Deploying learning designs across physical and web spaces: Making pervasive learning affordable for teachers

Pervasive computing devices and communication infrastructures enable learning situations that occur in both the physical and the virtual world. However, deploying these pervasive situations is still a challenge for teachers. This paper presents GLUEPS-AR, a system for deploying learning designs across physical and web spaces, using mainstream Virtual Learning Environments, Web 2.0 artifacts and Augmented Reality applications. GLUEPS-AR has been evaluated through a mixed methods study on the deployment of three authentic pervasive learning situations. Results highlight that GLUEPS-AR supports teachers in deploying their pedagogical ideas on pervasive learning environments, overcoming the main limitations of existing approaches.     

Towards pervasive learning: WeLearn.Mobile. A CPS package viewer for handhelds

Smart applications are influencing our life more and more. This paper presents an application where pervasive computing is used in the context of e-Learning. First a short introduction to the ongoing changes concerning pervasive computing and particularly e-Learning is given, followed by a report on an e-Learning framework used in schools, universities and the area of continuing adult education. This framework is the basis for the viewer application, which provides the possibility to present CPS (Content Packaging Specification) packages on handhelds (namely Pocket PCs). The paper concludes with an account of possible extensions and prospective future work.     

Exploring MARS: developing indoor and outdoor user interfaces to a mobile augmented reality system

We describe an experimental mobile augmented reality system (MARS) testbed that employs different user interfaces to allow outdoor and indoor users to access and manage information that is spatially registered with the real world. Outdoor users can experience spatialized multimedia presentations that are presented on a head-tracked, see-through, head-worn display used in conjunction with a hand-held pen-based computer. Indoor users can get an overview of the outdoor scene and communicate with outdoor users through a desktop user interface or a head- and hand-tracked immersive augmented reality user interface.     

Supporting group collaboration with interpersonal awareness devices

An Interpersonal Awareness Device, or IPAD, is a hand-held or wearable device designed to support awareness and collaboration between people who are in the physical vicinity of each other. An IPAD is designed to supply constant awareness information to users in any location without relying on an underlying infrastructure. We have constructed one such device, the Hummingbird, which gives members of a group continuous aural and visual indications when other group members are close. We have used the Hummingbirds in several different situations to explore how they affect group awareness. These experiences indicated that the Hummingbird increased awareness between group members, and that it could complement other forms of communication, such as phone and email. In particular, we found the Hummingbird to be useful when a group of people were in an unfamiliar location, for instance during a trip, where no other communication support was available. We argue that IPADs such as the Hummingbird may fulfil important functions in modern work situations.     

Augmented reality in informal learning environments: A field experiment in a mathematics exhibition

Recent advances in mobile technologies (esp., smartphones and tablets with built-in cameras, GPS and Internet access) made augmented reality (AR) applications available for the broad public. While many researchers have examined the affordances and constraints of AR for teaching and learning, quantitative evidence for its effectiveness is still scarce. To contribute to filling this research gap, we designed and conducted a pretest–posttest crossover field experiment with 101 participants at a mathematics exhibition to measure the effect of AR on acquiring and retaining mathematical knowledge in an informal learning environment. We hypothesized that visitors acquire more knowledge from augmented exhibits than from exhibits without AR. The theoretical rationale for our hypothesis is that AR allows for the efficient and effective implementation of a subset of the design principles defined in the cognitive theory of multimedia learning. The empirical results we obtained show that museum visitors performed significantly better on knowledge acquisition and retention tests related to augmented exhibits than to non-augmented exhibits and that they perceived AR as a valuable and desirable add-on for museum exhibitions.     

Schminky: The design of a café based digital experience

This paper describes the design process and lessons learned from creating Schminky, a café-based digital experience. Schminky was developed as an experimental field trial to explore the role of pervasive computing. The game will be played by the general public for one week in the Watershed café in Bristol. The Schminky system and the experience design process is described and three key findings, creative tension, context and content are discussed.     

Online continual learning for human activity recognition

Sensor-based human activity recognition (HAR), with the ability to recognise human activities from wearable or embedded sensors, has been playing an important role in many applications including personal health monitoring, smart home, and manufacturing. The real-world, long-term deployment of these HAR systems drives a critical research question: how to evolve the HAR model automatically over time to accommodate changes in an environment or activity patterns. This paper presents an online continual learning (OCL) scenario for HAR, where sensor data arrives in a streaming manner which contains unlabelled samples from already learnt activities or new activities. We propose a technique, OCL-HAR, making a real-time prediction on the streaming sensor data while at the same time discovering and learning new activities. We have empirically evaluated OCL-HAR on four third-party, publicly available HAR datasets. Our results have shown that this OCL scenario is challenging to state-of-the-art continual learning techniques that have significantly underperformed. Our technique OCL-HAR has consistently outperformed them in all experiment setups, leading up to 0.17 and 0.23 improvements in micro and macro F1 scores.     

