Ignazio Passero

Development and evaluation of a virtual campus on Second Life: The case of SecondDMI

Video games and new communication metaphors are quickly changing todays young people habits. Considering the actual e-learning scenarios, embedded in a fully technological enabled environment it is crucial to take advantage of this kind of capabilities to let learning process gain best results. This paper presents a virtual campus created using Second Life which provides four distinct types of virtual space: common student campus, collaborative zones, lecture rooms and recreational areas. Second Life environments and objects have been designed and programmed to support synchronous lectures and collaborative learning. The Second Life virtual world has also been equipped with supporting tools enabling students and teachers to navigate among multimedia contents. Second Life and an ad-hoc developed Moodle plug-in have been integrated to naturally enrich the environment with LMS services, exploiting this 3D world to increase the interaction and communication opportunities between teachers and students, and among students, principally favoring planned and unplanned social encounters. We have conducted an experiment involving university students aiming at evaluating Second Life synchronous distance lectures in the proposed learning environment. The evaluation has been conducted considering that, in a 3D multi-user virtual environment, learning is strongly related to the user perception of belonging to a learning community, as well as to the perception of awareness, presence and communication. The results of the evaluation are very positive.

Wiimote and Kinect: gestural user interfaces add a natural third dimension to HCI

The recent diffusion of advanced controllers, initially designed for the home game console, has been rapidly followed by the release of proprietary or third part PC drivers and SDKs suitable for implementing new forms of 3D user interfaces based on gestures. Exploiting the devices currently available on the game market, it is now possible to enrich, with low cost motion capture, the user interaction with desktop computers by building new forms of natural interfaces and new action metaphors that add the third dimension as well as a physical extension to interaction with users. This paper presents two systems specifically designed for 3D gestural user interaction on 3D geographical maps. The proposed applications rely on two consumer technologies both capable of motion tracking: the Nintendo Wii and the Microsoft Kinect devices. The work also evaluates, in terms of subjective usability and perceived sense of Presence and Immersion, the effects on users of the two different controllers and of the 3D navigation metaphors adopted. Results are really encouraging and reveal that, users feel deeply immerse in the 3D dynamic experience, the gestural interfaces quickly bring the interaction from novice to expert style and enrich the synthetic nature of the explored environment exploiting user physicality.

SLMeeting: supporting collaborative work in Second Life

Second Life is a virtual world which is often used for the synchronous meeting of teams. However, supporting distributed meeting goes beyond supporting user activities during the meeting itself, because it is also necessary to facilitate their coordination, arrangement and set up. In this paper we investigate how teams can work together more effectively in Second Life. We also propose a system, named SLMeeting, which enhances the communication facilities of Second Life to support the management of collaborative activities, organized as conferences or Job meetings and later replayed, queried, analyzed and visualized. The meeting organization and management functionalities are performed by ad-hoc developed Second Life objects and by the communication between these objects and a supporting web site. As a result, the functionalities offered by Second Life are enriched with the capabilities of organizing meetings and recoding all the information concerning the event.

A gestural approach to presentation exploiting motion capture metaphors

Speaking in public may be a challenging task in terms of self-control and attention to the concepts to expose and to non-verbal communication. Presentation software, like Microsoft PowerPoint™ or OpenOffice, may support the speaker in organizing and controlling the flow of his/her discussion by commanding the slide change. In this paper we describe an approach exploiting the availability of the Microsoft Kinect™ advanced game controller to manage a presentation software through a Natural User Interface (NUI). The approach, named Kinect Presenter (KiP), adopts motion capture to recognize body gestures representing interaction metaphors. We perform a preliminary evaluation aiming at assessing the degree of support provided by the proposed interaction approach to the speaker activities. The assessment is based on the combined usage of two techniques: a questionnaire-based survey and an empirical analysis. The context of this study was constituted of Bachelor and PhD students in Computer Science at the University of Salerno, and teachers and employees from the same university. First results were adequate both in terms of satisfaction and performances, also when compared with a wireless mouse-based interaction approach.

