First, various kind of factors concerning entertainment and dance is studied. Also we describe the functions required for robots to achieve dancing. Then we describe one of the dancing robot we have developed focusing its hardware functions and show several examples of dance performance we have developed.

Smart Ambience Games (or SAG) combines interactive media with smart ambience technologies to create a motivating environment for children with learning difficulties to overcome barriers in art education. Through a development of innovative motion and gesture capture and detection techniques, we create a smart ambience that enables students to interact intuitively with a virtual environment to create a rich variety of multimedia forms and space without the use of specific physical tools. Through various interactive activities and game scenarios, particular subjects such as history and mathematics can be taught through developed VR games that can help students to overcome inhibitions related to learning, become more active learners and stimulate creativity in art education.

In this paper, we report on our experiences in using an animated competitive game with simulated physics to teach Artificial Intelligence techniques in an undergraduate computer science course. Students develop intelligent controllers for simulated vehicles, which compete with each other in a tournament. The simulation includes a real-time visualisation of the contests, and the students’ solutions utilise an AI toolkit that provides animated displays showing the internal workings of their controllers in parallel with the simulation. The result is a learning experience that engages students’ enthusiasm, and helps them to development mental models of the AI algorithms.

Current findings suggest that human-computer interaction following the basics of human-human interaction, in which emotions play a critical role. We performed a set of consecutive experiments in a laboratory environment for identification, recognition, visualization and interactive computing of affective states within a gaming application framework. To start our research and to get a data base we analyzed more than 90 test hours of user tests using rating-scales and physiological measurements. As results we provide (1) a mini-game with extra features for the induction and obtaining of affective states, (2) integrated data mining methods with recognition rates up to 70 percent, (3) different kind of visual representation of recognized emotions, and (4) an architecture for control of an affective game.

This paper presents FITGap, an object-oriented framework dedicated to designing innovative interactions occurring in a Virtual Environment such as a Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG). This framework has been designed as the underlying software of a future development environment for online games prototyping. FITGap is an open framework based on an extensible basic-blocks library, and uses a deterministic scheduling model to ease the development and tuning of the final application. Its semantics is well-defined to allow future analysis tools.

The widespread use of on-line computer games makes this medium a valuable vehicle for information sharing, while scalability facilitates global collaboration between players in the game space. Game engines generally provide an intuitive interface allowing attention to be shifted to the understanding of scientific elements rather than hiding them between a wealth of menus and other counterintuitive user interfaces. These strengths are applied towards promoting the understanding of planetary systems and climate change. Unconventional interaction and visualization techniques are introduced as a method to experience geophysical environments. Players are provided with dynamic visualization assets, which enable them to discover, interrogate and correlate scientific data in the game space. The spirit of exploration is to give players the impetus to conceptualize how complex Earth and planetary systems work, understand their intrinsic beauty and the impact of humans, while providing a sense of responsibility for those systems.

“Online Learning” has been commonly viewed as a mechanism for empowering improved learning outcome, increased flexibility of aligning the individual need of learners, and better quality of educational interaction. In fact, a lot of “digitized” and “ready-to-use” learning and teaching resources are already available online; nevertheless, we must not confuse quantity and quality, as these resources may just continue to perpetuate teacher-centred approaches, rather than student-centred approaches. The present research aimed to compare the educational values, learning effectiveness, students and teachers’ perceptions of a new online educational paradigm – Situated Game-based Learning with Traditional Web-based Learning in secondary education in Hong Kong. A combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods were employed for data collection and analysis. Results showed that, under the present research settings, although no significant difference of students’ learning outcome with respect to these two approaches was found, the participating students and teachers were quite positive towards the educational paradigm of Situated Game-based Learning. This provides vital insights and a basis for further investigating the paradigm’s application and development for learning and teaching.

In the field of edutainment, it is very important to produce Web3D works efficiently, and to be able to visualize or interactively experience obscure heritage architectures and historical events. In this article, we describe 3Dblog technology, which we have proposed and developed. In addition, we explain a virtual system that we constructed by applying the proposed 3Dblog technology. In addition to being a useful and enjoyable learning tool, 3Dblog not only enables non-professional users to construct objects easily, it also allows both object constructors and users to easily participate in the construction of a virtual environment collaboratively. This brings forth new possibilities in experiencing virtual heritage ...

The expeditious growth of the Internet and the related technologies hastily contribute and fill up educational applications. While most of them are intended to facilitate the teaching process and are teacher-oriented, the society has continuously asked for a paradigm shift to a student-centred approach. The VISOLE teaching style is a learning paradigm is made up of student-oriented elements which contemplate to infuse learning with amusement.

Farmtasia

is an online game designed to implement the VISOLE idea with situated learning. Students are suggested to play this online game in groups, interact and compete with other group members. Eventually they are expected to learn the subject knowledge embedded in the game and develop high-order skills through playing the game. The design and implementation of the game follow two principles. The first one is to make the game as realistic as possible so that students can learn from an authentic environment. The second one is to inject fun and interactive components in the game, so that students are eager to immerse and interact in the multiuser environment.

In this paper, we introduce UTBot, a virtual agent platform for teaching agent systems’ design. UTBot implements a client for the Unreal Tournament game server and Gamebots system. It provides students with the basic functionality required to start developing their own intelligent virtual agents to play autonomously UT games. UTBot includes a generic agent architecture, CAA (Context-sensitive Agent Architecture), a domain-specific world model, a visualization tool, several basic strategies (represented by internal modes and internal behaviors), and skills (represented by external behaviors). The CAA architecture can support complex long-term behaviors as well as reactive short-term behaviors. It also realizes high context-sensitivity of behaviors. We also discuss our experience using UTBot as a pedagogical tool for teaching agent systems’ design in undergraduate Artificial Intelligence course.

This paper presents the authoring tool

Cyranus

, which implements novel authoring methods for highly interactive edutainment applications. Both concluded work and ongoing and future issues are presented. Among the concluded work, a framework is described that integrates a hierarchic transition network with non-graph based methods, in particular with a rule-based system. This facilitates the authoring process considerably, and enhances the power to control the logic of an application.

This paper introduce some technology about using VRML to construct 3D virtual scene and its interactive roaming by virtual campus environment’s researching and practice. Key techniques on building virtual campus, embeded virtual avatar for interaction and browser speed improvement are introduced.

Storytelling by a child, as a training activity, influences significantly a child’s linguistic abilities, logic and thought process, imagination, and creativity. There presently exist many software-based storytelling applications. However, most are deemed incompatible or not suitable to Chinese children. Due to the limited vocabulary of pre-school and lower-level grade school children, speech-based and pen-based input models are considered the most effective way of input. But now there is not an effective multimodal mode to solve the problem for children’s storytelling systems. In this paper, we propose a multimodal fusion framework that utilizes pen and speech techniques to incorporate both context information and linguistic attributes of the Chinese language into the design. Based on the proposed framework, we formulated specific methods of integration, and developed a prototype for our proposed system.

A method of developing cartoon game on traffic safety education of Chinese children is presented in this paper. Based on the psychological characteristic of children and constructivism learning theory, the design of game scenario, character’s emotion and interaction is introduced. The scene in this cartoon game is based on Gibson’s theory of affordances and all the signs on objects are easily distinguished. A finite state machine is used for expressing the emotion state of a cartoon character, and NPC (non player character) is introduced to arouse the interest of a child user. The cartoon game can run both on local PC and on Internet, a child user can learn safety knowledge by interactive method. The result will offer a new means for traffic safety education of children in china.

In film, cinematographic techniques are used in a concurrent sense, predominantly to achieve creative goals. The use of cinematographic techniques in edutainment applications would especially affect the modeling of virtual characters as well as the authoring and perception of interactive stories.

