Raffaele De Amicis

Learning using augmented reality technology: multiple means of interaction for teaching children the theory of colours

Augmented Reality technology permits the concurrent interaction with the real environment and computer-generated virtual objects, thus making it an interesting technology for developing educational applications that allows manipulation and visualization. The work described extends the traditional concept of book with rendered graphics to help children understand fundamentals of the theory of colours. A three-dimensional virtual chameleon shows children how, from the combination of primary colours, it is possible to get secondary colours and viceversa. The chameleon responds to childrens actions changing appearance according to the colours of the surroundings. Our tangible interface becomes an innovative teaching tool conceived for supporting school learning methods, where the child can learn by playing with the virtual character, turning over the pages of the book and manipulating the movable parts. The main scientific contribution of this work is in showing what the use of augmented reality-based interfaces can bring to improve existing learning methods.

DentroTrento: a virtual walk across history

This paper illustrates the results of the DentroTrento project which promotes historical, artistic and cultural heritage in the area of Trentino through the use of Virtual Reality technologies. The projects goal was to implement an user friendly system which could be used by visitors of an archeological site thus fostering a process of cultural enrichment. The importance of the project, commissioned by the authority for Cultural Heritage, partially resides in the peculiarity of the sites premises, located below a square in Trento among the theatres foundations. The interface developed allows users speaking different languages to share simultaneously the experience of virtual tour across time.

Geospatial Visual Analytics

In the context of spatial planning, environmental management and monitoring a number of geospatial technologies allow operators and experts to capture, store, process and display an unprecedented amount of information about the environment and a wide variety of phenomena. However the extremely wide range of data available poses a critical challenge to operators that need to extract key pieces of knowledge from very large and heterogeneous sets of geospatial information. Within this scenario the domain of GeoVisual Analytics (GVA) can provide effective solutions to ensure better environmental control and to prevent environmental crisis. This paper presents the current challenges that GVA needs to face in the context of environmental protection, highlighting current technological, infrastructural, economical and legal implications at the international level. Finally the chapter shows how these issues have been tackled by the authors presenting the results of their current research activities.

Service oriented computing for Ambient Intelligence to support management of transport infrastructures

Ensuring effective Ambient Intelligence based upon the wide range of static as well as real-time datasets required to manage a transport infrastructure such as a motorway, is a daunting task. This paper presents how this challenge has been faced through the development of a service-based networked infrastructure capable to make a wide range of Geographical Information (GI) available to the operators of a major Italian motorway. In doing so, the system has used open standards from ISO and Open Geospatial Consortium. Unlike current Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs), which address relatively static data in time slices, the work presented allows, similarly to traditional GIS, to manage true dynamic data available through geo-referenced sensors along the motorway. The main objective of the project described within this paper was to link existing systems and networks to deliver a comprehensive, coordinated and sustained intelligent infrastructure which can be used to improve management of the motorway as a system. This approach follows the vision of Ambient Spatial Intelligence, which explores how to better embed intelligent features to respond to spatio-temporal queries and to better monitor geographical events within built and natural environments. The combination of information available from different sources (GI, sensor networks, etc.) with information on traffic and vehicle situation is essential to provide context awareness to operators. The networked platform developed has extended the traditional concept of SDIs with an unprecedented volume of real-time geo-referenced sensor data, deployed along the motorway path, all characterized by high spatial and temporal resolution.

A Personal Mobility Assistant based on Ambient Intelligence to Promote Sustainable Travel Choices

Abstract An increasing amount of attention is being paid by local public administrations, national and federal governments as well as by international institutions, such as the European Commission, to improve personal mobility within urban environments through the use of public transports. Improving mobility of people through increased use of public transportation has a number of advantages since it is strategic to reduce energy consumption, to lower emissions and pollution levels, to improve public safety, and to dramatically reduce congestions and road traffic. Reducing private transportation clearly bring significant benefits not only to citizens’ quality of life and public health but it also results in a more efficient urban system as a whole, with consequent substantial economic benefits at the wider societal level. Based on this assumption, this paper presents a so-called personal mobility assistant, i.e. a software for smartphones and tablets which promotes use of public transport by helping user identify the best travel option across a multi-modal transport network, through a user-friendly interface that intelligently adjusts to user preferences and to contextual information.

