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Interactive videos have been applied to various areas due to their engagement potential and efficiency improvement of information communication. However, creating interactive videos can be challenging because of a lack of novice-oriented guidance in current platforms, and the logic-building process when authoring interactive videos. To address these challenges, we obtained insights from four creativity support tool designers, proposed a series of hierarchical interactive video structures based on existing narrative structures, and presented the HierVid system. The system is designed as a Template-Module-Unit Mode-based hierarchical authoring platform grounded on three design requirements, and we conducted two user studies to evaluate HierVid. The results showed that novice users could get started to use and understand the functions easily, and the system allowed users to use and explore freely, with an enhanced efficiency compared to the bilibili platform. In conclusion, our research and design of HierVid offer guidance and support for novice users, making interactive video authoring quicker and more accessible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a visual map to display the path and the location of the required books in a library is one of most expected service for patrons. The service generally relies on the construction and maintenance of a massive number of wireless sensors in order to achieve the coverage of the indoor positioning signal in a library. However, the main concern that impedes the implementation of this service by the general population is due to the immense costs of the hardware and maintenance which is required to run such a service. Therefore, the goals of this study are to: (1) develop an editable graphically displayed book-searching system (GDBSS) that allows librarians to establish a book-searching service, which implements a graphical display and is based on an online public access catalog (OPAC) system, without using additional hardware. (2) Examine whether the established service can effectively enhance the efficiency of the users' book-searching process. A library's geographic information system prototype was created by incorporating an existing OPAC system in the investigated library. To complete this task a total of 40 library patrons were selected at random to participate in the service test and also to take part in a follow-up interview. The following findings were obtained from the service test: (1) the GDBSS which was built by the proposed authoring system significantly improved the efficiency of the users' book-searching process, compared with the conventional book-searching methods which are currently in use by the library that was tested. (2) The participants' frequency of visiting the library did not correlate significantly with the efficiency of finding the required books when using the proposed service. (3) The participants not only perceived the proposed visualization service positively, but also considered the short text description of a targeted item's location, a feature offered by the service, to be highly useful information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Serious game development involves a multidisciplinary team of teachers and computer scientists. But the difference in computer competencies between the team members is a recurring difficulty in this collaboration. Authoring tools, which provide interfaces adapted to users' competencies, are promising solutions to overcome this difficulty. However, existing authoring tools are either limited in their functionalities (not powerful) or too complex for noncomputer scientists (not usable). A comprehensive set of design principles to address this limitation does not yet exist. The objective of this research was to define a set of design principles for the development of powerful and usable authoring tools. To achieve this objective, we first defined a set of design principles. We then developed an authoring tool corresponding to these principles. Finally, we carried out test uses of that tool through the development of twelve serious games. Results show that this authoring tool enabled the development of a wide variety of serious games (powerful) by teams with heterogeneous computer skills (usable). Design principles defined in this research integrate and extend previous works. They allow to overcome the dilemma between the power and usability of authoring tools. This could unlock new possibilities for collaborative approaches in serious games developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Serious game development involves a multidisciplinary team of teachers and computer scientists. But the difference in computer competencies between the team members is a recurring difficulty in this collaboration. Authoring tools, which provide interfaces adapted to users' competencies, are promising solutions to overcome this difficulty. However, existing authoring tools are either limited in their functionalities (not powerful) or too complex for non-computer scientists (not usable). A comprehensive set of design principles to address this limitation does not yet exist. The objective of this research was to define a set of design principles for the development of powerful and usable authoring tools. To achieve this objective, we first defined a set of design principles. We then developed an authoring tool corresponding to these principles. Finally, we carried out test uses of that tool through the development of twelve serious games. Results show that this authoring tool enabled the development of a wide variety of serious games (powerful) by teams with heterogeneous computer skills (usable). Design principles defined in this research integrate and extend previous works. They allow to overcome the dilemma between the power and usability of authoring tools. This could unlock new possibilities for collaborative approaches in serious games developments.