Terrain modeling and rendering is essential in construction of realistic virtual environment, for interactive computer games application. Advanced high resolution scanning technologies such as LIDAR enable us to obtain dense and accurate irregular terrain dataset. However, unlike the regular sampled dataset such as DEM and DTED, irregular dataset cannot be rendered in real-time due to random distribution of samples. Moreover, because they generally have huge amount of point data, it is very hard to manipulate them in consumer PC. We propose a fast and efficient terrain rendering method using large-scale irregular dataset for computer games application. First, it reconstructs the geometry by converting irregular dataset into regular one, through resampling input data with regular interval considering the spatial distribution of sample points. It can generate animated scene by applying quad-tree based rendering method to converted dataset. Experimental results show that its image quality is not deteriorated in comparison to the result of rendering reconstructed geometric models.

Recently, grid-based virtual wargame collaborative environment has become a hot topic, in which load balance plays an important role. In this paper, we survey existing technologies in federate migration for the purpose of balancing load, and focus on the selection of destination node for a federate to migrate to. Different from traditional methods, the proposed method takes into consideration not only the load of CPU & memory, but also communications among federates when selecting the destination node. Moreover, the procedure of migration is described and a prototype is implemented on the basis of Globus Toolkit 3.0 to validate its functionality and performance.

This paper describes how Genetic Algorithm can be used to control the level of difficulty in a game based on a user’s skill. An algorithm is proposed to control the difficulty of a game according to user’s propensity in our previous work [1], [2]. But the searching spaces are very narrow and convergence of chromosomes is also slow because the game progresses step-by-step and chromosomes are evaluated simultaneously while playing the game. Thus, a method is presented to expand the searching spaces and converge quickly on the Genetic Algorithm in the domain of sequential progress.

Simulation grid (SimGrid) is fit for the large-scale warfare simulation applications. Since stakeholders in warfare simulation include scenario developers, running & managing personnel and model managers, this paper firstly presents a special SimGrid framework which could be divided into three levels: application level, HLA/RTI level and model level. It then detailedly analyzes and describes how to search the model service based on warfare SimGrid architecture and its index integration mechanism. Finally, a model service location solution based on response order and access order is put forward. The service searching solution based on response order and access order is a good solution to rapidly search and locate necessary models in large-scale warfare simulation. The solution takes into whole account the access characteristics of warfare simulation models and its real-time characteristics, which greatly ensured the rapid service searching. In this solution, all kinds of parameters can be easily assigned and controlled. All buffer queues can be dynamically allocated according to requests of users. Obviously the solution can make great contribution to construct large-scale warfare simulation grid.

Firstly, the methodology for characters development in computer games was analyzed from both aspects of art-sourced character development and story-sourced character development separately from the different views of various research fields. In the second section, four different techniques relating to character design and the creation of emotion has been deeply discussed. At the end, the four diverse designs for character OEDIPUS were given according to the plot development based on the background of tragical fable of the ancient Greece.

There are two main approaches, conservative and optimistic, for maintaining consistency in distributed network games. Under the conservative approach, players may experience network latency, depending on packet transfer delay caused by the send-and-wait and acknowledging processes. Under the optimistic approach, the processes do not wait for other players’ packets and advance to their own frames, hence there is no network latency. However, when inconsistency happens, the processes must roll back. This can cause irritation and confusion to players, and thus the game quality deteriorates. Overall, the optimistic approach may not be suitable for networked games. To overcome the network latency problem in the conservative approach, we propose a new system which can reduce the network latency and bandwidth requirements. Furthermore, the effect of the number of players in multiplayer game sessions is examined in detail with varying number of players. Experimental results with our proposed system confirm improved performances in latency and frame rate.

In this paper, we present an algorithm to imitate a game player’s play patterns using a real-time

neuroevolution

(

NE

); the examples of the patterns can be moving and firing units. Our algorithm to learn and imitate is possible to be executed during gameplay. To test effectiveness of our algorithm, we made an application similar to the Starcraft

TM

. By using our method, a game player can avoids tediously repeating labors to control units. Moreover, applying this to enemy agents makes it possible to play more difficult and exciting games. From experimental results, we found that agents’ ability to imitate a game player’s unit control patterns could make human-like agents, and also we found that adaptive game AIs, especially the real-time NE, are efficient in such imitation problems.

This paper explores the idea that future game consoles and computers may no longer be single processor units, but instead symmetrical multiprocessor units. If this were to occur games would need to be programmed with concurrency in mind so that they could take advantage of the additional processing units. We explore past research and works in the field of parallel computing to find principles applicable to computer game programming. Concepts such as the Flynn’s classification, task, task-dependency graphs, dependency analysis, and Bernstein’s conditions to concurrency are applied to computer game programming to develop a new model for computer games that is meant to replace the standard sequential game loop.

This paper describes the implementation of ODECAL, a real-time physics powered, rag doll simulation system with animation blending ability. Unlike the traditional key frame animation rag doll system, our animating 3D character can blend into physics state to perform rag doll simulation and vice verse seamlessly. It can even be applied to any form of creatures with bone based articulation. ODECAL can be used for the development of computer games as well as virtual reality applications to enhance the realism and sense of immersion. ODECAL was build with flexible design in mind to allow it to integrate easily with any 3D rendering toolkits and game engines. It was written entirely in C++ using object oriented design to provide programmer a ”developer friendly” modularize architecture for large scale software project. We also utilized open source technologies for low cost development as well as its strong cross platform feature.

This paper presents a new computer supported remote learning and gaming method using Tele-Face Mouse system. The Tele-Face Mouse system is being developed as a teleconference system. It converts simple desktop computers to a teleconference system. The main advantage of the Tele-Face Mouse system is that it enables people to share a computer screen as a working space, and to interact with it using mouse pointers that followed by user face videos. By presenting that it is also the key point in remote learning, this paper shows that the Tele-Face Mouse system can be effectively used in remote learning and gaming.

We propose a method to improve generating moves in board games. The basic idea comes from swarm intelligence. The board game program runs Pheromone-based Pre-processing algorithm (PP) to construct two heuristic game trees apart from the game search tree, and learns from winners’ moves by laying pheromone trails on heuristic game trees before game starts. Then the program picks moves on the basis of their pheromone quantity to start game tree search when playing games. The results of our experiments show that the method is efficient and promising.

It is not easy to develop a game that applies physical laws. In this paper we proposed a physics editor to make it easy to produce a physics game. The physics editor uses XML for processing attribute values of each object. This paper presents the architecture of the physics editor, and describes its detailed components. The physics editor provides an efficient method that is easily applied to physical attributes of all objects in the game. In this paper, we showed the process of a car’s creation, using the physics editor. The physics editor that is presented in this paper automatically creates physical objects, but it is limited to the rigid body for car racing.

In late years game construction with high reality have been done along with the development of VR technology. However, three components such as behavior generation using rigid body physics, 3D sound generation and haptic feedback are considered necessary for constructing a virtual world with high reality. In the paper, synchronization among visual, auditory and haptic sensation is attained by SCRAME Net, the fastest network system. As a concrete example, a billiards game is built and we would like to confirm that the method used in this research will contribute to build a game with high reality.

Multiplayer computer games are becoming more and more popular. While much effort has been contributed to point-to-point communication based architecture and network game traffic, we proposed a server decentralized game architecture based on Jabber in order to have high availability, performance, scalability, fault tolerance and security. Three components of the architecture: players, game servers and record-keeper are defined and functioned. The architecture is implemented and instanced as a Chinese Chess game. The game data are packed with XML stanzas and delivered to the addressed player through XML streams. In order to test the availability, the game is experimented and the result is meaningful even though the test environment is rough.

In the outdoor 3D game, the terrain can be modified because of interaction. This brings two new complexities to render terrain in 3D game. The first lies in the real-time visualization of dynamic terrain, and the second is that the modified terrain surface need to be preserved. We present an algorithm for dynamic terrain LOD(DT LOD) with preserving region in 3D game engine. The algorithm uses a DAG to represent dependency relationship of vertices which split triangles, and employs an active vertices set to update triangles in two consecutive frames for improving rendering performance. The region LOD can be constructed according to the view direction and the distance between the viewpoint and regions. The results of experiments show that our algorithm has a effective performance during rendering terrain.

