A hypermedia authoring tool for augmented and virtual reality

Most existing hypermedia authoring systems are intended for use on desktop computers. These systems are typically designed for the creation of 2D documents and therefore employ 2D authoring mechanisms. In contrast, authoring systems for nontraditional multimedia/hypermedia experiences for 3D virtual or augmented worlds focus mainly on creating separate media objects and embedding them within the user's surroundings. As a result, linking these media objects to create 3D hypermedia is a tedious manual task. To address this issue, we present an authoring tool for creating and editing linked 3D hypermedia narratives that are interwoven with a wearable computer user's surrounding environment. Our system is designed for use by authors who are not programmers, and allows them to preview their results on a desktop workstation, as well as with an augmented or virtual reality system.     

The development of a sound viewer for an open hypermedia system

Abstract

While rich support for a wide variety of media such as text, video and image is common among contemporary hypermedia systems, so too is the inadequate support for audio. The primary reason that audio has not attracted as much attention as other media can be attributed to its obvious lack of visual identity. The main focus of this work was to identify a generic and meaningful visual representation of audio within a hypermedia context, and significantly promote hypermedia support for audio through the provision of a sound viewer.

This paper describes the inherent difficulties in providing a consistent interface to audio, and discusses in some depth the issues raised during the development process. The sound viewer is then introduced and the associated concepts described. The creation and traversal of links to and from audio are facilitated by the sound viewer across formats including WAV (proprietary digital sound file format from Microsoft), CD (Compact Disc) Audio and MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface). The resultant viewer provides a unified and extensible framework for interacting with audio from within an open hypermedia environment. The open hypermedia system Microcosm was used as the development platform for this work. Microcosm can be augmented to supply a hypermedia link service to additional media with minimal overhead.     

Effectiveness of hypermedia annotations for foreign language reading

Abstract This study first explores intermediate-level English learners' preferences for hypermedia annotations while they are engaged in reading a hypermedia text. Second, it examines whether multimedia annotations facilitate reading comprehension in the second language. The participants were 44 adult learners of English as a foreign language studying English for Academic Purposes. Data were collected through a tracking tool, a reading comprehension test, a questionnaire, and interviews. Results indicate that learners preferred visual annotations significantly more than textual and audio annotations. On the other hand, a negative relationship was found between annotation use and reading comprehension. Especially, pronunciations, audiorecordings, and videos were found to affect reading comprehension negatively. However, the qualitative data revealed that the participants had positive attitudes towards annotations and hypermedia reading in general.     

Thinking style,browsing primes and hypermedia navigation

There is a common assumption that hypermedia navigation is influenced by a learner’s style of thinking, so people who are inclined to apply sequential and analytical strategies (left-thinkers) are thought to browse hypermedia in a linear way, whereas those who prefer holistic and intuitive strategies (right-thinkers) tend towards non-linear paths. An experiment was conducted to study both the effects of students’ style of thinking on hypermedia navigation and the effects of primes aimed at inducing them to browse the hypermedia according to a given strategy. Two hundred undergraduates in different faculties were asked to visit a website. Navigation was preceded by some initial tasks (primes) that activated either the left- or the right-thinking style; 50 men and 50 women were randomly assigned to each of the two kinds of primes. Then participants were free to browse the hypermedia and navigational paths were tracked down. When navigation had been completed, a questionnaire measuring a preference for either the left- or the right-thinking style was filled out by participants. Analyses showed that primes influenced hypermedia navigation, leading participants to apply strategies consistent with the initial tasks. The participants’ age and faculty did not influence their behaviour in navigation. Gender and frequency of computer use determined some minor differences in hypermedia browsing, whereas there was no evidence of any relationship between thinking style and behaviour in navigation.     

Java hypermedia: on and beyond the world wide web

The world wide web (WWW) has made hypermedia applications widespread. Originally, the WWW was used only for ‘freestyle’, unrestricted browsing and its foundation technologies reflect this. Now, developers are working on more advanced hypermedia for new application domains. Improvements in graphical user interfaces, adaptive guidance and integrated navigation support are the main objectives. In this paper, we present Java as a mature implementation language for advanced Internet hypermedia. A minimalistic Java approach (MJA) towards development is introduced. MJA integrates Java with existing object-oriented hypermedia design methodologies. MJA is illustrated with HyperMap, a browser application for spatial hypermedia.     

视觉化协同超媒体及其在合作学习中的应用

在分布式合作学习环境中,学生和老师需要一个共享的信息空间去与学习材料交互作用,并从中知晓合作者的存在及其活动.学生和老师还需要一些协同和通信手段去协调他们共同的活动.为此,提出了一种视觉化协同超媒体技术.它可以提供所需的共享信息空间.在此空间中,形象的超媒体对象既可以表示学习材料(学习内容),又可以表示学习过程(学习方法).这种协同超媒体集成了灵活的过程支持、通信渠道以及文件处理功能.因而,它可以支持学生(和老师)按一定的学习方法并通过文字或声音渠道去协调他们共同的学习活动.这种协同超媒体可以通过万维网(浏览器)访问.为了揭示这种技术的实用性,还给出了一个案例和一些用户体验.     

