Academic methods for usability evaluation of serious games: a systematic review

Multimedia Tools and Applications - In the last years, there has been an increasing interest in the design of video games as a tool for education, training, health promotion, socialization, etc....     

Success factors for serious games to enhance learning: a systematic review

There is no doubt that an abundance of factors exists that makes learning with serious games successful. Research articles reporting on these factors, however, tend to focus on select serious game elements and do not combine all salient factors for successful learning with serious games. Addressing this gap is a necessity for the success of serious games and may even alleviate long-standing debates about pedagogy over enjoyment, how much realism is enough or whether artificial intelligence is worth the cost. This article examines existing academic literature from 2000 to 2015, extracting shared serious game success factors that have had an encouraging impact on gameful learning experiences. As such, we subsequently aim to withdraw the field from a perpetual spiral of does-my-game-work research toward more worthwhile why-does-my-game-not-work research. Qualitative content analysis through the constant comparison method (CCM) analyzed a total of 63 articles from a variety of recognized electronic libraries and databases. Through this analysis, we reveal five central serious game themes: backstory and production; realism; artificial intelligence and adaptivity; interaction; and feedback and debriefing, all of which require deliberate intertwining with pedagogical content to ensure successful learning. This review unravels each of the five themes into their constituent factors and consequently presents the factors as practical guidelines that serious games producers should strive to include in their game productions. Applying these recommendations whenever serious games are considered will provide a foundation for effective gameful learning experiences.     

A systematic literature review of empirical evidence on computer games and serious games

This paper examines the literature on computer games and serious games in regard to the potential positive impacts of gaming on users aged 14 years or above, especially with respect to learning, skill enhancement and engagement. Search terms identified 129 papers reporting empirical evidence about the impacts and outcomes of computer games and serious games with respect to learning and engagement and a multidimensional approach to categorizing games was developed. The findings revealed that playing computer games is linked to a range of perceptual, cognitive, behavioural, affective and motivational impacts and outcomes. The most frequently occurring outcomes and impacts were knowledge acquisition/content understanding and affective and motivational outcomes. The range of indicators and measures used in the included papers are discussed, together with methodological limitations and recommendations for further work in this area.     

Petroglyph digitization: enabling cultural heritage scholarship

The digitization of antiquities is facilitating a renaissance for scholars who have unprecedented access to rich representations of objects. Cultural Heritage digitization is a central challenge, and its subtleties are intertwined with object properties and the constraints of physical access and handling. In this paper, we present the design and analysis of a system built for the digitization of Puerto Rican petroglyphic iconography. The petroglyphs exhibit unique properties (shape, size, surface) that determine system design choices. The 3D models obtained with the system support new scholarly and educational activities, including interactive surface lighting, feature highlighting and annotation through mark-up, and immersive viewing using large-scale displays.     

Optimising engagement for stroke rehabilitation using serious games

Effective stroke rehabilitation must be early, intensive and repetitive, which can lead to problems with patient motivation and engagement. The design of video games, often associated with good user engagement, may offer insights into how more effective systems for stroke rehabilitation can be developed. In this paper we identify game design principles for upper limb stroke rehabilitation and present several games developed using these principles. The games use low-cost video-capture technology which may make them suitable for deployment at home. Results from evaluating the games with both healthy subjects and people with stroke in their home are encouraging.     

Enhanced thermal conductivity of nanofluids: a state-of-the-art review

Adding small particles into a fluid in cooling and heating processes is one of the methods to increase the rate of heat transfer by convection between the fluid and the surface. In the past decade, a new class of fluids called nanofluids, in which particles of size 1–100 nm with high thermal conductivity are suspended in a conventional heat transfer base fluid, have been developed. It has been shown that nanofluids containing a small amount of metallic or nonmetallic particles, such as Al₂O₃, CuO, Cu, SiO₂, TiO₂, have increased thermal conductivity compared with the thermal conductivity of the base fluid. In this work, effective thermal conductivity models of nanofluids are reviewed and comparisons between experimental findings and theoretical predictions are made. The results show that there exist significant discrepancies among the experimental data available and between the experimental findings and the theoretical model predictions.     

SKETCH'NDO: A framework for the creation of task-based serious games

We present SKETCH'NDO, a framework for the interactive design and creation of single-user task-based serious games in 3D virtual environments. The games are dimensionally congruent: inherently 2D tasks such as reading and writing are done in 2D, while manipulation tasks are 3D. The architecture of the system allows educators to design the tasks with a graphical editor that creates the game automatically. This editor does not require gaming expertise. It only needs educators to specify the correct ways of doing the task, without having to consider all possible erroneous learner's decisions. SKETCH'NDO provides a complete mechanism of monitoring and evaluation of the learner's performance that allows a precise assessment of the learning process. It offers a gradation of levels of assistance that can be fixed by educators or automatically adjusted to the trainee's skills. This way, the same task can be trained from a strictly conductist strategy to a fully constructivist one.     

Utilization of secret sharing technology for secure communication: a state-of-the-art review

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Cryptography is the process by which a readable message is converted into cipher-text unintelligible to an eavesdropper. With the advent of the internet,...     

A review of immersive virtual reality serious games to enhance learning and training

Multimedia Tools and Applications - The merger of game-based approaches and Virtual Reality (VR) environments that can enhance learning and training methodologies have a very promising future,...     