The purpose of this paper is to design and implement a mobile class Web site for elementary schools using intelligent user interface. Especially, our mobile class Web site encourages parents to participate in various school matters including their children’s scholastic achievements. Traditional class Web sites provide information to parents through wired networks. Recently, with the development of wireless data transmission technologies, traditional class Web sites can be linked with wireless networks. Armed with wireless transmission handset devices such as cellular phones and PDA (personal digital assistants), students’ parents can get class information directly through those devices. This work is to develop class Web sites that can be synergistically linked between wired and wireless networks. The communication through both wired and wireless networks enables students’ parents to overcome the limitation of space and time and further promotes better collaboration with teachers. The survey results show that our class Web site promotes active participation of parents.

Wearable computers and other handheld devices are now used beyond the research lab, in diverse applications, and this trend toward ubiquitous computing is accelerating. One challenge that remains in this emerging research field is the ability to build reliable industrial information management and training system for the mobile knowledge workers in the manufacture application. A Wearable Learning and Support System which has been designed as tools to support learning, training and operation of maintenance activity in industrial settings is presented. With the context information service, resources information process, and adaptive strategies, this system can suit for the requirements of operation assistant, learning, training and information management processes on the job.

A Providing collaborative learning applications the possibility to offer continuous awareness to on-line collaborative learning teams is a challenging issue since it is essential to keep participants informed of both what is happening and what happened in the learning group. Moreover, awareness is the basis to enhance collaboration and improve the individual and group performance since it allows to track and assess the collaborative learning process more objectively and to model students’ behavior more efficiently. In order to provide students and tutors with effective awareness, we consider the collaborative actions registered in log files. It is necessary to process large and considerably complex event log files in a constant manner, and thus it may requires processing capacity beyond that of a single computer. In this paper we show how a Grid approach can considerably decrease the time of processing group activity log files and thus allow students and tutors to be aware of what is going on in the group activity even in real time. Our approach is based on the master-worker paradigm and is implemented using Globus technology running on the Planetlab platform. To test our application, we used event log files from the Basic Support for Collaborative Work (BSCW) system.

The ability to better understand role performing during the learning process of a collaborative learning team is very crucial, in order to effectively support online students. Leadership roles which have the most influence in directing the team should be carefully recognized. Identifying the emergent team leaders is challenging because these roles are normally distributed and shifted among team members over time. In this paper, a new approach for the leadership roles identification is, thus proposed. The collaboration patterns are examined with different points of social network views to discover the network locations of the leaders. The proposed leadership index is a combination of degree of centrality, closeness and betweenness. The experiment and the simulation results indicate that the proposed index is promising.

The use of

new media

—multimedia elements and electronic modes of interaction—is at the core of contemporary efforts to enhance the learning experience of students at universities worldwide. This paper explores the use of general-purpose Wiki systems as a means to extend didactic scenarios in eLearning environments. Wiki systems are already used successfully in classrooms, and provide students with a novel means of learning, collaborating, and participating. Based on several classroom projects currently implemented at the Goethe-University Frankfurt, we identify important issues, success factors, requirements and problems, related to the use of Wikis as part of the classroom. These shape the basis for our concept to extend the standard Wiki functionality, in order to adapt the available technology to the e-enhanced classroom. A prototypical implementation is described that was developed as a basis for the implementation of the concept, and the summary illustrates current conclusions and lessons learned.

A model and a Java Framework to aid the construction of 3D Web-based Collaborative Virtual Environments (3D-CVE) are described in this paper. The proposal emphasizes on the interaction and collaboration among the entities (users’ avatars, agents, etc.) that populate the virtual world; and the services that they offer to each other in order to interact, or to carry out some kind of collaborative task. We propose a model for the conceptualization of CVE under the concept of social groups, a graph-based high level notation to specify the interactions among the entities that populate the CVE, and a Java based software framework that gives support to the model and the interaction graph in order to facilitate the implementation of the 3D-CVE. From the developing process point of view, the goal of the collaboration model and the framework proposed here is not only to develop 3D-CVE faster, but also the resulting 3D-CVEs have similar structures, they are easier to maintain and eventually to integrate. Design patterns were very useful to fulfill these characteristics, as we describe in the next sections. CVEs developed with the framework enable, through the Web browser, a shared understanding regarding many scientific, engineering and entertainment subjects concerned with three-dimensional data.

Wireless Local Area Network(WLAN) technology has been developed rapidly and impacted education greatly. Mobile learning(M-learning) is the trend of the modern education. The Mobile learning has a high requirement of multimedia applications on limited bandwidth network, but the transmission of voice and video becomes a bottleneck. Based on the polling scheme used in medium access control(MAC) protocols in IEEE 802.11 for WLAN, especially for delay sensitive multimedia information packet delivery, this paper focuses on improving the efficiency of polling scheme to satisfy the quality of service requirements. A new scheme model of polling system is analyzed and the information packet waiting time of voice and video is obtained. Through theoretic calculations and experiments based on voice and video traffic models it proves to be an efficient way of serving the M-learning.

As information technologies have been highly developed, mobile games are also becoming popular and splendid. However, the interface between human and computer has hardly changed and users can not operate mobile games exactly what they need due to the small buttons and small screen. In this paper, we present a new intuitive and interactive interface for mobile games using computer vision techniques optimized for low-performance mobile devices. It can track hand locations to interact with a cyber pet dog and execute several menus to give a command to mobile pet game. We use a HSI skin-color model and a CAMShift algorithm, which are adequate for the performance of mobile devices, in order to find the accurate hand location. And we use the Behavior-based AI method drawn from ethology to generate several actions of the pet dog.

A new freehand text entry method, called EasyStroke, is presented for mobile devices. Based on the multi-stroke philosophy and analogy principle, 26 lowercase characters are described. Trails of stylus movement are segmented dynamically and best approximated through the three captured points. Then, each segment is rendered immediately using hardware-accelerated OpenVG APIs. Finally, combination of the types of all segments flows into the small LUT-based recognizer, using some additional bits. Thus, this new method is easy, efficient and quick to use. Implementation and evaluation of such system are presented. Prototype of mobile game, WordCollection, is demonstrated to help users experience functions of both education and entertainment.

In this paper, we present a new middle-ware, streaming engine that can implement existing OpenGL-based 3D network games onto heterogeneous platforms. The engine consists of capturing OpenGL command stream, scene graph reconstruction, data simplification, and compression and transmission. Without modifying the original source code, our system can extend 3D network games onto various platforms, using hierarchical geometry hashing, a client-server scene graph, and a simple NPR(Non-Photorealistic Rendering) technique to reduce the amount of transmission.

Anisotropic texture mapping is not suitable for mobile devices because of their limited power consumption and low performance. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a triangle-based sub-texel precision anisotropic filtering (TSPAF). Then a hybrid triangle-based sub-texel precision anisotropic filter (HTSPAF) is presented, which combines the bilinear filtering and TSPAF filtering with the MIPMap layer selection. The experimental results show that the new approach can obtain good quality images with lower hardware cost, which is thus feasible for mobile GPU hardware implementation.

In this paper the simulation-based analysis of the reason of TCP throughput and loss over multihops wireless networks is given. An end-to-end combination scheme including both limiting of sending window size and delayed ACK mechanism to improve TCP throughput over multihops wireless networks is evaluated. The simulation results show the combination scheme has better goodput and loss performance than traditional TCP.

Edutainment projects are by definition very “entertaining”, but in order to become implemented into the everyday teaching process they have to become something more and in some aspects also “something less” than an ordinary computer game. We report our experience with edutaining products we are authoring and their symbiosis with the electronic and paper textbooks as well as bringing modern education in concert with the classical experimental work e.g. in a biology class.

3D city modeling is an interesting subject that attracts both computer aided design and computer graphics communities. This paper surveys the recent development of 3D city modeling techniques for either real or virtual city. Some typical approaches and fundamenta1 principles behind them are also analyzed and compared. Finally we introduce a rule-driven procedure modeling approach for large-scale virtual city. Comparing with the existing approaches, the rules adopted by the proposed approach and based on urban planning principles are easy to be understood and customized. Our experiments proved the system is effective and efficient.

