Michele Margarone

VeGamen exploring art and history in Venice

To make exploring a locales heritage a challenging and compelling experience, the Venice Game uses a handheld platform and educational software that leverages video game techniques.

MADE: developing edutainment applications on mobile computers

Abstract Recent advances in mobile computing and communication technologies have engendered and spurred a nomadic use of computers. In order to support the Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) design for new mobile services, we have developed the MADE (Mobile Applications Development Environment) software development kit. MADE includes M3P (MicroMultiMedia Player), a network-enabled multimedia player easily programmable through the Micromultimedia Services Language (MSL). MSL provides high-level components, which encapsulate advanced services (e.g. positioning, database query, path search, etc.) that can be easily integrated in multimedia presentations. This allows developers to build modular applications, which can give richly informative services to the general public through a coherent and homogeneous multimedia HCI, that can be learned with a low mental workload. On the other hand, MADE hides the low-level aspects of multimedia and service management, allowing designers to focus on the modalities of presentation of information and on the user interaction. Our tests have revealed that MADE supports a sort of constructive approach to applications’ development, which is particularly suitable for novice programmers. Moreover, MSL allows an integration of advanced services in multimedia interfaces without increasing the complexity of code writing.