Mobile augmented reality based context-aware library management system

Mobile augmented reality has gained popularity in recent years due to the technological advances of smartphones and other mobile devices. One particular area in which mobile augmented reality is being used is library management. However, current mobile augmented reality solutions in this domain are lacking in context-awareness. It has been suggested in the literature that agent programming may be suitable at overcoming this problem, but little research has been conducted using modern mobile augmented reality applications with agents. This paper aims to bridge this gap through the development of an agent-based, mobile augmented reality prototype, titled Libagent. Libagent was subjected to five experiments to determine its suitability, efficiency, and accuracy for library management. The results of these experiments indicate that agent-based mobile augmented reality is a promising tool for context-aware library management.     

Ambient media for peripheral information display

In our everyday lives, we use surrounding living and working environments to arrange physical information artefacts such as books, pictures and calendars. However, when it comes to consumption of computer-based information, this is almost entirely based on attending to screens that separate us from our surroundings. In this paper, we explore the augmentative use of non-computer artefacts in our surroundings for peripheral display of digital information. We discuss system integration of such ambient media, the mapping of information to ambient media, and issues of flexibility and user control. Ambient media have been in everyday use in our work environment, and we report observations from which we conclude their utility as extensions to our digital information spaces.     

The MIDAS touch: Thermal dissipation resulting from everyday interactions as a sensing modality

We contribute MIDAS as a novel sensing solution for characterizing everyday objects using thermal dissipation. MIDAS takes advantage of the fact that anytime a person touches an object it results in heat transfer. By capturing and modeling the dissipation of the transferred heat, e.g., through the decrease in the captured thermal radiation, MIDAS can characterize the object and determine its material. We validate MIDAS through extensive empirical benchmarks and demonstrate that MIDAS offers an innovative sensing modality that can recognize a wide range of materials – with up to 83% accuracy – and generalize to variations in the people interacting with objects. We also demonstrate that MIDAS can detect thermal dissipation through objects, up to 2 mm thickness, and support analysis of multiple objects that are interacted with.     

Emotional mapping of the archaeologist game

Mobile and ubiquitous learning has been linked to new information and communication technologies embedded in everyday life objects. A variety of invisible embedded tools have been developed and are connected to the Internet. The boundaries between learning, gaming, simulating or role-playing are not clearly defined. In this context a visit to a museum or to another place of interest (e.g. Archaeological parks, historical towns, urban trekking, etc.) using a smartphone, or a tablet, may offer a unique educational experience as will be described in the didactic experiments of EMMAP (Emotional Mapping of Museum Augmented Places) at the Archaeological Museum “Giuseppe Moretti” of San Severino Marche (Italy). EMMAP is a format aimed to develop innovative pedagogies, using handheld technology combined with QR codes, broadcasting and augmented reality (AR). These tools are useful in creating a ubiquitous learning environment and involving participants emotionally in a real landscape. In an authentic context, emotions play a relevant role in engaging students in a rich learning experience.     

Mobile devices and intelligent agents—towards a new generation of applications and services

If mobile computing is to become the pre-dominant computer usage paradigm in the coming years as is widely anticipated, a substantial increase in the demand for mobile computing applications and services will arise. How best to engineer such applications remains an open question and is naturally the focus of much research. In this article, we propose the use of intelligent agents as the constituent entities around which such applications and services can be conceptualised and realised. We describe the design and implementation of Gulliver’s Genie, an archetypal ubiquitous computing application that commissions a collaborative embedded agents approach.     

Supporting community-based learning: case study of a geographical community organization designing its website

Community computing supports human - computer interaction among neighbours in geographical or place-based community organizations. Using a case study of such an organization, we investigate the process of designing their website. Our long-term participatory design approach, integrating developmental informal learning, allowed us to understand how this community organization adopts, evaluates, and sustains website technology. Based on our case study analysis, we present three design heuristics for developing community-based technology: align and afford new possibilities for participation, dynamically manage organizational knowledge and learning, and enhance social capital within community organizations and with the broader community.     

The impact of coupled games on the learning experience of learners at-risk: An empirical study

Offering pervasive game-based learning scenarios to at-risk learners is considered effective and motivating. This experimental study offers a detailed example of an educational setting that couples a mobile game with a PC browser game. It evaluates how this coupling supports engagement and learning for the target group. Nineteen participants aged between 17 and 21 years played and explored the game. The findings through seven-week gaming indicate that coupled games have potential to increase learners’ interest in a topic and can support learning activities.     