Virtual geographic environment is involved in many kinds of data, which are very huge. Many theories of 3D interactive visualization such as dynamic data loading are presented and applied to the navigation of the whole scene. However, in 3D modeling, some approaches such as segmentation of the whole scene into subareas are often adopted. Thus, the disaccord between visualization and modeling may cause trouble. In this paper, the integration of 3D interactive visualization and 3D modeling is discussed, and a collaborative 3D modeling environment is designed and constructed. As a case study, a virtual learning environment for Lushan fieldwork education is implemented.

The feature-line extraction of a 3D model is a key step in the model-based Non-Photorealistic Rendering. In this paper, we introduce a new algorithm that is based on a sharpening filter to extract the feature-lines of 3D models. Experiments of feature-line rendering where our sharpening filter is introduced as a pre-calculation step are shown to compare with the existing algorithms ([1][2][3]). From these experiments it can be found that our rendering results reserve more feature details and contain less noise. Furthermore, in our algorithm, the computation time of rendering is also reduced.

We present a data-driven shape model for reconstructing human body models from one or more 2D photos. One of the key tasks in reconstructing the 3D model from image data is shape recovery, a task done until now in utterly geometric way, in the domain of human body modeling. In contrast, we adopt a data-driven, parameterized deformable model that is acquired from a collection of range scans of real human body. The key idea is to complement the image-based reconstruction method by leveraging the quality shape and statistic information accumulated from multiple shapes of range-scanned people. In the presence of ambiguity either from the noise or missing views, our technique has a bias towards representing as much as possible the previously acquired ‘knowledge’ on the shape geometry. Texture coordinates are then generated by projecting the modified deformable model onto the front and back images. Our technique has shown to reconstruct successfully human body models from minimum number images, even from a single image input.

We present an approach for constructing feature-based 3D characters from scanned models with feature markers specified. Our method consists of three phases. Firstly, a Radial Basis Function (RBF) based global warping function is applied to deform a feature-template to a shape interpolating the features points on the scanned model. A surface fitting process is then adopted to refine the feature-template to approximate the given model. The surface fitting process is a hybrid of the closest point scheme and the region propagation based scheme, which leads to an excellent result even if large size holes are introduced on the scanned data or the warped template mesh is apart from the scanned model. Finally, with the template fitting results, we introduce a method to transform the complex geometry to 3D character models by using the Compactly Supported Radial Basis Function (CSRBF).

Shadow maps provide a fast and convenient method of generating real-time shadows in computer games. Unfortunately, shadow maps suffer from aliasing problems. Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF) is one of the solutions, but in cases of severe aliasing it can only mask the aliasing by unnaturally blurring. In this paper we present two improved antialiased shadow algorithms based on PCF, named as Modified PCF I and Modified PCF II. The primary idea of our algorithms is to make sawtooth shadow edges straighter just by data modification before bilinear interpolation in PCF. We respectively implement the algorithms with graphic hardware in Pixel Shader 2.0 and 3.0, several examples are also provided to show that most of aliasing artifacts have been removed compared with PCF. The time complexity and hardware requirement of Modified PCF I are almost as same as that of PCF. The resource requirement of Modified PCF II is more rigorous than that of Modified PCF I, but it can still accommodate to real-time game rendering with obvious antialiasing effect.

We propose a new method for efficient out-of-core rendering of complex 3D scenes. The method consists of two main phases: a new out-of-core preprocessing and a run-time, view-dependent rendering of the scene. In the preprocessing, we partition the scene with a spatial octree and build an on-disk multi-resolution hierarchical representation for the scene. Then at run-time, the multi-threaded technology is used. The prefetching thread predicts the motion of the viewer and prefetches the scene that would be seen next. The rendering thread traverses the octree hierarchy and renders the scene by view-dependent selective refinement. Experimental results show that our system can render large complex 3D scenes of tens of millions of triangles at interactive rates on commodity PC with fine image quality and minimal popping artifacts.

In this paper, a new method is described for rendering convincing soft shadows from area light source at interactive frame rates. The method is based on the shadow map algorithm and it fully exploits the parallelism of the programmable graphics pipeline. In the method we sample the area light source using parallel linear segments and compute the light contribution of each segment using a completely new method which gives reasonable simulation for soft shadow generated by tiny scene object. We demonstrate that it can generate detailed soft shadow, while achieving the high frame rates. And our approach offers a number of benefits. E.g., it’s easy to be adopted by the projects using shadowing map and there is no extra overhead while the complexity of the scene geometry increases.

In this paper, we present a novel method for dynamic terrain in battlefield and an efficient plan to simulate crater in the battle. We explore a few methods for dynamic terrain surface, and analyze the different recent algorithms for representation and visualization of multiresolution static terrain, then select ROAM (Real-Time Optimally Adapting Meshes) as our basis to be improved and to be applicable in dynamic terrain projects. We further select half-ellipsoid model in the explosion theory as the physical based model of crater, and provide a procedural texture generation algorithm for crater, then give a hybrid multiresolution algorithm for dynamic terrain. At last the implementation results prove that the method and the algorithm are feasible and efficient.

The navigation and rendering of very large-scale terrain are facing a difficult problem that the geometry data and texture data cannot be used directly due to the storage space, computation capacity, and I/O bandwidth. To provide more realistic detail of terrain scene, procedural detail is a good solution. Firstly, this paper introduces a method of procedural geometry based on the terrain tile quad-tree and the Patch-LOD algorithm. Then, the texture generation operator is described and the method of dynamic pre-computation of patch-texture is presented. Finally, the experimental system based on these above ideas and methods has been implemented. The experimental results show that these methods are effective and are appropriate to the development of 3D games and battlefield applications.

This paper presents a fast texture synthesis method using texture patches with incremental sizes. In contrast to the existing work in the area, it offers much fast speed through efficient computations. By applying the method to a wide variety of texture samples, we have demonstrated the effectiveness of the method through the results and discussions. In addition, we have also applied this texture synthesis method to cube mapping for the fast viewing of surfaces decorated by textures.

A uniform active model adaptation is proposed for some specific applications related with realistic face reconstruction and sketch generation, which is separated into tow phases: global adaptation and local adaptation. During the global adaptation, a coarse matching is used for adjusting the facial contour and five sense organs according to the correspondence of feature points both in 2D facial image and 3D model. An interpolation is processed on the global adjusted 3D model for a fine matching, which forms the local adaptation. A personalized facial sketch generation method is present based on the similar idea of 3D facial model adaptation. By comparison between the feature points of specific person’s face and those of a predefined generic face, metamorphosis can be drawn for generating a personalized cartoon facial sketch. Two systems are built, and face reconstruction and sketch results show that proposed method is efficient and desirable.

The technology of 3d modeling include geometry and behavior modeling method, it is the base of virtual environment construction. Geometry modeling is mature, but the behavior modeling method develops slowly. For the simulation of satellite in virtual space environment, a new geometry and behavior 3D Modeling language (GBML) based on object hierarchical structure is given in this paper. For simulating space object’s geometry and behavior, the language define the basic primitive and use the tree structure to represent, manage and rendering the space object’s geometry and behavior parameter. At the end, Using the OpenGL, we implement the model manage component (ModelReaderCom) based on GBML. The testing shows that the method is useful and practical which can be wildly used in kinds of virtual environment.

Taking Dunhuang MoGao Frescoes as research background, a new method to generate the sketch for Dunhuang frescoes is proposed. Learning from the traditional manual imitation procedure, we first get the contour line of a Dunhuang fresco which is composed of many connected curves, and then render the strokes by learning styles from examples. For several example strokes, the style of example strokes are captured and expressed as style function. Given a target curve, a new stroke can be generated with the style of one example and moreover, the style of the target stroke can be further customized into different styles similar to the examples by interpolation of styles. This research has the potential to provide a computer aided tool for art historians to do imitation work, and improve the efficiency of imitation.