Online learning has been growing continuously in the last decade, accelerated by the pandemic Coronavirus, in order to offer learners new possibilities for learning and to guarantee pedagogical continuity. But some aspects, including the learning assessment, are still in development and require profound changes to meet the demands of the 21st century. However, by taking advantage of artificial intelligence techniques and new learning theories, it would be possible to create an assessment system in accordance with the active learning approach. This paper illustrates the models, algorithms and design used to create a formative and summative assessment system that will be mobilized to evaluate learner's knowledge, skills and competencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gamification has been widely applied on modern education. Most of them are used to stimulate learning motivation and improve learning efficiency for students. A successful game-based learning content depends on both an adaptive educational activity planning and a high-quality game design. In educational activity planning, the 5E learning cycle model presents a framework for constructive learning theories and is effectively used in education sciences. Thus, in this study, a proposed collaborative educational gamification authoring system, CeGAS, is recommended to teachers to realize their game-based learning/teaching planning activities based on the 5E learning cycle model. Using the CeGAS, rich experienced teachers could easily plan and conduct their educational activities without considering the complexity and difficulty of game implementation. As each experienced teacher follows the steps of the 5E learning cycle in the proposed script editing system, including engagement, exploration, explanation, elaboration, and evaluation, an available and exclusive game-based learning content with the 5E learning strategy will be developed. We are looking forward to achieving the goals of educational gamification with the educational game authoring system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to design an authoring system of robots and IoT-based toys for creating a scenario-based interactive learning environment for young English as a Foreign Language learners. This study adopts a design-based research approach to investigate the pedagogical needs, the critical features and usability of such a authoring system. Twelve adult participants, including EFL teachers, parents, non-technical, and technical professionals, voluntarily participated in this study to co-develop and evaluated the authoring system through iterations of needs collection, system design, system testing and refinements. An authoring system, consisting of IoT-based toys, a robot and a script editor, was finally developed taking four cycles of iterative improvements in 18 weeks. Eleven pedagogical needs concerning children's language and cognitive development, better children-robot interaction and practical issues were identified. The modifications made across different versions of the authoring system were presented in detail. The results also show that the issues of effectiveness, robustness and efficiency were the most frequently identified, and that the system had achieved good usability after four rounds of design and refinements. Design principles and guidelines also merged as a result providing insights into the effective design of Robot Assisted Language Learning in particular and Technology-Enhanced Language Learning in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of blogs in teaching and learning has emerged as a useful educational technology resource. Hence, this study’s main objective is to investigate the students’ perceptions and information-sharing patterns in learning computer science education through blogging. Eighteen samples were chosen purposively in this study. The study collected both quantitative and qualitative data using questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, and students’ blogs transcripts. The results revealed the positive outcomes of students’ perceptions of blog aspects, such as writing, reading, and making comments. In terms of information-sharing patterns, student frequencies in writing and sharing information through blogging were high when they were given tasks or activities that would be evaluated by an instructor. This showed that instructors play an important role in motivating students to be actively involved in blogging. Rewards or marks also need to be given as an encouragement to students for them to continuously and actively use blogs for learning purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Featured Application: The proposed system specifically targets applications related to 360° multimedia content in virtual reality. Overall, this platform supports the generation of multiple interesting experiences or multimedia contents from a single 360° video, an easy to use authoring system for the 360° content providers, the efficient transferring of the generated 360° experiences to the prospective viewers in virtual reality, and enabling the viewers to share their personal experiences of the 360° multimedia content in virtual reality with the other viewers. We propose a novel authoring and viewing system for generating multiple experiences with a single 360° video and efficiently transferring these experiences to the user. An immersive video contains much more interesting information within the 360° environment than normal videos. There can be multiple interesting areas within a 360° frame at the same time. Due to the narrow field of view in virtual reality head-mounted displays, a user can only view a limited area of a 360° video. Hence, our system is aimed at generating multiple experiences based on interesting information in different regions of a 360° video and efficient transferring of these experiences to prospective users. The proposed system generates experiences by using two approaches: (1) Recording of the user's experience when the user watches a panoramic video using a virtual reality head-mounted display, and (2) tracking of an arbitrary interesting object in a 360° video selected by the user. For tracking of an arbitrary interesting object, we have developed a pipeline around an existing simple object tracker to adapt it for 360° videos. This tracking algorithm was performed in real time on a CPU with high precision. