Fabio Sorrentino

Fitmersive Games: Fitness Gamification through Immersive VR

The decreasing hardware cost makes it affordable to pair Immersive Virtual Environments (IVR) visors with treadmills and exercise bikes. In this paper, we discuss the application of different gamification techniques in IVR for supporting physical exercise. We describe both the hardware setting and the design of Rift-a-bike, a cycling fitmersive game (immersive games for fitness). We evaluate the effectiveness of such techniques through a user study, which provides different insights on their effectiveness in designing such applications.

RiftArt: Bringing masterpieces in the classroom through immersive virtual reality

The recent development in consumer hardware lowers the cost barrier for adopting immersive Virtual Reality (VR) solutions, which could be an option for classroom use in the near future. In this paper, we introduce RiftArt, a VR tool for supporting the teaching and studying of Art History. Using RiftArt the teachers can configure virtual museum rooms, with artwork models inside, and enhance them with multimodal annotation. The environment supports both the teachers during the lesson and the students during rehearsal. The application, implemented completely using Web technologies, can be visualized on large screens and head mounted displays. The user test results advance the understanding of the VR effects on classroom usage. We demonstrate that VR increases the motivation of high-school students towards studying Art History and we provide an in-depth analysis of the factors that contribute to this result.

SuperAvatar Children and mobile tourist guides become friends using superpowered avatars

When tourists are wandering around in a town or city they do not know, it is normal to use a guide to make up their mind on what is more interesting in the surrounding.If the guide is an interactive one on a mobile device, they can also consult multimedia material and listen to audio descriptions. But what if the user is a children that is much more prone to get distracted? In this paper, we propose the presentation of touristic and cultural information to children through an augmented-reality approach. In order to keep focused the attention of the young users we make use of a virtual tourist guide, appearing as a comic book superhero. To get a realistic representation of the avatar we exploit a technique for fast simulating talking heads, which is portable on mobile devices. The technique is based on preloading a set of meshes representing different phonemes and switching among them in order to simulate animation, without the need of computing the update for an entire face model. In addition, we report on a first Android prototype, which shows the effectiveness of the approach for increasing childrens learning.

WoBo: Multisensorial travels through Oculus Rift

WoBo (World in a Box) aims to provide a new experience for travellers, allowing them to visit distant or hardly reachable places through the exploitation of consumer cameras and a head mounted display. The experience consists in watching a 360-degrees video with 3D audio in a dedicated cabin. The user can select videos shot in different places, which have been created with six consumer cameras. We describe the proposed experience, the hardware and the software used for a first prototype.

Click and share: A face recognition tool for the mobile community

In this paper, we describe an Android based application for mobile devices that allows users to quickly and easily identify faces in pictures, recognizing persons, and, thus, sharing pictures with them. Each identified person matches against a contact registered in the phone directory, and, if no match is found, the detected face can be used for the creation of a new contact. We discuss how face recognition in a mobile setting increases the efficiency of the users while sharing content created with the mobile device, automatically suggesting the people identified in a photo or a video. We show the effectiveness of the approach through a user test on a photo sharing task, showing that it reduces the need for tedious, in particular on mobile devices, user input (e.g., compared to Facebook). By this means, we envision an increase of the quality of the user experience when interacting with the components of her social network.

3D-ize U! A Real-time 3D Head-model Texture Generator for Android

Recently, the number of applications developed for smartphones has dramatically increased; however, at the moment, applications having the purpose of creating and displaying 3D models are quite rare. The goal of this work is to build an application that allows the user to see the virtual three-dimensional representations of their friends and interact with them. The main challenge is to achieve results similar to those that a computer would produce, optimizing the process to deal with the constraints due to the technology used. Since there are no similar mobile applications, this work will make possible to create a base onto which will be possible to realize applications that have customized 3D models as a common feature.

A seamless pipeline for the acquisition of the body shape: the Virtuoso case study

In this paper, we describe the design and the implementation of the demonstrator for the Virtuoso project, which aims at creating seamless support for fitness and wellness activities in touristic resort. We define the objectives of the user interface, the hardware and software setup, showing how we combined and exploited consumer-level devices for supporting 3D body scan, contact-less acquisition of physical parameters, exercise guidance and operator support.

Smart Furniture and Technologies for Supporting Distributed Learning Groups

Advances in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and its combination with IP technology support developers of interactive systems in building integrated experiences. In the same way, people are constantly connected between them using mobile devices. Through the IoT era we are going to a fully connected world and it influences the field of Education too. Due to the availability of smartphones, bluetooth beacons and other network devices that enhance the interaction in the classroom, we try to lower the gap between the activities that take place in the physical and in the digital world, taking advantage from implicit inputs and tracking the creation of groups. In this paper, we describe a proof of concept in a blended learning environment setting by detailing both the hardware setup and the general prototype architecture design thus presenting the implemented features and the future work.

Smart Mirror Where I Stand, Who Is the Leanest in the Sand?

In this paper we introduce the Virtuoso project, which aims at creating a seamless interactive support for fitness and wellness activities in touristic resorts. The overall idea is to evaluate the current physical state of the user through a technology-enhanced mirror. We describe the state of the art technologies for building a smart mirror prototype. In addition, we compare different parameters for evaluating the user’s physical state, considering the user’s impact, the contact requirements and their cost. Finally we depict the planned setup and evaluation setting for the Virtuoso project.

AR Turn-by-turn Navigation in Small Urban Areas and Information Browsing

Navigation systems allow to discover cities and their urban areas easily and quickly, finding the shortest path to reach them and giving directions to users saving their time and energy. At present time, these systems are based over streets maps offered by the major mapping services like Tele Atlas, Navteq or OpenStreetMap. In recent years, thanks to the Google StreetView service it has been possible to discover main cities locations both indoor and outdoor. What is missing in this frame is the possibility to map small urban areas of small and medium sized cities, due to their lack of relevance for the big players. In this cities there could be very interesting areas for tourists. Example locations could be botanical gardens, archeological sites, protected natural areas among others. In this work we tried to set up a navigation system for limited extensions inside urban areas which permits to wander around and gives access to related information using augmented reality techniques. Due to the possible poor wireless coverage in these locations we designed an application that stores all required data on the user’s device, splitting the information in packages according to the chosen language. A key issue was to achieve good results combining all these features in a single device with a small display, overwhelming the constraints due to the mobile environment.