In this system, we first build the geometrical model of out-door scene. Then by establishing an energy equation based on principle of energy equilibrium, the surface temperatures of the infrared scene under various conditions are acquired. We propose a new method to obtain infrared texture from its corresponding visible image. The infrared effect due to different weather conditions such as rain, cloud, fog is accounted for. The infrared shadow with high-reality and the high dynamic range effect of infrared dynamic scene are also simulated, and real-time walkthrough of large-scale infrared dynamic scene is carried out.

We introduce a new surface deformation and modeling method in this paper. Referring to the swept volume generation, the surface is pulled or pushed along a trajectory curve. The key point is the sweeping function. Surface points are moved to where they should be during sweeping operations according to the global parameter, which is determined by topological distance. An index factor controls how much the surface deforms around the handle point. The proposed method is easy to extend to fit different applications such as various constraints, local deformation and animations.

In this paper, the morphologic summation of two curves is studied and its parametric equation is obtained. Because the morphologic summation is usually a region that not convenient to analyze and to use, we turn to research its boundaries and found a super set of the boundaries by solving the Jacobi determinant equation. In our method, the super set consists of several sub-curves and the corresponding parametric equation of each sub-curve can be obtained. As the super set includes the real boundaries and the pseudo boundaries, we propose a method of removing the pseudo boundaries real. To avoid the complicated computation, based on the geometric meanings of the boundaries, an approximate algorithm is also applied. Experimental results show that the approximate boundaries are very close to the real boundaries and the computational cost is low.

With the development of motion capture techniques; more and more 3D motion libraries become available. The growing amount of motion capture data requires more efficient and effective methods for indexing, searching and retrieving. In many cases, the user will only have a sketchy idea of which kind of motion to look for in the motion database. In consequence, the description about the query movement is a bottleneck for motion retrieval system. This paper presents a framework that can describe and handle the query scenes effectively. Our content-based retrieval system supports two kinds of query modes: textual query mode and query-by-example mode. By using various kinds of qualitative features and adaptive segments of motion capture data stream, our indexing and retrieval methods are carried out at the segment level rather than at the frame level, making them quite efficient. Some experimental examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of proposed algorithms.

In this paper, we present a fast individual face modeling and animation system. The input of the system is a single frontal face image, which is captured by an ordinary video camera. And the output is 3D individual facial animation. Firstly, an Adaboost method is used to detect the face in the image. Then the key points of the face are located with the inverse compositional algorithm based active appearance models (AAM). The 3D geometry mesh of the individual face is then generated with morphable models. Finally, the direction and magnitude of existed motion vectors are adjusted according to different 3D face shapes using expression cloning technique. With this system, we can achieve realistic 3D facial animation with minimal and often no manual tuning. The experiments show that our system is fast enough for common applications.

In this paper, we describe a haptic deformation algorithm used in a virtual storytelling system known as the Digital Buddhist Image Creation System. This system supports not only haptic interaction, but also visual and auditory feedback and the combination of these three modalities provides a user with an immersive experience of a virtual cultural environment. We believe the proposed bi-directional haptic interaction will encourage users to spontaneously participate and engage with the system. To demonstrate and explore this concept, a virtual environment that tells the legend of Korea’s ’Unju Temple’ has been constructed. The proposed haptic interaction is expected to play an important role in supporting users as they directly experience and learn about this significant piece of cultural heritage in a digital, virtual environment.

Emotion plays an essential role in adaptation and social communication in organism. Similarly, appropriately timed and clearly expressed emotion is a central required for believable interactive virtual humans. Presently, incorporating emotion into virtual humans is gain increasing attention in academia and industry. This strong interest is driven by a wide spectrum of promising applications in many areas such as virtual reality, e-learning, entertainment, etc.This paper discusses a system that allows the design of emotion for interactive virtual human. We introduce an emotion model of artificial psychology, in which the transition of emotion can be viewed as a Morkov process and the relation of between emotion and mood can be describes by Hidden Morkov Model (HMM). In order to demonstrate the approach, we integrate the emotion model into a system composed of voice recognition and a realistic facial model. Thus, the model can be used for generating a variety of emotional expression of autonomous, interactive virtual humans.

3D video mosaics created by 3D image mosaicking, our previous research, are for 3D visualization of the roadside standing building scene captured by a side-looking video camera as a continuous set of vertical-textured planar faces. These vertical faces were concatenated to create an approximate model on which the images could be back-projected as textures. We proposed a retrieval technique of selecting vertical-textured planar faces from archived 3D image mosaics to fast represent a 3D world, where this selection is based on proximity to the user location in the virtual world. The chosen vertical-textured planar faces are recomposed as a continuous set formed stream and are then rendered in 3D virtual space.

Recently, motion capture is widely used in the human animation. But it is still difficult to create new-style animations from the existing motion capture data. In this paper, we propose a novel technique to create the style animations from an existing motion sequence. Firstly, we use linear time-invariant system (LTI) to derive an explicit mapping between the high-dimensional motion capture data and the low-dimensional state variables. Secondly, new style animations are created within the state space. Only a few important keyframes need be modified through adjusting the low-dimensional style variables. The remaining frames of the original motion can be generated automatically. Finally, we design an effective algorithm to calculate the model parameters. Experimental results show that the generated style animations are natural and smooth.

This paper presents a set of technologies to generate human animations based on captured motion data. Firstly, original coarse motion data need to be normalized as standard data set. Secondly, spatial and temporal characteristics of human locomotion are calculated according to experience equations, anthropometric statistics data and user-defined interface parameters. Trajectory of human’s root site is scaled and rotated to fit real walking distance and direction. Then, a simulation structure based on place/transition Petri Net is designed and conducted to start, run, pause and end simulation loop. During the update phase of the loop, position and posture of virtual figure in each frame are generated through interpolating from scaled motion data.

Employing computer techniques to visualize the color changing of Dunhuang Frescoes is of great significance since the audience can re-experience this process and the protectors can discuss the protection measures according to the simulated video clips and thus help them make their decision more scientifically. But previously, because colorimetric and chemical modeling was not introduced to simulate the color changing of frescoes, there was a lack of objectivity and sense of reality. In this paper, however, two kinds of color changing, namely, color changing due to chemical changing of the pigment as well as dust accumulation, are modeled. Since this modeling describes the natural behavior of the color changing process, the simulation result is quite striking.

Based on the newly appeared image editing and image pro- cessing techniques, a novel interactive, computer-assisted system is proposed for facial synthesis. This paper presents the architecture of this facial synthesis system and gives a detailed description of the four key modules. The techniques used in these modules are also particularized. First, graph cut algorithm is used to automatically select region. Then gradient domain fusion is used to get better result. Finally, k-means method is used to improve efficiency. The experimental results show that our experimental facial synthesis system can produce visually good synthesized face images.

The mechanical behaviour of the human skin shows a non-linear stress-strain relationship. Based on the behaviour of human dermis proposed by Hendriks, we develop a system to draw a specific skin incision shape which consists of four spine curves and two lines. Users can firstly define the two incision points on the skin, our system can superimpose the shape on the surface and show the skin incision cutaway. OBBTree analysis for the skin surface is used to put the incision shape. Followed by shape shown on the surface and finally a cutaway is generated to show the cut. Jittering problem generated by the above steps is also resolved.

This paper presents a physically-based approach for real-time music fountain simulation based on fluid dynamics and particle systems. A special case of Navier-Stokes equations is explored and particles are employed to model fountain geometry. Music intensity is used to synchronize the motion of fountain particles, and simple dynamics equations of particles are used to simulate realistic fountain behavior. The proposed algorithm can be easily integrated into interactive applications for real-time fountain simulation.

We present a framework for generating paper-cutting effects on mesh models. Our system involves the construction of model defined paper-cutting patterns, extraction of the medial axis (MA) from the mesh models and position location for patterns on the mesh surface based on MA. Patch sets for placing patterns on the mesh surface are determined by the region growing algorithm. After patch sets parameterization, patterns are drawn on the parameterized domain and mapped onto the mesh surface by inverse sampling.