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, there is no such existing system that can generate a variety of different experiences from a single 360° video and enable the viewer to watch one 360° visual content from various interesting perspectives in immersive virtual reality. Furthermore, we have provided an adaptive focus assistance technique for efficient transferring of the generated experiences to other users in virtual reality. In this study, technical evaluation of the system along with a detailed user study has been performed to assess the system's application. Findings from evaluation of the system showed that a single 360° multimedia content has the capability of generating multiple experiences and transfers among users. Moreover, sharing of the 360° experiences enabled viewers to watch multiple interesting contents with less effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adoption of Virtual Reality (RV) technologies in prototype design and process revision has contributed to multiple industry areas. Nonetheless, the development of VR systems for engineering is a complex task, as it involves specialized teams handling low-level code development. Given these problems, the goal of this study is presenting a methodology for designing VR, through an Authoring System based on Computer-Aided Design (CAD). The presented methodology provides an easy integration of electric power substation floor plans and Virtual Reality software (VRS), as well as three-dimensional and symbol modeling conventions. Centralized software architecture was developed, composed of the CAD Editor, input manager and VRS. The methodology was evaluated through a case study applied to the conception (elaboration) of electric power substations (EPS) as part of a Research and Development (R&D) project for training and field assets supervision. The results demonstrated visual precision and high integrity in elaboration of a VR environment from the CAD floor plan. This work also presents a comparative analysis between manual conception and the Authoring System.

Typical reports on past disasters contain valuable lessons that can help us improve our preparedness and response strategies and operations, especially with the help of modern analysis, simulation and visualization tools. However, disaster historical records are typically written in natural language for human consumption. They sometimes contain inconsistent data and information, which take time and effort to uncover. Extracting from the reports for further analysis by tools is almost impossible. DiSRC (Disaster Scenario and Record Capture) system is being designed as a solution of these problems. The system contains a cloud-based authoring system together with Disaster Record Capture Tools (DiReCT) running on mobile devices. Targeted users of DiReCT are government agents who are responsible for contributing data to be included in disasters records and volunteers trained by the responsible agencies. They can use DiReCT to capture observation data on the dynamics and effects of the disaster on places and people in machine readable form. The quality of the captured observation data is controlled and assured by both the capturing tools in real-time and by tools in the cloud. The authoring system can assist authors to write reports on the disaster based on the captured data and information. Disaster records produced with the help of DiSRC system can be read and processed by search, analysis, simulation and visualization tools for purposes such as developing better response strategies, providing decision support during emergencies, post-disaster analysis, and so on. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a novel authoring and viewing system for generating multiple experiences with a single 360° video and efficiently transferring these experiences to the user. An immersive video contains much more interesting information within the 360° environment than normal videos. There can be multiple interesting areas within a 360° frame at the same time. Due to the narrow field of view in virtual reality head-mounted displays, a user can only view a limited area of a 360° video. Hence, our system is aimed at generating multiple experiences based on interesting information in different regions of a 360° video and efficient transferring of these experiences to prospective users. The proposed system generates experiences by using two approaches: (1) Recording of the user’s experience when the user watches a panoramic video using a virtual reality head-mounted display, and (2) tracking of an arbitrary interesting object in a 360° video selected by the user. For tracking of an arbitrary interesting object, we have developed a pipeline around an existing simple object tracker to adapt it for 360° videos. This tracking algorithm was performed in real time on a CPU with high precision. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, there is no such existing system that can generate a variety of different experiences from a single 360° video and enable the viewer to watch one 360° visual content from various interesting perspectives in immersive virtual reality. Furthermore, we have provided an adaptive focus assistance technique for efficient transferring of the generated experiences to other users in virtual reality. In this study, technical evaluation of the system along with a detailed user study has been performed to assess the system’s application. Findings from evaluation of the system showed that a single 360° multimedia content has the capability of generating multiple experiences and transfers among users. Moreover, sharing of the 360° experiences enabled viewers to watch multiple interesting contents with less effort.

