Abstract: When tourists are wandering around in a town or city they do not know, it is normal to use a guide to make up their mind on what is more interesting in the surrounding. If the guide is an interactive one on a mobile device, they can also consult multimedia material and listen to audio descriptions. But what if the user is a children that is much more prone to get distracted? In this paper, we propose the presentation of touristic and cultural information to children through an augmented-reality approach. In order to keep focused the attention of the young users we make use of a virtual tourist guide, appearing as a comic book superhero. To get a realistic representation of the avatar we exploit a technique for fast simulating talking heads, which is portable on mobile devices. The technique is based on preloading a set of meshes representing different phonemes and switching among them in order to simulate animation, without the need of computing the update for an entire face model. In addition, we report on a first Android prototype, which shows the effectiveness of the approach for increasing children’s learning.
Authors: F. Sorrentino, L. D. Spano, R. Scateni.
SuperAvatar: Children and mobile tourist guides become friends using superpowered avatars.
Motivating students with Mobiles (MsM’2015), part of IMCL2015, 222-226.
Salonicco, Grecia, Novembre 2015.
Abstract: In recent years, mobile devices have become very popular within young people. Thanks to developments in mobile technologies, these devices can now do much more than just voice calls and texts. We envision mobile devices as tools for improving the young users’ lifestyle, especially for learning. In this work we present a web authoring system that makes it possible to create a mobile application that supports children in learning a new language in a more pleasant and entertaining way by using Augmented Reality. This application allows pupils to improve their speaking skills turning the language acquisition into a game under the supervision of both teachers and parents. Our contribution is focused on understanding how digital technology can facilitate learning while keeping in mind that it is a wide and interdisciplinary issue.
Abstract: Starting from the triangle mesh of a digital shape, mainly an articulated object, we produce a coarse quad layout that can be used in character modeling and animation. Our quad layout follows the intrinsic object structure described by its curve skeleton; it contains few irregular vertices of low degree; it can be immediately refined into a semi-regular quad mesh; it provides a structured domain for UV-mapping and parametrization. Our method is fast, one-click and it does not require any parameter setting. The user can steer and refine the process through simple interactive tools during the construction of the quad layout.
Abstract: The recent development in consumer hardware lowers the cost barrier for adopting immersive Virtual Reality (VR) solutions, which could be an option for classroom use in the near future. In this paper, we introduce RiftArt, a VR tool for supporting the teaching and studying of Art History. Using riftArt the teachers can configure virtual museum rooms, with artwork models inside, and enhance them with multimodal annotation. The environment supports both the teachers during the lesson and the students during rehearsal. The application, implemented completely using Web technologies, can be visualized on large screens and head mounted displays. Via the user test results we can say that the immersive VR visualization increases the motivation of high-school students towards studying Art History.
Abstract: Curve-skeletons are well known shape descriptors, able to encode topological and structural information of a shape. The range of applications in which they are used comprises, to name a few, computer animation, shape matching, modelling and remeshing. Different tools for automatically extracting the curve-skeleton for a given input mesh are currently available, as well as inverse skeletonization tools, where a user-defined skeleton is taken as input in order to build a mesh that reflects the encoded structure. Although their use is broad, an automatically extracted curve-skeleton is usually not well-suited for the next pipeline step in which they will be used. We present a tool for creating, editing and repairing curve-skeletons whose aim is to allow users to obtain, within minutes, curve-skeletons that are tailored for their specific task.