We propose a hybrid geometry-image representation of trees, which consists of three hierarchies. In the lowest hierarchy, a collection of triangles are used to represent the trunk and salient branches. The finer hierarchy for the small branches is represented by

Frond Map

, a special type of textures. As the finest hierarchy, the leaves are clustered first and represented as a set of billboards. For each hierarchy, we generate a sequence of LODs (Level of Details). The appropriate level is selected on-the-fly. Smooth transitions between successive levels are accomplished using an image-space voting technique. Our representation facilitates the rapid modeling of trees, the dynamic simulation of trees swaying under wind as well as realistic simulation of large-scale forest scenes. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and high quality of our approaches.

In this paper, we present a new dynamic texture technique by using our new mixed auto-regressive moving average exogenous (MARMAX) model in the wavelet domain. The technique captures much more detailed local and global dynamic texture properties than the previous works and it can synthesize long dynamic texture videos with temporal coherency. The whole input video is firstly transformed into the wavelet domain in different levels, then we use MARMAX model to capture the dynamic characters of the original video, finally we transform the video back by inverse discrete wavelet transform (IDWT). A desired long dynamic texture video can be synthesized easily from a short input one. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach can produce visually promising dynamic texture sequences.

This paper describes a computational approach to style conversion of cartoon animation. Our system works in two stages: the internal color shading phase, in which characters painted by the conventional method are segmented into their constituent regions and edges first, textures painted using different media are then added to the identified regions, and the line rendering phase, in which curvature of edges detected during the first phase is calculated and used to pick up turning points from edges, strokes with defined shapes and textures are then placed in the positions determined by turning points along the contour as well as internal lines of characters. Our system obviates the tedium of creating more expressive rendering by hand, and keeps frame-to-frame coherence in the resultant animations.

Regarding the modeling aspects of computer animation, the skeletal animation is a newfangled modeling technology to assist in single-mesh model animation. There are two aspects of advancement proposed in this paper. First, we construct a novel vertical data structure (Modified Body-Tree) to describe the skeletal models in animation. Second, instead of normal methods such as linear interpolation and higher-order spline interpolation to generate in-between frame, we proposes an adaptive and high-performance algorithm based on 4-Point subdivision scheme to generate in-between frame in the skeletal animation. By this advanced algorithm, a smoother skeletal animation with blander vision effect is achieved.

This study gives the new definition of the rational L curve and surface in Grassmann space, where convert these rational recursive curves and surfaces’ equations to normal polynomial. So we can use blossom algorithms and duality principle to deduce the derivative equations of these curves and surfaces. Thus, the rational L spline curve and surface are defined and constructed based on blossom algorithms and ensuring the continuity of L curve segment and surface patch. Next, we prove that rational L spline curve and surface are the generalization of many interpolation or approach parameter curves and surfaces (Lagrange, rational Lagrange, Bezier, rational Bezier, B spline, NURBS curves and surfaces, etc.). These recurrence curves and surfaces are used to establish the universal storage data file format for different CAD systems.

Virtual Five Animals Exercise is an interactive game which is an important part of Virtual Olympic Museum for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad. Users can learn and imitate Five Animals Exercise without any interactive device. To do these, we make use of motion capture data to drive the virtual human motion, and use template matching method to recognize users’ motion. We improve the motion editing and motion retargetting methods in our system. Many people enjoy our game.

A narrow-band-based adaptive level set method is proposed for mesh evolution in this paper. In the preprocessing step, the portions of the mesh with high curvature are detected and clustered as fine geometric details. Then the fine grids with optimal orientations are defined for each detected portions, while the coarse grid is chosen for global evolution. The solutions on different scale grids are synthesized as the final results. Compared with the level set solution on the uniform grid, our approach can achieve a good compromise between computational costs and mesh evolution quality. The implementation results also show that it is an efficient and robust method.

In this paper, we formulate the image matting as one of solving energy minimization problems. Our approach has the following advantages. First, the matte estimation is modeled using an energy function as a MRF optimization problem. Second, the energy function combines the gradient of the matte, the gradient of the color and statistical sampling together to achieve global optimization. Third, the matte is directly reconstructed by solving energy equations. Experimental results show that our method is efficient to extract high quality mattes for foregrounds with complex natural images.

This paper describes a simulation of the physical processes of coupled heat and moisture transfer in a clothing assembly containing phase change material (PCM). This paper focuses on the analysis of the effect of the PCM. The results of simulation show that the PCM can delay the decrease in temperature of the clothing. The experiment results are also shown in this paper. A reasonable agreement was found when comparing the results of the simulation with the experiment results.

This paper describes the design of a distributed architecture to support an interactive, interoperable, and collaborative forest fire fighting simulation using High Level Architecture (HLA). Based on the Run-time Infrastructure (RTI) services which are specified in HLA and C++ application programming interface (API) of the RTI, The distributed virtual fire fighting environment provides a practical foundation to enhance interactivity, interoperability for distributed simulation.. Users can build new federation application by the way of the goal system reorganization. The key techniques, such as FOM/SOM design, system structure, running mechanism of simulation system are discussed.

There are several researches on 2D gaze tracking techniques for the 2D screen for the Human-Computer Interaction. However, the researches for the gaze-based interaction to the stereo images or contents are not reported. The 3D display techniques are emerging now for the reality service. Moreover, the 3D interaction techniques are much more needed in the 3D contents service environments. This paper addresses the gaze-based 3D interaction techniques. It is well known that there are characteristics of eye vergence according to the depth of object to be focused by human. This paper presents our experimental research results about the characteristics of eye vergence according to stereo image depth. Our research result is evaluated and applied to the gaze-based 3D interaction with the parallax barrier stereo image display system.

We propose a distributed computing framework for network- optimized visualization and steering of real-time scientific simulations and computations executed on a remote host, such as workstation, cluster or supercomputer. Unlike the conventional “batch” simulations, this system enables: (i) monitoring of an on-going remote computation using visualization tools, and (ii) on-line specification of simulation parameters to interactively steer remote computations. Using performance models for transport channels and visualization modules, we develop a dynamic programming method to optimize the realization of the visualization pipeline over a wide-area network to maximize the frame rate. We present experimental results to illustrate the effectiveness of this system.

We present a novel method for merging a live video stream of multiple users into a shared virtual world in a large VR display environment. Collaborators at a remote site can be displayed in a virtual world as video textures to support visual communication more efficiently. To generate the video texture of a user in a dynamic background environment such as a CAVE

TM

-like system, we use a camera pair which consists of two gray-scale cameras with band-pass filters, and two color cameras. The gray-scale cameras capture infrared images in which the dynamic background on the screen is eliminated, having only the infrared light reflected by the person. This makes it easy to extract the user’s silhouette robustly. Using projection histogram we found rough position of the all users’ head in the image. We can then find exact corresponding points using cross-correlation between two user silhouette images to determine the 3D position of each user. The extracted user silhouette is warped by rectification and translated to fit into a color image. We can now generate a video texture of the user by masking the background of the user in the color image. Each video texture is then transmitted to a remote site and displayed on a billboard in virtual space.

An improved 6DOF electromagnetic tracking algorithm is proposed. It utilizes the scattering parameters, which are about the transmitter coils, the receiver coils and the involved circuits, to determine the pose and orientation information of the target. Compared with the traditional algorithm which takes the system parameters as same in all the three directions, it is more accordant to the nature of the current tracking device. And it also simplifies the system hardware design. The experimental results prove the algorithm is valid and can improve the accuracy of the system.

