Yoselie Alvarado

Be Civic: An Immersive Serious Game

Nowadays, serious games are one of the biggest existing industries and it is still growing steadily in many sectors. Particularly, the use of virtual worlds and serious games in education is growing. This paper introduces the development of a serious game in an immersive learning environment for teaching Civics. The work’s idea is to develop a game to motivate, educate and train learners on civic rules by placing users in different civic roles and giving them agency to address real-world problems and issues. In order to improve the user’s experience, the game was developed to work in a cave-like immersive environment by using a conversational character for a new kind of Human-Computer Interface. The game includes static and dynamic 3D environments, allowing players to share the experience of navigation in the scene among the users, even geographically distributed. In order to evaluate the game’s performance, a between groups experiment with thirty participants was designed. Received on 10 November 2016; accepted on 13 July 2017; published on 5 January 2018

Natural User Interfaces: A Physical Activity Trainer

Despite the known health benefits of regular participation in physical activity people still refuse this practise. Nowadays, Virtual Reality (VR) is a very powerful and compelling computer tool by which humans can interface and interact with computer-generated environments. In this paper, we propose a virtual training system which can be customized for the physical activity level of the user. System provides real time visual action guide and a performance’s feedback of users through a Natural User Interface (NUI). We conduct a brief pilot study to evaluate our virtual trainers in which participants’ performance doing physical activities is evaluated via our NUI. Initial results indicate that virtual training through a NUI is motivating and entertaining for any kind of user, in particular for individuals with low level of physical activity.