Juan Mateu

Developing Mixed Reality Educational Applications: The Virtual Touch Toolkit.

In this paper, we present Virtual Touch, a toolkit that allows the development of educational activities through a mixed reality environment such that, using various tangible elements, the interconnection of a virtual world with the real world is enabled. The main goal of Virtual Touch is to facilitate the installation, configuration and programming of different types of technologies, abstracting the creator of educational applications from the technical details involving the use of tangible interfaces and virtual worlds. Therefore, it is specially designed to enable teachers to themselves create educational activities for their students in a simple way, taking into account that teachers generally lack advanced knowledge in computer programming and electronics. The toolkit has been used to develop various educational applications that have been tested in two secondary education high schools in Spain.

VirtualTouch: A Tool for Developing Mixed Reality Educational Applications and an Example of Use for Inclusive Education

This article describes VirtualTouch, a tool for developing mixed reality educational applications. VirtualTouch proposes the use of virtual worlds and tangible user interfaces to offer a “mixed reality” experience. Using VirtualTouch a teacher may easily design learning modules, which are immediately implemented and used in the classroom. A first experience of such use, focused in the area of inclusive education, is also presented. The results of this experience are encouraging, showing that mixed reality applications have a high potential for use in this area.

Tangible Interfaces and Virtual Worlds: A New Environment for Inclusive Education

In this paper we present an educational application that integrates virtual worlds with tangible interfaces, in what is called “mixed reality”, using Kinect and OpenSim as the base technologies. The paper also discusses an experience on applying such technology for the inclusion at a concrete high school in Cunit (Spain). In the initial experiments, the use of mixed reality has shown a great potential for these education requirements.

Virtual Touch FlyStick and PrimBox: Two Case Studies of Mixed Reality for Teaching Geometry

This article presents a case study of the use of two new tangible interfaces for teaching geometry in a secondary school. The first tangible device allows the user to control a virtual object in 6 degrees of freedom by sensing isotonic and isometric muscle contractions. The second tangible device is used to modify virtual objects, changing attributes such as position, size, rotation and color. An experiment on using these devices was carried out at the “Florida Secundaria” high school: students learned geometric concepts by interacting with a virtual world using the tangible interfaces.

CUBICA: An Example of Mixed Reality

We want to thank the faculty of the I.E.S. “Joan Coromines”, at Benicarlo (Valencia, Spain), for their support while evaluating the system. In particular, the contribution of Lorenzo Otero was essential during that process. The work described in this paper was partially funded by the Spanish National Plan of I+D+i (TIN2010-17344), and by the Spanish Ministry of Industry (TSI-020100-2010-743).

Designing virtual world educational applications

Different studies show the benefits of using virtual worlds for educational purposes, where you can develop a wide variety of innovative teaching and learning activities. During the last six years we have been developing educational applications using virtual worlds and mixed reality. In this paper we summarize our experiences from the point of view of the design of the educational materials that have been developed in these virtual worlds.

Integrating Virtual Worlds with Tangible User Interfaces for Teaching Mathematics: A Pilot Study

This article presents a pilot study of the use of two new tangible interfaces and virtual worlds for teaching geometry in a secondary school. The first tangible device allows the user to control a virtual object in six degrees of freedom. The second tangible device is used to modify virtual objects, changing attributes such as position, size, rotation and color. A pilot study on using these devices was carried out at the “Florida Secundaria” high school. A virtual world was built where students used the tangible interfaces to manipulate geometrical figures in order to learn different geometrical concepts. The pilot experiment results suggest that the use of tangible interfaces and virtual worlds allowed a more meaningful learning (concepts learnt were more durable).

eMadrid project: Authoring, reuse and remote labs

This article describes in detail the main achievements in authoring and reuse of educational materials within the eMadrid project.