Rita Francese

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.

Reengineering Web applications based on cloned pattern analysis

Web applications are subject to continuous and rapid evolution. Often it happens that programmers indiscriminately duplicate Web pages without considering systematic development and maintenance methods. This practice creates code clones that make Web applications hard to maintain and reuse. This paper presents an approach for reengineering Web applications based on clone analysis that aims at identifying and generalizing static and dynamic pages and navigational patterns of a Web application. Clone analysis is also helpful for identifying literals that can be generated from a database. A case study is described which shows how the proposed approach can be used for restructuring the navigational structure of a Web application by removing redundant code.

MicroApps development on mobile phones

The definition of an approach supporting an End-User in the development of mobile applications is a hard task because of the characteristics and the limitations of mobile device interfaces. In this paper we present an approach and a tool to enable End-Users to visually compose their own applications directly on their mobile phone. To this aim, a touchable interface and an ad-hoc visual language have been developed, enabling the user to compose simple focused applications, named MicroApps. The user has not in charge the creation of the user interface that is automatically generated.

Understanding cloned patterns in Web applications

We propose a tool to identify and analyze cloned patterns in Web applications using clone analysis and clustering of static and dynamic Web pages. The tool first detects cloned pages, which are then grouped into clusters as well as the groups of links between clusters. In this way the navigational schema is simplified and the duplicated functionalities corresponding to cloned navigational patterns can be more easily analyzed. The tool also allows filtering out uninteresting parts of the restructured navigational schema, thus to further improve the understanding.

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.

A Strategy and an Eclipse Based Environment for the Migration of Legacy Systems to Multi-tier Web-based Architectures

We present an incremental approach to the migration of non decomposable COBOL applications to a Web-enabled multi-tier architecture. The relevant software components of the target architecture, namely the communication middleware and the generator of graphical user interfaces, are developed once for all in order to reduce the migration effort. An Eclipse plug-in has also been developed to support the software engineer in the migration of the graphical user interface and in the restructuring and wrapping of the original legacy code. A pilot project on a COBOL legacy system evolved during the last thirty years has been used to experiment the migration strategy and the plug-in

Visual Mobile Computing for Mobile End-Users

We present an approach to enable end-users to graphically compose their own applications directly on their mobile phone, mainly integrating the functionalities available on the device and those provided by pervasive and Internet services. To this aim, we propose a methodology and a graphical notation enabling the user to compose mobile applications, named MicroApps: the user creates an application following an incremental and iterative development process; he composes icons representing (pervasive) services mainly by touch-based selection and following a data-flow approach. He is not in charge of the creation of the user interface, which is automatically generated. The methodology enables the end-user to develop applications and/or compose services on the smartphone, so paving the way towards new scenarios where smartphones replace and overtake the Personal Computer, given their native possibility of wide connectivity, when augmented by features for interaction with remote systems and sensors. The methodology has been evaluated through an empirical analysis that revealed that in spite of the reduced size of the screen the use of the MicroApp Generator tool improves the effectiveness in terms of time and editing errors with respect to the use of MIT App Inventor [1] .

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.