Zhigang Wen

Social Virtual Worlds for Technology-Enhanced Learning on an Augmented Learning Platform.

Virtual worlds have been linked with e‐learning applications to create virtual learning environments (VLEs) for the past decade. However, while they can support many educational activities that extend both traditional on‐campus teaching and distance learning, they are used primarily for learning content generated and managed by instructors. With the evolution of internet technology, social virtual worlds (SVWs) are now able to facilitate more social interaction, efficient visual communication, integration of rich media and sharing of student‐generated content. They offer the prospect of lively interactive virtual communities in which users interact through their emotional avatars in a 3D virtual world. SVWs are being increasingly embedded into e‐commerce and e‐learning, and challenge our ideas about the next generation of VLEs. This article outlines the impact of emerging social networking technologies on the internet, reveals the convergence between social networking and virtual worlds for technology‐enhanced learning (TEL), and examines the way in which SVWs are transforming the nature of learning as a social practice. The design and implementation of an innovative social interactive learning platform is presented, which augments SVWs and other social networking services with conventional learning management and student support systems. Practical experiments are described that have been prototyped on this platform, including e‐tutoring and student‐led exhibitions. The results demonstrate that an SVW can greatly enhance student‐centred active learning experience on the augmented learning platform in comparison to traditional VLEs. It is shown that the platform has the potential to support both formal and informal learning, as well as facilitating social interaction, self‐motivation, active engagement and creative thinking in TEL.

An Augmented Social Interactive Learning Approach through Web2.0

With the rapid development of the Internet, Web2.0 as the next generation of networking services emphasizes social interaction and share of user-generated content in a collaborative environment. It has evolved and transferred the Internet into a platform by supporting rich digital media technology for the development of innovative business and educational applications. In conjunction with Web 3D technology, social networking has already begun to foster an intuitive and immersive system that allows effective visual communication and delivers real time natural interactive experience for enhancing user motivation and engagement compared with the traditional static and text-oriented Web. This paper presents an augmented social interactive learning approach to incorporating social networking services on Web2.0 into traditional distance learning and on-site teaching for blended learning. This paper also discusses the key issues including user interaction and communication forms and examines different educational activities involving user content generation, e-tutoring, and role-playing.

Distributed VR for Collaborative Design and Manufacturing

Virtual manufacturing (VM) applies virtual reality (VR) technology to provide a digital manufacturing solution in both 3D visual and interactive ways. It makes VR no longer a state-of the art but rather an innovation technology to support modern industry. With the rapid growth of network technology and Web 3D graphics techniques, we propose a cost-effective distributed VM system for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with limited equipment, funds and technical capabilities. The system enables SMEs to perform collaborative tasks including product design, manufacturing and resources sharing through the World Wide Web (WWW) in lower cost. This paper describes the design and critical integration issues of the system and the use of the Web 3D technology - X3D. It also evaluates the distributed VM system by comparing it to the conventional standalone CAD/CAM system.

Real Time Multimodal Interaction with Animated Virtual Human

This paper describes the design and implementation of a real time animation framework in which animated virtual human is capable of performing multimodal interactions with human user. The animation system consists of several functional components, namely perception, behaviours generation, and motion generation. The virtual human agent in the system has a complex underlying geometry structure with multiple degrees of freedom (DOFs). It relies on a virtual perception system to capture information from its environment and respond to human users commands by a combination of non-verbal behaviours including co-verbal gestures, posture, body motions and simple utterances. A language processing module is incorporated to interpret users command. In particular, an efficient motion generation method has been developed to combines both motion captured data and parameterized actions generated in real time to produce variations in agents behaviours depending on its momentary emotional states