EnThe paper discusses the production of an interactive map (both for desktop and for mobile) aiming to support the promotion of the cultural heritage, using an authoring system. At present, the tools feature 13 heritage sites across the County of Tirana, which are supported by text and photographs supplied by IMK - Instituti i Monumenteve te Kultures ‘Gani Strazimiri’ (Institute for Cultural Monuments) within the project ‘S.O.S. – Squiperia Open Source’, funded by the Apulia Region. We include experience of developing the tools as a possible benefit to other developers in the cultural sector.ItL'articolo illustra la produzione di una mappa interattiva (per sistemi 'desktop' e 'mobile') finalizzata a dare supporto alla promozione del patrimonio culturale, realizzata mediante un sistema autore. Attualmente il sistema gestisce 13 siti di interesse culturale collocati nel distretto di Tirana in Albania, con testi e fotografie fornite da IMK - Instituti i Monumenteve te Kultures 'Gani Strazimiri' (Istituto per i Monumenti della Cultura) nell'ambito del progetto 'S.O.S. - Squiperia Open Source', finanziato dalla Regione Puglia. La descrizione del sistema può essere utile agli sviluppatori che operano nel settore culturale.

IT L’ingente patrimonio culturale italiano affronta oggi le conseguenze di strategie di promozione obsolete e di un insufficiente uso delle ICT, ma soprattutto di una errata percezione del suo significato nella vita delle comunità. I caratteri stessi del c.d. ‘Museo Italia’(un patrimonio di beni ‘minori’ fortemente diffuso sul territorio accanto ai più noti beni monumentali) richiedono notevoli cambiamenti nei progetti di promozione sia nel senso di un trasferimento alla scala locale dei processi, sia nella identificazione e modellazione dell’utenza potenziale. Sul piano operativo ciò implica il ricorso a strumenti tecnologici semplici e fortemente interattivi, incentrati sui bisogni di informazione dell’utente medio, potenziale visitatore. L’articolo illustra il sistema sviluppato da ITC-CNR (Bari) nell’ambito del progetto 'Smart Cities’ per la città di Siracusa, basato su procedure e software che semplificano la pubblicazione di informazione georeferenziata.ENThe huge cultural heritage of Italy is facing the consequences of obsolete promotion strategies and of an under exploitation of ICTs, but above all of a wrong perception of its significance in communities’ life. The inherent characters of the so-called ‘Museum Italy’ (a wealth of ‘minor’ assets, diffused on the territory, together with the more famous monuments) demand substantial modifications in promotion projects, in terms of both a downscaling of processes and of identification and modelling of potential users’ behaviour. On the operational level, this requires the elaboration of simple and highly interactive technological tools, focused on the ‘average’ user’s information needs, or potential visitor. The article presents the system developed by ITC-CNR (Bari) within the ‘Smart Cities’ project for the city of Siracusa (Sicily), based on software and procedures aimed at simplifying the publication of georeferenced information.

This paper proposes a maze terrain authoring system with which a user can automatically calculate various and complex maze patterns to compose maze terrains in an easier and more intuitive structure. Using the maze terrain information calculated by using the proposed authoring system, a 3D maze terrain is generated quickly and effectively, and through this, the user’s visual realism in an immersive virtual reality is increased to provide a new presence. The proposed maze terrain authoring system consists of three core functions: a function that automatically generates a grid maze of various sizes and patterns based on a maze generation algorithm; a function that calculates a circular maze in an intuitive structure; and a function that transforms a sketch-based maze by using an image-processing algorithm. Through the authoring system consisting of these functions, various maze terrains from uniform mazes to irregular mazes can be generated effectively. This study produces maze terrains of various concepts directly by using maze information calculated through the authoring system. In addition, through experiments, this study analyzes the efficiency in an immersive virtual reality and the presence through visual realism. In this process, the suitability of the authoring system is also analyzed in combination with a survey.

