Patrice Torguet

Experimental Feedback on Prog&Play: A Serious Game for Programming Practice

This paper presents an experimental feedback on a serious game dedicated to strengthening programming skills. This serious game, called Prog&Play, is built on an open source real‐time strategy game. Its goal is to be compatible with different students, teachers and institutions. We based its evaluation on an iterative process that allows to implement the game and carry out experimentations in several contexts. Through this assessment, we define a framework which has been tested by third parties and we analyse both positive and negative points to improve the project. Evaluation is indeed beneficial and enables you to establish communication about the implemented practices.

Multi-user interactions in the context of concurrent virtual world modelling

Distributed virtual reality, thanks to newly proposed paradigms, offers interesting perspectives to virtual world modelling. Our main interests are in applications which allow users to edit and deform existing shapes. This paper presents a concurrent virtual world modelling application based on those ideas. Herein is shown how concrete manipulations of tools (such as a hammer) are transformed into free form deformations of existing shapes. We also present a first implementation based on VIPER (Virtuality Programming EnviRonment) a generic distributed virtual reality development platform.

A Virtual Reality Tool for Teleoperation Research

Efficiency in teleoperation systems is strongly affected by the relationship between the operator and the remote environment If the operator has access to easily comprehensible information, his capability for opportune decision making increases Virtual reality has been shown to be an effective means of displaying information to the human operator It allows the creation of three-dimensional and interactive environments, which can be explored and controlled in an intuitive way. In our system, called ASSET, we have applied virtual reality techniques in the design and implementation of a teleoperation systems human-machine interface. ASSETs objective was to create an object-oriented software framework for teleoperation systems development This tool allows flexible customizing and can be used as a test bed for evaluating interaction techniques, devices, simulation models and for research about autonomous agents.

A Distributed Virtual Storytelling System for Firefighters Training

The aim of the proposed paper is to present a virtual reality scenario managing application which has been distributed according to the DoD (Department of Defense) High Level Architecture (HLA) standard. The system works over several implementations of the Run-Time Infrastructure (RTI, HLA software part), on networked PCs. The main scenario is a networked Firefighters Training Simulation where each computer can control one or several avatars either through human piloting or through Artificial Intelligence (AI) based behaviors using Learning Classifier Systems.

Learning Programming with an RTS-Based Serious Game

This paper presents a prototype of a serious game that aims to entice gamers to learn computer programming by using a multiplayer real time strategy game (RTS). In this type of game, a player gives orders to his/her units to carry out operations (i.e. moving, building and so forth). Typically, these instructions are given by clicking on a map with the mouse. The goal of this project is to encourage players to give these orders through programming. This game is intended for computer science students in higher education and can be used across both university and professional curricula. The programming languages used are C or C++.

Towards A Serious Application for Telescope Maintenance

Abstract This paper summarizes the ongoing development of a Serious Application towards a 3D Virtual World (VW) for Telescope Complex Systems (TCS). Specifically, the underlying goal is to show how VWs can be useful for telescope maintenance by providing an intuitive means of complex data visualization and inference, equipments teleoperation and by becoming a future platform for technical training and museographic Serious Games.

A new method to optimize the force-directed placement for 3D large graph drawing

This paper describes a novel force-directed placement approach for 3D drawing of large graphs. The main idea behind our approach consists in optimizing the layout by equitably distributing vertices in the space. We consider the largest sphere inscribed in the 3D space and the vertices are then assigned random initial positions that are improved by force-directed placement. In order to ensure the effectiveness of the algorithm, we propose a new energy function minimization which uses the conjugated gradient of Fletcher-Reeves [1, 2]. Our algorithm is not only addressed to general undirected graphs but also it produces good layout of large trees. This work is motivated by our need to offer 3D visualization tools for large computing networks but this first phase will be focused on the graph representation.