Physical query interface for tangible augmented tagging and interaction

A new physical query interface is proposed for tangible augmented tagging and interaction using two types of context-aware AR interfaces, visual and invisible interfaces. In visual interfaces, augmented reality markers are utilized for supporting intuitive interactions and manipulations with digital contents. RFID is used as an invisible interface for supporting line-of-sight, direct and query interactions. By combining the advantages of visual and invisible interfaces, more natural interaction with digital contents can be provided, which can remove the difficulty of using typical AR paddles, cubes and gadgets that are widely used in AR interactions. Semantic ontology is adopted in order to effectively support physical querying, filtering and grouping through the combination of multiple RFID tags. The proposed approach has been applied to a variety of multi-media interactions, such as digital product review and digital catalog or book interaction. We show the effectiveness and the advantages of the proposed approach by demonstrating several implementation results and by a usability study.     

Hypermedia in the ambient wood

The Ambient Wood project, carried out as part of the Equator project, set out to provide an augmented learning experience for children in an outdoor environment. Using a variety of devices, the children gathered information about the woodland habitats performing basic scientific enquiry and hypothesis testing. In this paper, we describe the supporting information infrastructure used in the project, focusing on how hypermedia tools and techniques were used to structure and deliver the information to the children, helping to orchestrate the learning activities.     

Hypermedia authoring tools based on OLE technology

This paper report on recent and on going work related to the design of a set of hypermedia authoring tools intended to produce courseware, to be used for self learning or distance learning and training environments in a cooperative way. These tools have roots in a standalone hypermedia editor developed to create courseware, to which were added other tools to enhance its usability, namely a hypermedia player to view courseware in self study mode, and a hypermedia browser to create, to navigate and to display graphically the hypermedia document structure. The underlying metaphors are the overhead projector, the transparency and the layer. This system was developed for the MS-Windows environment, supporting OLE technology. We discuss the impact that such technology might have on the look and feel of hypermedia learning material and we describe the implementation of a Hypermedia Editor, Browser and Player tools.Part of this work is carried out in the context of the Co-Learn European project, which is aiming to design and to implement a third generation cooperative learning environment.     

Navigational behaviors in hypermedia documents in music

Abstract

Hypermedia is defined as an interactive multimedia application where discrete information units of various formats can be accessed in nonlinear ways. This kind of application does differ from traditional information delivery systems in allowing the user considerable freedom in making navigational decisions; users are able to determine, at least to some extent, the media-form of presentation and the order of material presented. However given this freedom, it is possible in some situations that learners might stray from the teacher's instructional objective and become overly engaged in unrelated browsing activities. This study investigates navigational behaviors made by college undergraduate music appreciation students who used a hypermedia program as a supplement to traditional instruction. Results indicated that students accessed these materials in strikingly different ways. While some users read the screens in linear fashion not viewing any multimedia nodes, others made many nonlinear jumps and investigated multimedia nodes often. Although most students did access the musical nodes, most did not listen to the musical examples in their entirety. Overall lesson length varied considerably. Results also indicated that students acted in dynamic fashions, making many navigational actions that were not related to the established instructional objective.     

Methods and techniques of adaptive hypermedia

Adaptive hypermedia is a new direction of research within the area of adaptive and user model-based interfaces. Adaptive hypermedia (AH) systems build a model of the individual user and apply it for adaptation to that user, for example, to adapt the content of a hypermedia page to the user's knowledge and goals, or to suggest the most relevant links to follow. AH systems are used now in several application areas where the hyperspace is reasonably large and where a hypermedia application is expected to be used by individuals with different goals, knowledge and backgrounds. This paper is a review of existing work on adaptive hypermedia. The paper is centered around a set of identified methods and techniques of AH. It introduces several dimensions of classification of AH systems, methods and techniques and describes the most important of them.     

Adaptive-creative versus routine-reproductive expertise in hypermedia design: an exploratory study

The unique characteristics of routine-reproductive and adaptive-creative expertise were examined in the protocols of three expert hypermedia designers. It was expected that it would be possible to differentiate routine-reproductive expertise from adaptive-creative expertise in the planning phases of hypermedia design. One designer's protocol corresponded well with characteristics unique to routine-reproductive expertise; only three of that designer's replies were coded as adaptive-creative responses. Two of the designers' protocols corresponded well with the unique characteristics of adaptive-creative expertise, and none of their responses was coded as routine-reproductive. The distinction between the two types of expertise is supported in this rapidly evolving new domain.     