Question generation is an emerging research area of artificial intelligence in education. Question authoring tools are important in educational technologies, e.g., intelligent tutoring systems, as well as in dialogue systems. Approaches to generate factual questions, i.e., questions that have concrete answers, mainly make use of the syntactical and semantic information in a declarative sentence, which is then transformed into questions. Recently, some research has been conducted to investigate Chinese factual question generation with some limited success. Reported performance is poor due to unavoidable errors (e.g., sentence parsing, name entity recognition, and rule-based question transformation errors) and the complexity of long Chinese sentences. This article introduces a novel Chinese question generation system based on three stages, sentence simplification, question generation and ranking, to address the challenge of automatically generating factual questions in Chinese. The proposed approach and system have been evaluated on sentences from the New Practical Chinese Reader corpus. Experimental results show that ranking improves more than 20 percentage of questions rated as acceptable by annotators, from 65 percent of all questions to 87 percent of the top ranked 25 percent questions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Nowadays, development of application that support cooperative works has attracted recent attention. Thus, several approaches and methods were proposed to reach this aim. In this context, we propose a new solution to the problem of collective work, that present a result of hybridization of several cooperative approaches, as follows: the non-communicative approach to minimizing the required time to perform a cooperative activity and conflict resolution approach based competency for improving the quality of cooperative works. Therefore, we propose a cooperation framework fault tolerant called CoMAS (Cooperative Multi-Agent System) brings preemption resources to cooperating agents (CA) in case of failure to prevent the blocking and ensure the survival of the system. Moreover, we study the case of cooperative authoring systems for e-learning to examine the behavior of our framework with a cooperative activity. Finally, our cooperation approach provides a generic and extensible solution that covers the whole cycle of a cooperation process.

Nowadays, development of application that supports cooperative works has attracted recent attention. Thus, several approaches and methods were proposed to reach this aim. In this context, we propose a new solution to the problem of collective work that presents a result of hybridization of several cooperative approaches, as follows: the non-communicative approach to minimizing the required time to perform a cooperative activity and conflict resolution approach based competency for improving the quality of cooperative works. Therefore, we propose a cooperation framework fault tolerant called CoMAS (Cooperative Multi-Agent System) brings preemption resources to cooperating agents (CA) in case of failure to prevent the blocking and ensure the survival of the system. Moreover, we study the case of cooperative authoring systems for e-learning to examine the behavior of our framework with a cooperative activity. Finally, our cooperation approach provides a generic and extensible solution that covers the whole cycle of a cooperation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the production of an interactive map (both for desktop and for mobile) aiming to support the promotion of the cultural heritage, using an authoring system. At present, the tools feature 13 heritage sites across the County of Tirana, which are supported by text and photographs supplied by IMK - Instituti i Monumenteve te Kultures 'Gani Strazimiri' (Institute for Cultural Monuments) within the project 'S.O.S. - Squiperia Open Source', funded by the Apulia Region. We include experience of developing the tools as a possible benefit to other developers in the cultural sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several researchers have studied the impact of collaboration between the learners on their cognitive levels, but few studies have been carried out on the impact of collaboration between the teachers. The aim of our research is to study the effects on the knowledge levels of learners of collaborative construction of learning objects created by the teachers. More precisely, the objective is to conceive a distance learning environment that takes into account many concepts and strategies. Among the tasks assigned to our research team is to study the effects of collaboration among learners on the one side and among teachers in the other side. In previous work, we have studied the impact of collaborative learning on the cognitive profile of learners. In this work, we focused on the impact of collaboration among teachers on both teachers and learners. The aim of this paper is to present a collaborative authoring system called SAC (which is the French acronym of Système Auteur Collaboratif). This is designed to be used in an academic environment. Moreover, it can be used by any academic institution adopting the LMD (Licence-Master-Doctorate) regime. Its principal feature is that it takes into account collaboration among teachers for construction of learning objects. In this case, teachers collaborate to build common products. They discuss and coordinate their efforts to build pedagogical content that