Spatial augmented reality as a method for a mobile robot to communicate intended movement

Our work evaluates a mobile robot’s ability to communicate intended movements to humans via projection of visual arrows and a simplified map. Humans utilize a variety of techniques to signal intended movement in a co-occupied space. We evaluated an augmented reality projection provided by the robot. The projection is on the floor and consists of arrows and a simplified map. Two pilots and one quasi-experiment were conducted to examine the effectiveness of visual projection of arrows by a robot for signaling intended movement. The pilot work demonstrates the effectiveness of utilizing arrows as a communication medium. The experiment examined the effectiveness of a simplified map and arrows for signaling the short-, mid-range, and long-term intended movement. Two pilot experiments confirm that arrows are an effective symbol for a robot to use to signal intent. A field experiment demonstrates that a robot can use a projected arrow and simplified map to signal its intended movement and people understand the projection for upcoming short-, medium-, and long-term movement. Augmented reality, such as projected arrows and simplified map, are an effective tool for robots to use when signaling their upcoming movement to humans. Telepresence robots in organizations, museum docents, information kiosks, hospital assistants, factories, and as members of search and rescue teams are typical applications where mobile robots reside and interact with people.     

Webizing mobile augmented reality content

This paper presents a content structure for building mobile augmented reality (AR) applications in HTML5 to achieve a clean separation of the mobile AR content and the application logic for scaling as on the Web. We propose that the content structure contains the physical world as well as virtual assets for mobile AR applications as document object model (DOM) elements and that their behaviour and user interactions are controlled through DOM events by representing objects and places with a uniform resource identifier. Our content structure enables mobile AR applications to be seamlessly developed as normal HTML documents under the current Web eco-system.     

Treating cockroach phobia using a serious game on a mobile phone and augmented reality exposure: A single case study

In vivo exposure has proved its efficacy in the treatment of specific phobias; however, not all patients benefit from it. Communication and information technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) have improved exposure treatment adherence and acceptance. Serious games (SG) could also be used in order to facilitate exposure treatment. A line of research on SG is emerging which focuses on health issues. We have developed a SG for the treatment of cockroach phobia that uses a mobile phone as the application device. This work examines results of an N = 1 study about whether the use of this mobile game can facilitate treatment of this specific phobia preparing her for the AR exposure. A 25-year-old woman with cockroach phobia participated in the study. Results showed that the use of the mobile game reduced her level of fear and avoidance before a “one-session” AR exposure treatment was applied, following the guidelines by Öst. The participant found very helpful the use of the SG before the AR exposure session and she was willing to use it after the AR exposure session as a homework assignment. Although the results of this study are preliminary, SG appears to be a line of research of high interest in clinical psychology for the treatment of specific phobias.     

OmniStore: Automating data management in a personal system comprising several portable devices

The ever growing amount of data generated and consumed on the move using portable devices gives rise to serious data management issues. The fact that each person may own and is likely to carry several such devices further aggravates this problem. On the other hand, new opportunities for achieving cleverer device interaction emerge due to the increased wireless networking capabilities of wearable and portable devices. This paper introduces OmniStore, a system that combines portable devices and infrastructure-based services to relieve the user from explicit and time consuming file management tasks. Our approach is to let devices communicate with each other as well as with a repository service, in an opportunistic and asynchronous fashion, to perform a variety of file movement and copying actions behind the scenes, which would have typically required considerable explicit user interaction.     

Discovering the campus together: A mobile and computer-based learning experience

One of the most relevant difficulties faced by first-year undergraduate students is to settle into the educational environment of universities. This paper presents a case study that proposes a computer-assisted collaborative experience designed to help students in their transition from high school to university. This is done by facilitating their first contact with the campus and its services, the university community, methodologies and activities. The experience combines individual and collaborative activities, conducted in and out of the classroom, structured following the Jigsaw Collaborative Learning Flow Pattern. A specific environment including portable technologies with network and computer applications has been developed to support and facilitate the orchestration of a flow of learning activities into a single integrated learning setting. The result is a Computer Supported Collaborative Blended Learning scenario that has been evaluated with first-year university students of the degrees of Software and Audiovisual Engineering within the subject Introduction to Information and Communications Technologies. The findings reveal that the scenario improves significantly students’ interest in their studies and their understanding about the campus and services provided. The environment is also an innovative approach to successfully support the heterogeneous activities conducted by both teachers and students during the scenario. This paper introduces the goals and context of the case study, describes how the technology was employed to conduct the learning scenario, the evaluation methods and the main results of the experience.     

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.