102 research outputs found
Conceptual design of collaborative virtual environments for education using a theater-based metaphor
No full textCollaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) are becoming more and more important in many areas because they offer users the opportunity to experiment with novel interaction paradigms in order to perform collaborative work or have engaging experiences ‘being together’. One of the most promising application fields is eLearning, where CVEs give the unique opportunity to explore effective educational formats. Surprisingly, if compared with other more traditional fields as software engineering and database, we note a lack of design approaches. We point out that a well-founded design approach is crucial to develop collaborative experiences that could generate substantial and measurable educational benefits. To meet this challenge, in this paper we present a set of founding concepts that enable pedagogs and teachers designing effective 3D virtual worlds for education. To keep our concepts simply understandable, we based our design method on a widespread metaphor: the theater. We demonstrate through a real case study the promising advantages of our approach: expressiveness to capture collaborative features at a high level of abstraction, semi-formality to facilitate the establishment of a common ground between educational designers and CVEs engineers, and guidance to enable non-experts to cope with all the relevant aspects of a 3D virtual world
Digiplaza: A 2,5D Virtual Environment to Support the Sense of Locality of Geographic Communities Using an Ontologic Approach
No full textToday, there is a growing interest in using online communities to support either social interaction or Public Administration (PA) digital inclusion, both in geography-based communities and geographically distributed users of the Internet. In this paper we present a pseudo 3D (2,5D) configurable virtual environment that uses the “plaza metaphor” to virtually represent the natural place where citizens meet and socialize. Information exchanged among users generates a lot of data difficult to store in a structured way. We propose the use of ontologies to categorize data in order to provide to the user the right information according to his/her specific profile, context and location. The advantages of the proposed approach are an improvement of the users’ “Sense of Locality” and a better and more direct relationship between citizens and Public Administration
Structuring Repositories of Educational Experiences: A Case Study
No full textUntil now, a large amount of effort has been spent on structuring educational repositories. During the years, standard formats to describe learning resources have been provided, reference content models to exchange them among repositories and between repositories and Learning Management Systems have been specified, large repositories have been deployed both from academia and from private organizations (as IEEE and ACM, for example). Researchers observe that open and widely available educational resources can significantly reduce the time required to prepare lectures; other authors argue that repositories facilitate education, combining different learning style theories with technology preferences. The focus is mainly on learning content. In this paper we give a different perspectives on repositories for education, having as a central point the educational experience. We report on a case study we are completing structuring a repository to collect credible evidence from Italian teachers who create innovation in schools using technology. We describe the technical issues we encountered developing an online repository of hundreds of experiences, carried out in classes of all levels of schooling, where technology was skillfully combined with pedagogical solutions to generate
substantial educational benefits
Supply Chain Management meets Auto-ID Management: A Structured Approach
No full textNowadays, firms need to support e-business through solutions that guarantee, on the one hand, the supply chain management (SCM) and, on the other, products’ identification and traceability (ID automation). These two
aspects have been faced, up until now, in a separate manner and adhered to the definition of established standards. Thus, we propose an approach that allows the integration of SCM and ID-automation software architectures and, at the same time, guarantees the separation of concerns. In this paper, we also present an implementation that uses two systems: the data interchange system based on the ebXML standard and the traceability system based on the EPCglobal standard. According to this approach, we propose a preliminary implementation experience for the pharmaceutical sector
Fast Prototyping of Learning Experiences: An Attempt of Modelling
No full textThere are already several examples of Enhanced Learning Management System (ELMS) that use 3D Virtual Worlds as a novel visual metaphor to catch the young student’s attention, to convey concepts and to develop their competences in a learning-by-doing and collaborative fashion. However, their main weak point is the lack of flexibility in the design of the virtual environment and in the customization of the learning experience. Moreover, the number of users potentially involved in each learning session, the variety of learning strategies and the amount of learning objects already available, require the ability of fast prototyping each virtual learning experience, generating, sometimes hundreds, of customized sessions starting from the same “general format”. The need to simplify the customization, open also to non-technical skilled people like teachers, have led us to focus the attention on the simplification of the authoring process of the learning experience and to develop OpenWebTalk, a general-purpose, flexible framework for the fast prototyping of collaborative 3D learning experiences that represents also a first approach to the structured modelling a learning session
Flexible 3D Collaborative Virtual Environment: WebTalk04
No full textA Collaborative Virtual Environment, CVE, is a computer-based virtual space that supports collaborative work and social interplay. In a 3D CVE, a “hosting” 3D world is the necessary ingredient: within it, users, provided with graphical embodiments, called avatars, that convey their identity (presence, location, movement, ..) can meet and interact with other users, with agents, or with virtual objects.
As we move increasingly to a networked world, and with the promise of increased and improved data-flow through broadband networks, we believe that collaborative virtual environments will be of increasing importance. Distributed teams engaged in collaborative task using CVEs are getting rather common in fields such as gaming, military, training, and engineering.
