Claudio Kirner

Development of a collaborative virtual environment for educational applications

This article presents the CVE-VM, a Collaborative Virtual Environment that has been developed for educational purposes. The system supports collaborative learning, according to the constructionism approach, and is intended to be used in Brazilian schools by children and teen-agers students. The article focuses mainly on design and implementation aspects, aiming to contribute to the development of similar multi-user systems.

Development of an interactive artifact for cognitive rehabilitation based on augmented reality

Cognitive rehabilitation, which uses software applications (multimedia), advanced physical devices (PDAs, cellular phones, etc.) or virtual reality applications, presents limitations of several types related to: workspace, realistic representation, intuitive interaction, dexterity demand, availability, devices dependency, user-friendly interface, customization, multi-sensory input/output, complexity, etc. Recently, the technological evolution has allowed the development of artifacts based on augmented reality that overcome most of the weaknesses of the applications implemented with the previous technology. In this way, this paper presents and discusses the development of an interactive artifact based on augmented reality, which makes possible intuitive tangible interactions, multi-sensory feedback, customization, simplicity and the implementation of cognitive exercises. Ten users evaluated cognitive applications running over the interactive artifact under the point-of-view of augmented reality, giving their impressions. Finally, we discuss the potential of the interactive artifact, pointing out directions to improve its structure and utilization by cognitive disabled people.

Interaction in Collaborative Educational Virtual Environments

The collaborative educational virtual environment supposes the active participation of students and teachers, interacting highly and aiming at knowledge exchange and creation of new abilities. The learning becomes a process in which one assists the other to reach the objective, by exchanging experiences, dialogues, discussion of ideas, accomplishments of the group, and individual activities that can be shared with the group, allowing the creation of knowledge based on collective involvement. In this context, this paper describes and discusses the aspects and methods of interaction between students and teachers in collaborative educational virtual environments and presents an application based on the Virtual Teacher Project.

Ambientes Educacionais Colaborativos com Realidade Aumentada

A aprendizagem colaborativa presencial e remota vem sendo usada cada vez mais como uma abordagem educacional eficiente. A evolucao tecnologica permite, atualmente, replicar e, ate mesmo, amplificar caracteristicas da comunicacao interpessoal, mas o problema da manipulacao remota de objetos continua sendo dificil de ser resolvido. No entanto, a Realidade Virtual e Realidade Aumentada permitem a manipulacao de objetos virtuais de maneira parecida com as situacoes reais. Assim, este trabalho discute essas questoes e apresenta solucoes para a interacao em ambientes colaborativos presenciais e remotos, usando recursos para a comunicacao interpessoal (chat, audio e video-conferencia) e Realidade Aumentada.

Providing More Interactivity to Virtual Museums: A Proposal for a VR Authoring Tool

This paper describes the museuVirtual project that is developing an authoring tool for the collaborative building of nonimmersive museums in virtual reality. The rationale behind museuVirtual is based on the observation that virtual museums found on the Internet normally have very limited opportunities for user interactivity. We examine different kinds of interactivity and propose an authoring tool that allows a teacher or student to create virtual exhibits in which dynamic interactive objects and chatterbots may be programmed in a relatively easy way. This proposal is strongly based on the concepts of actor-based programming and constructivist theory, which have been applied in the last five years to teach basic programming skills to beginners. The ideas applied with success in many previous experiments using 2-D graphics are now being introduced in an authoring tool that generates VRML/Java code. The museuVirtual project is developing a tool that not only allows the students to be the organizers and curators of their own museums, but also to work collaboratively, by building such museums in a virtual distributed environment.

Using augmented reality to support the understanding of three-dimensional concepts by blind people

Abstract Describing real and imaginary three-dimensional scenes from the observer’s viewpoint is an intuitive activity for visually non-impaired people, but it is difficult for congenitally blind people, since it involves abstract concepts, such as perspective, depth planes, occlusion, etc. This paper discusses these problems and presents physical environments and procedures supported by an augmented reality tool in order to help blind people to understand, describe and convert three-dimensional scenes into two-dimensional embossed representations. To verify how blind people can acquire these concepts, we developed an augmented reality application that worked as an audio spatial tutor to make the perspective-learning process easy. The application was tested with 10 congenitally blind people, who learned to understand the perspective concepts and who reported on the experience. Finally, we discuss the learning method and technical aspects, suggesting ways to improve the augmented reality application and how it can be released.

Development of Adaptive Information Visualization Systems with Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality combined with adaptive hypermedia plays an important role on providing effective information visualization systems. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive architecture model in order to provide adaptive information visualization systems with augmented reality. We also provide a novel visual metaphor for real-valued, low-dimensional data with optimal values for each feature inspired on the pseudo-flower metaphor.

Realidade Aumentada com em um Mapa Tátil Sonoro para Deficientes Visuais: um sistema de interação.

Este artigo apresenta um modelo para aplicacao de tecnicas de mineracao em dados coletados a partir de avaliacoes da aprendizagem. A partir da proposta, torna-se possivel identificar quais conteudos e em que niveis cognitivos eles foram assimilados pelos aprendizes, permitindo, assim, que estrategicas pedagogicas sejam adequadamente planejadas para grupos de estudantes que apresentem as dificuldades identificadas. Para validar o estudo, sao apresentados tambem os resultados do experimento realizado numa disciplina de Programacao do curso de Licenciatura em Computacao da Universidade de Pernambuco.

Subjective Usability Evaluation Criteria of Augmented Reality Applications

This paper presents an extensive list of attributes to measure the usability of Augmented Reality applications. These attributes were collected from a systematic review of papers in journals and conferences at the global scope, arising from the productions of the last five years, such as main areas, more used attributes, AR environments, and number of papers by year. We used the most relevant studies in the literature to compose the organization and categorization of the main usability attributes discussed and used in Augmented Reality. Finally, we propose a set of questions on these Augmented Reality usability attributes, based on established questionnaires and also experience in the evaluation of the authors.

Ensino e Aprendizagem de Eletromagnetismo usando Recursos de Realidade Aumentada

O ensino e aprendizagem de alguns conceitos de eletromagnetismo, por serem relativamente abstratos, necessitam de meios que oferecam mais clareza ao aluno. O desenho ou projecao de figuras estaticas e em perspectiva no quadro-negro ou em tela tem sido a forma mais tradicional de ensino desse topico, mas com os avancos da computacao e o barateamento dos computadores surgiram solucoes alternativas que fazem uso de realidade virtual e realidade aumentada. Pelo que se tem avaliado, essas alternativas se mostram como grandes auxiliadores do processo de aprendizagem e transformam o que antes era algo apenas imaginado, a partir de um desenho no quadro ou na tela, em algo tangivel, pratico e acessivel a experimentacao pessoal do aluno. Nesse trabalho, apresenta-se uma aplicacao de realidade aumentada para auxiliar no ensino e aprendizagem de alguns conceitos basicos de eletromagnetismo. O aluno pode fazer experimentos com um circuito eletrico tal como se estivesse em um mini laboratorio e ainda tem a opcao de ser instruido por um tutor em audio que explica os efeitos da interacao sobre o circuito.