Supporting Jigsaw-Based Collaborative Learning in Second Life

In this paper we describe how to exploit the 3D programmable virtual world provided by second life to create an environment and a location for collaborative learning. To this aim second life objects have been modeled and programmed to support the synchronous role-based collaborative activities required by the jigsaw learning technique in a 3D virtual meeting setting. We have also integrated this approach with Moodle, in such a way to naturally enrich LMS services with meeting management, set-up features, and synchronous collaborative learning.

VirtualHoP: Virtual Worlds for experimentation and concretization of technical drawing

This work proposes the adoption of 3D Virtual Worlds for providing younger students with an environment capable of supporting the engineering practices based on technical drawing. The main difficulty of technical drawing consists in representing a 3D object on a 2D medium. This restriction imposes to human mind to be able to summarize the spatial properties of objects on the paper. The proposed system trains these capabilities by requiring students to build in the simulated environment simple objects represented with 2D drawings. In this way, the students are not only pushed to move themselves between different dimensionality spaces, but also they benefit of the 3D spaces for moving and exploring the models they are building.

Migrating legacy video lectures to multimedia learning objects

This paper presents a variation of the visitor pattern which allows programmers to write visitor-like code in a concise way. The Runabout is a library extension that adds a limited form of multi-dispatch to Java. While the Runabout is not as expressive as a general multiple dispatching facility, the Runabout can be significantly faster than existing implementations of multiple dispatch for Java, such as MultiJava. Unlike MultiJava, the Runabout does not require changes to the syntax and the compiler. This paper illustrates how to use the Runabout, details its implementation and provides benchmarks comparing its performance with other approaches. Furthermore, the effect of an automatic static program transformation tool that translates bytecode using the Runabout to equivalent bytecode is evaluated. The tool uses double dispatch and runtime-type checks to achieve the same semantics that the Runabout has. The performance comparisons on large benchmarks that make extensive use of multiple dispatch show that using the Runabout does not result in a significant loss of performance for realistic applications and that, depending on the application and platform, small performance gains are also possible. Copyright

Second Life Technological Transfer to Companies: the case study of the CC ICT- Sud Centre

Many well known international business organizations are interested in virtual worlds considered as a valid support to distance cooperation and training. This paper describes the Second Life experience, gained by the authors to support the distance training activities proposed by the Competency Centre CC ICT-Sud, in the context of a course focused on showing how virtual worlds support collaborative work. The course was targeted to show distance collaboration tools and methodologies to company representatives, public administration employees and graduates auditors. The teaching modalities adopted were both of teaching and collaborative types. The latter allowed to experiment with collaborative methodologies that were introduced in the synchronous distance lectures. The results obtained are, in the main, encouraging.

A Service Oriented Collaborative Distributed Learning Object Management System

Learning Objects are stored in repositories and spread through Internet. The educational sector needs to share good quality educational contents, which can be reused and adopted in several contexts. In this paper we present a Service Oriented and SCORM conformant system, named CD-LOMAS (Collaborative Distributed Learning Object MAnagement System), supporting the sharing of contents and collaborative teaching in a highly distributed environment. Complex Learning Objects are decomposed into simpler Learning Objects that can be distributed at different sites. The adoption of a service oriented architecture enables to federate distributed Learning Management System at content level. CD-LOMAS has been developed as a MOODLE plug-in and is equipped with an extensible service oriented architecture supporting artifact management features, such as coordination of cooperative teaching and versioning, which are integrated with context-awareness.

An Augmented Reality Application to Gather Participant Feedback During a Meeting

The new features offered by top-of-the-range mobile devices can be exploited to support Face-to-Face collaboration, providing collaborative interfaces that go “beyond being there” perception. In particular, Augmented Reality interfaces appear to be a natural medium for Computer Supported Collaborative Work. In this paper, we present an Augmented Reality system, named Augmented Reality Mind Scanner System (ARMS), aiming at supporting the speaker of a meeting in receiving feedback from the audience concerning their agreement with and the clarity of the presentation. The ARMS system is a phase of deeper ongoing research on the possibilities of applying Augmented Reality technology on mobile devices, and is anticipating future technological developments that will bring more powerful devices on current customer markets.