Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

We summarize three evaluations of an educational augmented reality application for geometry education, which have been conducted in 2000, 2003 and 2005 respectively. Repeated formative evaluations with more than 100 students guided the redesign of the application and its user interface throughout the years. We present and discuss the results regarding usability and simulator sickness providing guidelines on how to design augmented reality applications utilizing head-mounted displays.

Virtual reality (VR) based system has an advantage to provide an experience which never be realized in the real world. In these years, medical training simulators are developed by VR-based system. The aim of medical VR training system is to teach the actual manipulation in surgery. At the same time, the most important feature is that the system can teach anatomical and physiological behaviors. Interactive learning by VR system is expected to motivate active learning effectively. Hence, this study aims to provide a game system which does not require completely accurate simulation for a teaching material. However, modeling of the whole body relation between anatomy and physiology is not simple. So far, conventional brain study defines the functional map on the surface of brain. Therefore, the authors propose self surgery game for learning the basis of brain by stimulation and reaction. The self surgery game provides an experience to treat oneself by oneself. The game system would support the subject to imagine the relation between actual behavior and brain function map by touching one’s own head.

Historic buildings are important to many aspects of human, but most buildings are not protected well. The natural and man-made calamities are major destruction. The destruction of natural and some man-made destruction are unable to avoid. The laws about the preservation of historic building are too passive, because they need a lot of time to establish identity. But before the historic buildings establish identity and between the official documents make a round trip, the buildings are destroyed constantly. To face such problem, we are necessary to suggest new preservation concepts to assist preservation of historic building. Due to development of computer, we can protect the data of historic building by digitization. In this case, I will use virtools to do an interface to help people to build the buildings in the virtual reality. Making everyone can protect the historic buildings by it.

Interactive 3D computer graphics technology is now extremely popular, seen in the increasing interest in and use of 3D digitization of cultural heritage contents. This paper introduces a digital interactive cultural heritage system which embeds Virtual-Reality (VR) technology within the Peranakan culture, the Peranakan culture being a Singaporean unique ethnic culture. A prototype has undergone the full developmental process of being implemented, tested, and evaluated. This paper will also discuss the results of the usability test.

Tangible Moyangsung is a collaborative virtual heritage environment that employs tangible interfaces to encourage group social interaction and cooperation. It is designed for a group of users to play fortification games for reconstructing a Korean war-defensive castle in virtual reality. This paper describes a historical background and cultural meanings of Moyangsung, and details in design, implementation and a user study of the Tangible Moyangsung system. The study results showed that collaborative work using tangible interfaces helped users to be more engaged in the task and learn cooperation to produce better performance.

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in clinical and research applications of virtual reality (VR). However, the adoption of this approach is still limited by the high costs of software development, lack of technical expertise among end-users, and the difficulty of adapting the contents of the virtual environments (VEs). To address these needs, we have designed and developed NeuroVR, (http://www.neurovr.org), a cost-free virtual reality platform based on open-source software components. NeuroVR allows non-expert users to easily customize a VE by using a set of pre-designed virtual scenes, and to run them in an immersive or non-immersive modality. In this paper, we provide a description of the key functional features of the platform.

Showing pictures of famous artists to students is a fundamental task to teach fine art history. Images found on the Internet are a major resource of such pictures that can replace older albums of fine art collections. The colours reproduced in Internet images are, however, in many instances not correct. Images have been collected both from museums’ publications and from the Internet, and some critical areas of the images have been colorimetrically evaluated. Investigations have shown that in some databases the colours of the images are highly distorted. Before using pictures from one or the other database, one should compare the reproductions downloadable from different sources, and select – according to the aesthetic feeling of the user – the artefact that one can assume to come nearest to the original. It is a great pity that the artefacts in the databases are not accompanied with the necessary background information (metadata) that would provide some information on the taking illumination, the spectral sensitivity and gamma of the taking apparatus, and of any transformations the provider has performed. Without this information that is quite common in other areas of image databases, the user is unable to set the reproduction parameters of his or her equipment to get to a reasonable reproduction.

This paper discusses methods of implementing 3D simulation technology of the cultural relics, brings forward 3D simulation technology to implement high-quality, high-precision and vivid texture of the ancient cultural relics by adopting range laser 3D scanner and CCD cameras; suggests the automatic registry methods of 3D laser scanning data, which can make 3D laser scanning data with different viewpoints as well as different resolutions into the same coordinate, so as to achieve the high-precision 3D cultural relic models; proposes to take the reflectivity map of 3D laser scanner as middle reference to realize the accurate mapping of planar images and 3D laser scanning data, so as to obtain simulated cultural relics with vivid texture.

This paper describes a pilot study to investigate participants’ perceptions of usefulness and usability of our developed Plant Mixed Reality System (PMRS), designed for primary school children (11-12 years old). Preliminary results seemed to indicate participants’ intention to use PMRS for learning. The paper concludes with a discussion on how the findings were used to formulate a second study based on the Technology Acceptance Model, and discuss implications on intention to use and acceptance of mixed reality systems for education.

In this paper, we present a new immersive first-person shooting (FPS) game. Our system provides an intuitive way for the users to interact with the virtual world by physically moving around the real world and aiming freely with tangible objects. This encourages physical interaction between the players as they compete or collaborate with each other.