In an augmented game is a game, which is overlapping virtual objects on a real environment and attacking the virtual objects, accurate location estimation in a real environment is one of important issues. Existing global positioning systems(GPS) to track users’ positions do not work inside a building, and systems using sensors such as Active Badge are expensive to install and maintain. Therefore, researches for low-cost vision-based navigation system have been attempted. Since most of scenes include a floor, ceiling and wall in a building, it is difficult to represent characteristics of those scenes. We propose an image matching method using image texts instead of objects included uniformly in natural scenes for navigation. The image texts are widely distributed in our environments, are very useful for describing the contents of an image, and can be sassily extracted compared to other semantic contents, and we obtain image texts using a method combining edge density and multi-layer perceptrons with CAMShift. However, since a camera attached to moving vehicles(robots) or hand-held devices has a low resolution, it is not easy to perform extraction using a binarization and a text recognition. Therefore, we perform an image matching using a matching window based on a scale and orientation of image texts and its neighborhood to recognize discriminated places including same image texts.

A framework of collaborative system based on multi-stereo vision for a shared mixed reality (MR) application is described in this paper. The traditional immersive VR system usually separates the users from the real environment and mainly provides CG-generated space. Recently an alternative approach is through Mixed Reality, which allows user to manipulate objects in a combined environment of the real world objects and virtual space. We propose a framework of shared mixed reality environment to show a real world object with a stereo view and natural operating interface for the separated users. In this paper we mainly describe the sketch of the system and the structure of each functional part and their implementation approaches.

We introduce a projection-space interaction tool (Digital Canvas) which can be used for visual environments. Using Digital Canvas, users are allowed to interact with the visual items on the same space where they are displayed. Digital Canvas has resolved some limitations of previous interaction tools by merging interaction space and display space, providing tangible interface, and allowing for intuitive and natural interfaces. Digital Canvas was successfully used for digital painting education and a virtual environment manipulation. As a painting tool, it provided tactile feedback, freedom of choosing painting tools, erasable and undoable procedures, and an interface that is similar to traditional painting. As a virtual environment interaction tool, Digital Canvas allowed for projection-space tangible interactions using physical objects.

In this paper, we illustrate an augmented reality toolkit that can be used to develop edutainment materials with 3-dimensional graphics and video images. It is based on SEDRIS(Synthetic Environment Data Representation and Interchange Specification) and represents a complete range of real world object attributes. The toolkit manipulates and integrates 3-dimensional graphics objects and video. The virtual environment data structure allows object attributes to be visualized and interactively manipulated in the toolkit.

This paper presents guidelines for designing interactions for augmented reality (AR) based contents for education. The guidelines stems directly from our experience in designing, implementing and validating an AR based contents for teaching the concept of “circulation of water.” We describe the production and validation process that starts with a careful analysis of whether AR is (can be) appropriate for the target educational material. In particular, where possible, the direct tangible 3D manipulation is applied to the important interaction points to imbue the “hands-on” experience. The resulting contents were successfully put to use in real classrooms and usability and educational effects study is under way.

Augmented Reality (AR) and Tangible User Interface (TUI) have been proven to provide intuition to human computer interface with richness of a tactile sense. Recent implementations in that field, however, have inherited a 2D Graphical User Interface (GUI) scheme and work as isolated systems. Consequently, the systems are limited in supporting intuitive interfaces and various applications. This paper presents an AR-based tangible interaction system for table-top interaction environments. A projector displays information or graphical images on the table through back-projection. Two cameras on and under the table track the tangible objects which are attached with ARToolKit markers and that are used as interaction tools. Furthermore, a Augmentation Display beside the table shows graphical objects combined with the real table. The system shares the object tracking information of the object as context through the vr-UCAM [8]. Moreover, we also present a scheme of tracking smoothing based on a tracking prediction using Kalman Filter. As an application, the ARTable is integrated with Responsive Multimedia System (RMS), a storytelling system [3,4]. The proposed system is applicable to a wide range of usages such as virtual reality and augmented reality applications.

In this paper, we investigated the effects of guided and unguided style VR learning on user attention and retained knowledge. We conducted a study where users performed guided or unguided style learning in the virtual environment while user attention was measured through an eye tracking system and physiological sensors. The virtual environment contained the five specific events associated with different stimuli, but the guided task was designed to provide the specific goals whereas the unguided task asked the user to actively search for the interesting items. The results showed that the unguided task followed by the guided task made a considerable learning effect by giving a preview to the user. In addition, tactile feedback, sudden view point change, unique appearance and behavior, and sound stimuli played an important factor in increasing human attention states that also induced enhancing human memory about VR experience.

A multi-modal virtual reality application that aims to investigate the effect of olfaction on learning, retention, and recall of complex 3D structures such as organic molecules, is presented. Students interact with molecules in either desktop or immersive configuration. In the latter case, visual immersion is achieved through the use of a large rear-projected stereoscopic screen. In both configurations motion parallax is provided using a camera-based head tracking technique. Both desktop and large-scale fan-based devices that allow real-time smell diffusion are used.

This paper proposes a prototype of an optical tracking system based on a single camera, and presents a design of the active infrared optical tracker to improve the stability of the tracking. Moreover, a method based on Virtual Visual Servoing (VVS) is utilized to compute the pose of the device to be tracked. With the proposed method, the pose computation can be considered as the dual problem of visual servoing, thus an accurate and robust result can be obtained. The proposed system can be regarded as a 6-DOF controller and can be widely applied in the fields of entertainment, education and industry, etc.

In this paper, we propose a computer interaction method for a game. The game is played by using finger shadow cast by a projector to move a ball rendered by a computer. We use a camera to track the movement of the finger shadow. A simple algorithm to move this ball was developed, which depends on the position of the shadow in the camera picture.

The algorithm consist of three parts: the recognition of the shadow, the calculation of the ball by using transformation matrices, and the recognition of the collision between the ball and the shadow and consequential the direction of the ball-movement.

Interactions that provide motivating activities, and perform mutual feedback truly in human-scale spaces, were not suggested in any studies. In this paper, we propose and implement a haptic interaction system that realizes reciprocal reactions. This system is composed of a wire-driven haptic interface and an immersive virtual environment. It enables user to do visual and force feedback in a human-scale interaction spaces. And the virtual human performs intuitive response to changes of user’s action. Based on the framework, we implemented a haptic interaction,

Virtual Catch Ball

, that a user can play the virtual human with one’s feeling of contacting real ball. Furthermore we introduce the system’s extended function that virtual human imitates user’s effective styles acquired by a on-line motion capture, and then reflects them on his behavioral structure. It will be a practical way to produce various motion patterns during playing, and to evolve both behaviors.

A source-less attitude measurement system and robust heading self-calibration method for virtual surgery navigation is presented. The proposed system includes three accelerometers and three magnetometers to measure the gravity field and the geomagnetic filed to calculate the attitude. During the heading calibration procedure, both the magnetic field and gravity field are measured in all three axes with a set of combinations of attitudes. The set of measurements of magnetometer triad are first selected by random sampling consensus (RANSAC), and then are used to fit an ellipsoid to remove the hard iron error, finally the measurements of the magnetometer triad without the hard iron error and the measurements of accelerometer triad are rearranged to a set of equations to solve the soft iron matrix. Compared with other existing calibration method, the proposed calibration method does not require heading reference. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method and its potential application in virtual surgery navigation.

This paper presents a strategy of dynamic user modeling for sketch-based user interface. A user model is defined as an incremental decision tree for a specific user. A drawing style modeling process is designed to model user’s temporal drawing performances among inputting strokes, and to predict the possible shape in term of fuzzy matching. A user mediation process is proposed based on relevance feedback to capture users’ drawing intentions and refine the recognition results. Experiments prove efficiency of the method.

A multi-modal Virtual Environment that provides human-scale haptic feedback is described. User’s immersion is achieved using a large rear-projected stereoscopic screen, a 5.1 audio system, and fan-based olfactory displays. An educational Virtual Reality application that allows students to experiment the electron bound state in the Bohr atom model and the quantification of the energy levels through the haptic channel, is presented. This application can be run in both immersive and desktop configurations including haptic interaction, ranging from pseudo-haptic illusion to human-scale haptic immersion.

To quantify the regularity of state updates, the concept of Irregular Degree was introduced. Two experiments corresponding to four different filtering policies were designed. In the first experiment three filtering policies based on Irregular Degree were compared. In the second experiment, the filtering policy achieving the best task performance in the first experiment was selected to compare with other filtering policies. The results of the first experiment indicate that the stability of state updates per second is a more important impact factor than Irregular Degree on the task performance. The results of the second experiment indicate that corresponding to different state updates per second, the filtering policies can achieve different task performance.