reflects all their points of view. Through this system, the teachers can put their courses online in various formats (lessons, tutorials, presentations, etc.) and students can download lessons, self-assess, and communicate with their colleagues. We used a certain number of criteria for making the collaboration task more efficient. These criteria are used by a search tool of co-authors, which is a part of SAC system. Among these criteria are the behavioral profile and the expertise area of teachers. The co-author search tool is like a search engine but it is used for searching authors in order to perform collaborative tasks. The use of this system overcomes the difficulties met by teachers in traditional systems. These difficulties are mainly related to the lack of tools, and assistance means facilitating their tasks during the preparation of their learning objects. In fact, this system has many features for the organization of learning objects and the facilitation of the courses preparation. These courses are those of the Licence degree. SAC was implemented and tested by a sample of university students and teachers. The aim was to know the attitude of these actors toward the system and the content of the courses that are built collaboratively. The obtained results showed that the teachers enjoyed using the system. They were very satisfied with the main components of SAC, such as the shared editor tool, the co-author search engine, and the trace manager. Particular attention was given to the co-authors search engine, which constitutes the main contribution of this paper. It was used by most of the teachers. This fact revealed its usefulness. After rigorous analysis of the results, we observed that the collaboration among teachers has good effects on the cognitive profile of learners. All the details concerning the experiment as well as the obtained results will be presented and discussed at the end of this paper. Furthermore, we will present the problems faced by the participants (i.e., teachers and students) and a short description of the future work. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A three layer e-learning course development model has been defined based on a conceptual model of learning content object. It starts by decomposing the learning content into small chunks which are initially placed in a hierarchic structure of units and blocks. The raw content components, being the atomic learning objects (ALO), were linked to the blocks and are structured in the database. We set forward a dynamic generation of LO's using re-usable e-learning raw materials or ALO's In that view we need a LO authoring/ assembling system fitting the requirements of interoperability and reusability and starting from selecting the raw learning content from the learning materials content database. In practice authoring systems are used to develop e-learning courses. The company EDUWEST has developed an authoring system that is database based and will be SCORM compliant in the near future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is our goal to assemble the content into dynamic learning objects (LO), to make the content adaptable to the learners prefernces and to all kinds of used appliances by the learner. A three layer e-learning course development model has been defined based on the "conceptual model of content object". It starts by decomposing the learning content into small chunks which are initially placed in a hierarchic structure of units and blocks. The raw content components, being the atomic learning objects (ALO), were linked to the blocks and are structured in the database. We set forward a dynamic generation of LO's customised to the learner group on point of content and customised on point of presentation, fitting the preferences and the used appliances of the learner. In that view we need a LO assembling system fitting the requirements of interoperability and reusability and starting from selecting the raw learning content from the learning materials content database. The company AGFA Healthcare is using an authoring system that creates SCO's being interoperable. Thanks to a good management is the solution a best practice, even it is not based on a database. Though they can not create dynamic solutions and cannot customise the e-learning module on the fly to the learners preference and the used appliance by the learner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Algerian Virtual University AVUNET (Algerian Virtual University on the NET) will be a multilingual environment for distance learning and teaching by exploiting communication and information technologies in particularly the Internet and the hypermedia [1]. The objective of our work is to develop within AVUNET, an authoring package (AVUNET Author) that makes it possible for instructors who are not information technology specialists to create interactive learning modules within a distance teaching platform. A pedagogic model based on a conceptual network is used as a support for the construction system. Based on this model, the system will guide the user in the tree structure, by indicating the necessary concepts for comprehension of other concepts at a higher level. The users of the authoring module are instructors, whatever their information technology experience is. The content designed is made accessible to the learner through a computer connected to the network. Tests in real situation are being done at the University Ferhat Abbas (Setif Algeria) in collaboration