Infoweb: An adaptive information filtering system for the cultural heritage domain

This paper presents a system developed for adaptive retrieval and the filtering of documents belonging to digital libraries available on the Web. This system, called InfoWeb, is currently in operation on the ENEA (National Entity for Alternative Energy) digital library Web site reserved to the cultural heritage and environment domain. InfoWeb records the user information needs in a user model, created through a representation, which extends the traditional vector space model and takes the form of a semantic network consisting of co-occurrences between index terms. The initial user model is built on the basis of stereotypes, developed through a clustering of the collection by using specific documents as a starting point. The user's query can be expanded in an adaptive way, using the user model formulated by the user himself. The system has been tested on the entire collection comprising about 14,000 documents in HTML/text format. The results of the experiments are satisfactory both in terms of performance and in terms of the system's ability to adapt itself to the user's shifting interests.     

Product family design and platform-based product development: a state-of-the-art review

Product family design and platform-based product development has received much attention over the last decade. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art research in this field. A decision framework is introduced to reveal a holistic view of product family design and platform-based product development, encompassing both front-end and back-end issues. The review is organized according to various topics in relation to product families, including fundamental issues and definitions, product portfolio and product family positioning, platform-based product family design, manufacturing and production, as well as supply chain management. Major challenges and future research directions are also discussed.     

A hybrid human-computer approach for recovering incomplete cultural heritage pieces

The automatic reconstruction of archeological pieces through the integration of a set of unknown segments is a highly complex problem which is still being researched. When only a few segments of the original piece are available, solutions exclusively based on computational algorithms are inefficient when attempting to create a credible whole restoration. Incomplete 3D puzzles must consequently be tackled by considering hybrid human/computer strategies. This paper presents a reconstruction approach in which the knowledge of human experts and computational solutions coexist together. Hypotheses, models and integration solutions originating from both humans and computers are thus continuously updated until an agreement is reached. This semi-automatic restoration approach has been tested on a set of ancient fractured pieces belonging to the remains of Roman sculptures at the well known Mérida site (Spain), and promising results have been obtained. The successful results and applicability of this method have led us to believe that computational solutions should evolve towards hybrid human-computer strategies.     

Remote monitoring of buildings using a ground-based SAR: Application to cultural heritage survey

In this Letter, the authors describe an innovative application of radar interferometric techniques aimed to monitor structural deformations of buildings. The proposed application is based on the use of ground-based instrumentation able to operate as Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR). Preliminary experimental results on a model of an historical building encourage the development of this technique for use in architectural heritage survey.     

The wise cursor: assisted selection in 3D serious games

In recent years, the evolution of 3D graphics hardware and software has lead to a growing interest for serious games in three-dimensional virtual environments for learning, training, and rehabilitation. Many of these games are based on a first-person-shooter paradigm in which users navigate through the environment, select, and manipulate virtual objects. The target users of these applications are not necessarily usual gamers, and they often have difficulties in navigating and interacting in the 3D environment. This paper proposes the wise cursor, a new method for selection that improves the usability and accessibility of mouse-driven serious games in 3D environments. At each user click, the proposed method computes a list of objects candidates to be selected and their probability of being the desired one. Depending on the uncertainty of the probability distribution, either one object is selected or a mechanism to clarify the selection is proposed. In the former case, if the selected object is within the user avatar’s scope, the action associated to it is realized, otherwise the application automatically navigates toward it. In this way, selection and navigation are eased. The empirical results of the usability tests show that this technique is fast, practical, and that it requires little user’s skills. Thus, it can make serious games usable for a wider range of users who can concentrate on the training objectives without technological barriers.     

Playful public participation in urban planning: A case study for online serious games

The aim of this paper is to study the implementation of online games to encourage public participation in urban planning. Its theoretical foundations are based on previous work in public participatory geographical information systems (PP GISs), play and games, with a special focus on serious games. Serious games aim to support learning processes in a new, more playful way. We developed the concept of playful public participation in urban planning, including playful elements such as storytelling, walking and moving, sketching, drawing, and games. A group of students designed an online serious public participatory game entitled NextCampus. The case study used in NextCampus was taken from the real-world question of a possible move of a university campus to a new location in the city of Hamburg, Germany. The development of the serious public participatory game NextCampus resulted in a physical prototype, user interface design, and a computational model of the game. The NextCampus game was tested with the help of two groups of urban planning students and presented to three external experts who provided valuable recommendations for further development. The critical comments questioned the level of complexity involved in such games. The positive comments included recognition of the potential for joy and the playfulness a game like NextCampus could evoke.     

Determining relevance of imprecise temporal intervals for cultural heritage information retrieval

Time is an essential concept in cultural heritage applications. Instances of temporal concepts such as time intervals are used for the annotation of cultural objects and also for querying datasets containing information about these objects. Hence it is important to match query and annotation intervals by examining their similarity or closeness. One of the problems is that in many cases time intervals are imprecise. For example, the boundaries of the “Pre-Roman age” and the “Roman age” are inherently imprecise and it may be difficult to distinguish them with clear-cut intervals. In this paper we apply the fuzzy set theory to model imprecise time intervals in order to determine relevance of the relationship between two time intervals. We present a method for matching query and annotation intervals based on their weighted mutual overlapping and closeness. We present (1) methods for calculating these weights to produce a combined measure and (2) results of comparing the combined measure with human evaluators as a case study. The case study takes into consideration archaeological temporal information, which is in most cases inherently fuzzy, and therefore offers a particularly complex and challenging scenario. The results show that our new combined measure that utilizes different weighted measures together in rankings, performs the best in terms of precision and recall. It should be used when ranking annotation intervals according to a given query interval in cultural heritage information retrieval. Our approach intends to be generalizable: overlapping and closeness may be calculated between any two fuzzy temporal intervals. The presented procedure of using user evaluation results as a basis for assigning weights for overlapping and closeness could potentially be used to reveal weights in other domains and purposes as well.