Virtual anatomy system is helpful in medical education. We designed and implemented virtual anatomy training system for medical students. Anatomical images of Visible Korean Human (VKH) data were produced with serial sectioning of the Korean cadaver’s whole body at 0.2 mm intervals. 3D volume data was made by stacking the color and segmented images, and the volume data was reconstructed with 1 mm voxel size since entire volume data is so large. We present the virtual anatomy training system using volume rendering, on which the 3D anatomical volume and 3D segmented volume can be sectioned at arbitrary angles, and the 3D rendered images of the several anatomical structures can be displayed and rotated at any angles.

In this paper, we present novel systems supporting remote interactions between humans and also between humans and animals. We developed interfaces which supports non-verbal modes of communication. We introduce the Poultry.Internet system, a remote multi-modal human-pet interaction system. This system allows humans to remotely touch their pet using a system interconnected through the Internet. We also present the Internet.Pajama, a wearable suit which allows parents to interact with their child. The aim of the system is to allow parents to hug their child while they are not at home.

In interactive computer games and computer animation, intuitively controlling the motion of an articulated character is considered as a difficult task. One of the reasons is that, typically, an articulated model used in the field has a high degree-of-freedom (DOF) for joints so that it is challenging to devise an easy-to-use interface to control the individual DOF. In this paper, as an alternative to existing techniques for controlling articulated characters, we propose the traditional marionette control [1] as natural interfaces to control the characters, and explain how to implement a virtual marionette based on physically-based modelling and haptic paradigm. Using our virtual marionette system, we can rapidly but easily create sophisticated motions for a high-DOF articulated character. Moreover, our system relies on haptic interfaces to model the behavior of real-world marionette controls and provides to the puppeteer responsive forces as a result of the created motions. This results in the puppeteer having a better sense of control over the marionette that she or he manipulates. Our experimentations show that our system can create reasonably complicated motions for articulated characters in an easy and quick manner at highly interactive rates.

A MPEG-7 based multimedia retrieval system for digital museum is introduced in this paper. The system utilizes description tools standardized in MPEG-7, like color and shape descriptors and simple semantic annotations, to support image retrieval. The implementation also exploits eXist, a native xml database system with XQuery support to manage and query the MPEG-7 meta data. Two query methods are supported: Query-By-Example(QBE) and Query-By-Keyword(QBK). This system is integrated into SDU-ADM, Archaeological Digital Museum of Shandong University.

Tour into the picture (TIP) is a technique that can make animation from one 2D image of a scene. Compared to traditional geometry based modeling method, it is not only realized easily, but also can provide better effects of navigation. Based on the previous research experience, this paper mainly introduces the application of TIP for digitization of Culture Heritage by using relative depth calculation and cubic panorama. Finally, by using a hybrid NPR/TIP approach, we provide stylized interactive and real-time scenes walkthrough so as to convey a kind of specific cultural spirits.

A project named ”Virtual Museum Net of Magna Graecia” is presented, whose objective is to provide an unitary image of the archaeological heritage of Calabria (a Southern Italian region), through Computer Technology, Multimedia Designing and Virtual Reconstructions. The project aims to encourage the technological transfer of the most advanced researches in the exploitation and conservation sector of the Cultural Heritage. The ”Virtual Museum Net of Magna Graecia” project is included in the context of Knowledge Media Design for Museums. This project links the museum scenery and multimedia, in order to use technology as system of representation.

In this paper, we present a digital repair method for archeological relics with some vacant areas. We first use the simple method to find the neighboring area which influences the shape of the vacant area. Then we construct the bi-cubic Bezier spline surface to interpolate given points in the influencing area. Re-sampling points on the bi-cubic Bezier spline surface, we can use triangle meshes to repair vacant areas. The advantage of this method is that the repaired area can smoothly be patched with other parts of archeological relics and it can keep the real shape of vacant areas.

More and more attention is paid to Game-based Learning at present. In this paper, the design and development of a teacher’s tool in game-based learning system was introduced. The teacher’s tool has two main functions. Firstly, teacher can use the tool to trace students’ learning activity on-line and interact real-time with students, such as providing help, scaffold and encouragement etc. Secondly, teachers can design new plots according to students’ study schedule and integrate the content of courses in it, which can give teachers full play to the leading role of instruction. The second function also has a good effect on integrating the game and education.

We describe in this paper an experimental setting for browsing and reading simultaneously multiple digital documents. An hemispherical visualization device is used to immerge the reader into 3D representations of digital collections.

The development status about digitalized protection of cultural relic and virtual museum construction has been introduced. The key technology of digitalized protection for cultural relic and virtual museum construction has been expatiated. The application of stereo photography and virtual reality technology in digitalized protection of cultural relic and virtual museum construction has been shown. The principle of stereo display has been explained in detail. The key technical problem of virtual reality used in digitalized protection of cultural relic has been expounded, including several important aspects such as 3D scanning and modeling for cultural relic, texture mapping of virtual cultural relic, technology of human-machine interaction to the virtual museum scene, etc. The problem about the mode of management, maintenance and working on virtual museum has been also introduced in this paper.

This paper proposes a blind watermarking scheme for 3D motion signal based on frequency domain, using addition property of DFT and noise eliminating. The algorithm embeds a watermark into the 3D motion by perturbing the middle frequency coefficients. During watermark extraction, the detected signal is smoothed to get an approximation of original signal by noise eliminating to obtain the watermark noise, which is amplified to extract watermark. Experimental results shows that the algorithm for 3D motion is resilient to many attacks such as Gaussian White Noise, resampling, smoothing, cropping, enhancement, attenuation and rearranging.

In this paper, we propose a new shape feature for shape-similarity search of 3D polygonal-mesh models in digital museum. The shape feature is an extension of the D2 shape functions proposed by Osada. Our proposed shape feature is a combination of geometry and texture which is also invariant to similarity transformation. Experiments showed that, our method achieved better performance improvement especially for appearance retrieval of 3d model.

A novel digital historical heritage restoration approach is presented in this paper, which is based on photo-realistic 3D reconstruction from uncalibrated image sequences. Original images of the targets, such as statues, buildings, or culture relics, are captured with a hand-held camera and processed in three steps, which consists of preprocessing, sparse reconstruction and dense reconstruction. The reconstructed surface models can be preserved or exhibited as digital copies of the heritage; experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach and its potential to be applied in the field of historical heritage restoration.

This study proposes a scheme to integrate several types of media elements into a multimedia framework, which plays media on a same platform without distinct players. This investigation is well-suited for multimedia applications such as the distance learning and digital library. However, the varied media elements put together and played on a same platform are great challenges. This study employs MPEG-21 digital item standard to achieve this target, makes varied multimedia exist on a browser interface, and solves the problem of different players playing different media. Moreover, this study exploits XML and Digital Item Declaration Language (DIDL) functions to construct a Digital Media System (DMS). The DMS puts separate videos, audios, images, and text media sources into a trailer. Users select and play the trailer using web-based interface to achieve on demand playing. Finally, we demonstrate that the proposed system is resilient on multimedia applications and very suitable for distance learning systems.

The widespread use of on-line computer games makes this medium a valuable vehicle for information sharing, while scalability facilitates global collaboration between players in the game space. Game engines generally provide an intuitive interface allowing attention to be shifted to the understanding of scientific elements rather than hiding them between a wealth of menus and other counterintuitive user interfaces. These strengths are applied towards promoting the understanding of planetary systems and climate change. Unconventional interaction and visualization techniques are introduced as a method to experience geophysical environments. Players are provided with dynamic visualization assets, which enable them to discover, interrogate and correlate scientific data in the game space. The spirit of exploration is to give players the impetus to conceptualize how complex Earth and planetary systems work, understand their intrinsic beauty and the impact of humans, while providing a sense of responsibility for those systems.