with a group of instructors and students. This experience has helped us to outline a methodology to create interactive modular courses (bag pedagogic) accessible on Internet and CD-ROM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sharable content object reference model (SCORM) includes a representation of distance learning contents and a behavior definition of how users should interact with the contents. Generally, SCORM-compliant systems were based on multimedia and Web technologies on PCs. We further build a pervasive learning environment, which allows users to read SCORM-compliant textbooks with multimodal learning devices. Respecting the learning contents for supporting such learning environment, alt efficient authoring tool was developed for serving this goal. Some specific tags were defined to spec~; the corresponding information or interactions that cannot be performed in the hardcopy books. These tags can be printed in SCORM-compliant textbooks and recognized by Hyper Pen to facilitate the affinity between the physical textbooks and digital world. Therefore, users can read the SCORM-compliant hardcopy textbooks in a traditional manner. The authored course contents will be the same while applying to the multimodal learning devices with different layouts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a system that maps classroom lectures directly into web based education lessons. In the classroom, the lecturer writes on a wide, pen sensitive display. The system tracks all actions and makes it possible for the lecture to be replayed from the web any time. The remote viewer can follow the progress of the lecture: Audio, the creation of the board content, and an optional video image of the instructor is transmitted. In addition to usual drawing functionality the board can handle a range of multimedia elements from the Internet. The board can integrate different kinds of modules, invoked by board drawings. One of these modules is described here: A computer algebra system that evaluates mathematical expressions or plots functions is placed at the lecturers disposal by a handwriting recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a method to construct both an intelligent tutoring system and its authoring system for Japanese on reading mathematical expressions in English. Because mathematical expressions can be described easily in DCG, the remaining problems are mainly identification of error origins in a learner's answer and judgment of his/her state of understanding. The paper proposes that it is possible to construct a practically solid intelligent tutoring system if a domain and suitable technologies of artificial intelligence are selected carefully, though it is often held that a tutoring system using technologies of artificial intelligence is of no practical use. © 2000 Scripta Technica, Syst Comp Jpn, 31(10): 56–64, 2000 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adoption of Virtual Reality (RV) technologies in prototype design and process revision has contributed to multiple industry areas. Nonetheless, the development of VR systems for engineering is a complex task, as it involves specialized teams handling low-level code development. Given these problems, the goal of this study is presenting a methodology for designing VR, through an Authoring System based on Computer-Aided Design (CAD). The presented methodology provides an easy integration of electric power substation floor plans and Virtual Reality software (VRS), as well as three-dimensional and symbol modeling conventions. Centralized software architecture was developed, composed of the CAD Editor, input manager and VRS. The methodology was evaluated through a case study applied to the conception (elaboration) of electric power substations (EPS) as part of a Research and Development (R&D) project for training and field assets supervision. The results demonstrated visual precision and high integrity in elaboration of a VR environment from the CAD floor plan. This work also presents a comparative analysis between manual conception and the Authoring System. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a maze terrain authoring system with which a user can automatically calculate various and complex maze patterns to compose maze terrains in an easier and more intuitive structure. Using the maze terrain information calculated by using the proposed authoring system, a 3D maze terrain is generated quickly and effectively, and through this, the user's visual realism in an immersive virtual reality is increased to provide a new presence. The proposed maze terrain authoring system consists of three core functions: a function that automatically generates a grid maze of various sizes and patterns based on a maze generation algorithm; a function that calculates a circular maze in an intuitive structure; and a function that transforms a sketch-based maze by using an image-processing algorithm. Through the authoring system consisting of these functions, various maze terrains from uniform mazes to irregular mazes can be generated effectively. This study produces maze terrains of various concepts directly by using maze information calculated through the authoring system. In addition, through experiments, this study analyzes the efficiency in an immersive virtual reality and the presence through visual realism. In this process, the suitability of the authoring system is also analyzed in combination with a survey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]