Visualization and analysis of CityGML dataset within a client sever infrastructure

Three dimensional city model is a topic of great interest in the context of the smart cities. The CityGML standard allows to collect in a unique format a big amount of information regarding the urban scenario, both from the geometric and from the f semantic and descriptive point of view. The chain of processes developed such as the creation, storage in tile and integration with data coming from different sources is quickly described. Greater attention is paid in describing the technique adopted for the streaming of the data from the server to the client, and this is compared with the standard services W3DS, WFS and WVS. Finally, a technique to convert three-dimensional vector model in elevation map is illustrated.

IMPROVE: collaborative design review in mobile mixed reality

In this paper we introduce an innovative application designed tomake collaborative design review in the architectural and automotive domainmore effective. For this purpose we present a system architecture whichcombines variety of visualization displays such as high resolution multitile displays, TabletPCs and head-mounted displays with innovative 2D and 3DInteraction Paradigms to better support collaborative mobile mixed realitydesign reviews. Our research and development is motivated by two usescenarios: automotive and architectural design review involving real users fromPage\Park architects and FIAT Elasis. Our activities are supported by the EUIST project IMPROVE aimed at developing advanced display techniques,fostering activities in the areas of: optical see-through HMD development usingunique OLED technology, marker-less optical tracking, mixed reality rendering,image calibration for large tiled displays, collaborative tablet-based andprojection wall oriented interaction and stereoscopic video streaming for mobileusers. The paper gives an overview of the hardware and software developmentswithin IMPROVE and concludes with results from first user tests.

C-space: Fostering new creative paradigms based on recording and sharing “casual” videos through the internet

A key theme in ubiquitous computing is to create smart environments in which there is seamless integration of people, information, and physical reality. In this manuscript, we describe a set of tools that facilitate the creation of such environments, e,g, a service to transform videos recorded with mobile devices into navigable 3D scenes, a service to compute and describe the emotional processes that occur during the user interaction with such content, a service that takes into account certain dynamic needs of users in personalizing solutions for allocating their leisure time and activities, a gamified crowdsourcing application, and a set of projection-based tools for creating and interacting with augmented environments. Ultimately, our objective is have a framework that seamless integrates all these components, to foster creativity processes.

Use of OGC web standard for a spatio-temporal enabled SDI for civil protection

In the last years, Geographic Information technologies have reached a mature state, providing a platform to support interoperability among different providers and users through Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI). However, Civil Protection applications have specific requirements that make them different from typical Earth System Sciences research applications. Currently SDIs and the ESDI (European Spatial Data Infrastructure) only partially address user needs as they offer no or very limited time variable management. The main objective of the work presented here, which presents the achievements of the EU project BRISEIDE, was to develop a complete software architecture in that could provide the user with the possibility to interact with geographic spatio-temporal information through a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The challenge is to define a complex architecture, which is able to provide several kinds of geographic services (images, multidimensional raster data, sensor information, features and processing features) in a unique 2D/3D environment allowing the user to easily interact with the web services and functions. The deployed services enable sharing of geospatial information even with temporal dimension, a fundamental requirement for Civil Protection applications. The services are accessible through a multi-platform 3D client, developed during the project, which also allows interactive orchestration of spatio-temporal WPSs (Web Processing Services) by providing support to chaining of required processing units.

“Verba Volant Scripta Manent” a false axiom within virtual environments. A semi-automatic tool for retrieval of semantics understanding for speech-enabled VR applications

Abstract Traditional interaction with virtual environments (VE) via widgets or menus forces users to rigidly sequential interactions. Previous research has proved that the adoption of speech recognition (SR) allows more flexible and natural forms of interaction resembling the human-to-human communication pattern. This feature though requires programmers to compile some human supplied knowledge in the form grammars. These are then used at runtime to process spoken utterances into complete commands. Further speech recognition (SR) must be hard-coded into the application. This paper presents a completely automatic process to build a body of knowledge from the information embedded within the application source code. The programmer in fact embeds, throughout the coding process, a vast amount of semantic information. This research work exploits this semantic richness and it provides a self-configurable system, which automatically adapts its understanding of human commands according to the content and to the semantic information defined within the applications source code.