超媒体电子出版软件系统的设计与实现

阐述了一种超媒体电子出版软件系统,系统采用积件的设计思想,探讨了在积件思想下的制作方法,解决了超媒体应用中难于实现的分工协作以及在缺乏媒体情况下的制作问题,系统 以直观的奔顺序方式建立和组织媒体链接。     

Automatic authoring and construction of hypermedia for information retrieval

This paper describes the complete process and a tool for the automatic construction of a multimedia hypertext starting from a large collection of multimedia documents. Through the use of an authoring methodology, the document collection is automatically authored, and the result is a multimedia hypertext, also called a hypermedia, written in hypertext mark-up language (HTML), almost a standard among hypermedia mark-up languages. The resulting hypermedia can be browsed and queried with Mosaic, an interface developed in the framework of the World Wide Web Project. In particular, the set of methods and techniques used for the automatic construction of hypermedia is described in this paper, and their relevance in the context of multimedia information retrieval is highlighted.     

基于超媒体思想的课件系统分析与设计

超媒体技术采用非线性的网状结构组织块状信息，信息关联思想类似于人类的联想记忆结构和思维方式。运用超媒体技术设计教学课件系统，以资源共享为基础，可以灵活的编制教学内容，可在教学过程中进行动态的流程选择。     

Toward intelligent styling for digital museum exhibitions: modularization framework for aesthetic hypermedia presentations

In current Web-based hypermedia environments, constructing and maintaining a large-scale interactive aesthetic hypermedia exhibition is a difficult task. In particular, the shaping of presentation styles requires tedious multimedia composing and is indeed extremely laborious. As our first step toward developing an intelligent styling system for digital museum exhibitions, this paper proposes a fine-grained modularization framework that decomposes the styling of a typical hypermedia presentation into fine-grained style modules (FGSM). A hypermedia document based on a monomodal media handler and a digital museum exhibition management framework have been designed to realize the concept of FGSM. We have implemented a Web-based authoring system that allows content providers to efficiently construct mediacentric, interactive, aesthetic hypermedia Web sites. In the future, relevant optimization and constraint-solving techniques will be exploited to achieve the goal of intelligent styling for digital museum exhibitions .     

Cooperative Hypermedia Editing with CoMEdiA

CoMEdiA is a groupware tool which enables co-authors to cooperatively produce hypermedia documents.CoMEdiA allows co-authors to communicate their ideas,drafts,guidelines,constraints and annotations to other co-authors.In uses a mix of communication patterns,media and document organization to enable co-authors to keep on exchanging information(remotely or face-to-face),improving passages and modifying notes until a final document is achieved.We did not concentrate on th depth but on the breath of the features.Our efforts were on integrating and corrdinating concepts from collaboration,multimedia and hyper organization rather than on making a specialized system in any of them.We began with the text medium and are now including bitmaps and raster images.Later sound and video will also be integrated.In this paper we describe and sustain the available capacites.     

A Framework for Interacting with Paper

This paper reports on ways of using digitised video from television cameras in user interfaces for computer systems. The DigitalDesk is built around an ordinary physical desk and can be used as such, but it has extra capabilities. A video camera mounted above the desk, pointing down at the work surface, is used to detect where the user is pointing and to read documents that are placed on the desk. A computer-driven projector is also mounted above the desk, allowing the system to project electronic objects onto the work surface and onto real paper documents. The animated paper documents project is considering particular applications of the technology in electronic publishing. The goal is to combine electronic and printed documents to give a richer presentation than that afforded by either separate medium. This paper describes the framework that has been developed to assist with the preparation and presentation of these mixed-media documents. The central component is a registry that associates physical locations on pieces of paper with actions. This is surrounded by a number of adaptors that assist with the creation of new documents either from scratch or by translating from conventional hypermedia, and also allow the documents to be edited. Finally the DigitalDesk itself identifies pieces of paper and animates them with the actions described in the registry.     

Note-taking while learning hypermedia: Cognitive and motivational considerations

The non-linear format of hypermedia requires the use of self-regulated learning (SRL) processes, including making decisions about which representation to access. The design of hypermedia environments can make these decisions difficult, and may result in extraneous cognitive load. Note-taking, a SRL strategy may offload extraneous cognitive load while learning with hypermedia. This study examined factors related to undergraduate students’ note-taking while learning with hypermedia. Think-aloud, self-report, pretest, and posttest data were collected from 53 undergraduates while they learned about a challenging science topic for 30 min with hypermedia. Results indicated that participants’ prior domain knowledge, as measured by the pretest, did not significantly predict the content of their notes. However, motivation, as measured by a self-report questionnaire, had a significant relationship with the content of the participants’ notes. Specifically, intrinsic motivation had a significant negative relationship while extrinsic motivation had a significant positive relationship with the content of notes. Additionally, there was a significant interaction between the content of the participants’ notes and their use of self-regulatory processes while learning with hypermedia.