In this paper we present WebTalk04, a general purpose, flexible, framework for building 3D CVEs: the need of generating a variety of applications has led to high degree of flexibility and configurability. An XML configuration, in fact, allows to easily control most of its advanced features (including collaborative functions). WebTalk04 is a framework (rather than a specific application), developed by a joint team (University of Lecce and Politecnico di Milano). It supports complex cooperation features that have been tested with hundreds of “direct users” and thousands of “indirect users” as it will be explained in the paper.
The paper will describe the framework architecture, and will also describe how we use 3D networking technologies, to leverage collaboration between users (at different locations) that are working on the same learning task: thus creating blended, distributed e-Learning activities, and extending the current concept of e-Learning (today mainly perceived as “remote learning”)
Collaborative Learning through Flexible Web CVE: The Experience of WebTalk
No full textThis chapter describes the technological platform of the authors’ learning experiences and its evolution through the years, providing insights into the reasons that led to significant design choices and offering guidelines on how to deal with technological issues
Loading and Rendering Optimization for Networked Virtual Worlds
No full textInternet-based collaborative virtual environments allow users to explore and interact with many virtual worlds containing a very large number of objects that are downloaded in real time rather than been pre-distributed. Client’s bandwidth fluctuation during the enjoyment of particularly complex environments, can produce a bottleneck that generates very long downloading and rendering time. This bottleneck can compromise the correct enjoyment of collaborative virtual environments, arising synchronization and shard state consistency problems that are keys factors in these applications. To avoid too much long waiting times during objects’ download, we have developed a method to reduce bandwidth congestion. This is possible thanks to the download of only the exact portion of geometries that is necessary for rendering, according to its own field of view and to the semantic rules defined by the designer during the phase of contents population. Such approach consists in the use of a data structure that is based on different levels of priority and allows in this way a selective download. We have applied this solution to WT04 framework which is a research project whose aim is to achieve a framework for generating and enjoining 3D collaborative virtual experiences. WT04 framework supports collaborative rules definitions suitable to perfectly govern virtual experiences
A Framework to Generate 3D Learning Experiences
No full textA Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) is a computer-based virtual space that supports collaborative work and social interplay. In a 3D CVE, a ‘hosting’ 3D world is the necessary
ingredient: within it users provided with graphical embodiments called avatars that convey their identity (presence, location, movement etc.), can meet and interact with other users,
with agents or with virtual objects. Even if graphics hardware and 3D technologies are rapidly evolving and the increased Internet connection speed allows the sharing of amounts of data and information among geographically distributed users, the development of networked three-dimensional applications is still complicated and requires expert knowledge. Although some collaborative 3D Web technologies and applications have already been developed, most of them are particularly concerned with offering a high level realistic representation of the
virtual world since increasing the level of detail increases the sense of ‘virtual presence’ in the 3D world. However, these developments have not, at the same time supported a high
level, non-expert authoring process and the concepts of programming flexibility and component re-use have rarely been taken into account.
In this introduction, we discuss our research experience in the field of Collaborative Virtual Environments. We will outline our approach which has been based on both multi-channel
integration and on high performances issues
WebTalkCube: a Framework to Add One Dimension to eLearning
No full textE-Learning is gaining increasing momentum as a teaching approach, both within universities and in general within funded courses, in Italy and abroad. It is in these specific learning environments, that vast numbers of students encounter eLearning as a mean to cut times and costs of lesson-going, capitalizing their time and their efforts for a better preparation. Enterprise-wide eLearning, used in companies and associations, is also perceived as a key instrument to train human resources reducing costs. However, especially in the range of funded courses directed to a lesser educated audience in respect to undergraduates, post-docs, or highly-motivated employees within an enterprise, sustaining the trainee’s attention for eLearning courses of long duration (e.g. entire ECDL preparation courses given in eLearning format, or history courses in intermediate schools) may be a problem, reducing the effectiveness and the benefits of the eLearning approach. Starting from these issues, the problem of which teaching methodologies are to be applied to eLearning is currently one the most debated at the moment. In this paper, we advocate the necessity to intermingle the present eLearning approach, mainly based on bi-dimensional multimedia presentation of the contents (with varying degrees of exploitation of sound, graphics and interactivity), with new types of eLearning, based on the exploitation of 3D representation, thus adding one dimension to the current way of thinking eLearning. The paper will show our early experiments on the subject, and how we used 3D and networking technologies to leverage collaboration between students that are working on the same eLearning modules in different places, thus creating blended, distributed eLearning activities, and extending the current concept of eLearning (today mainly perceived as “remote learning”). After having commented the results we obtained within two of our main experiments, we elaborate on a new framework which would support better this new eLearning paradigm, we describe its architectural structure, and the directions of our future work
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