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Educational games have found use in the classroom environment, and research suggests that well-designed games have motivational and educational benefits. But often games are individually crafted to fill a need in a specific assignment with no relation to other parts of the course or any other games used to assist teaching in the course. We are examining the question of whether or not educational content in a game tied more closely together through a common narrative is beneficial to student motivation to complete the educational content. To investigate this, we have developed a game with a common narrative to tie together a set of assignments in a circuitry course to then compare to the same set of assignments spread across three games containing different narratives.

The field of Sonification has led to a variety of projects aimed at conveying graphical information via audition. Most of these projects are aimed at specific domains or contexts, and few have studied general audio presentation techniques empirically. This paper details the results of a multipart study of user perception of selected audio stimuli as users are asked to interpret those stimuli as points in a generic Cartesian space. Results will be used in future work designing methods of portraying technical drawings such as flowcharts and UML via audio.

We examined background characteristics of virtual reality participants in order to determine correlations to cybersickness. As 3D media and new VR display technologies from companies such as Occulus and Sony become more popular, the incidence of cybersickness is likely to increase. Understanding the impact of individual backgrounds on susceptibility can help shed light on which individuals are more likely to be impacted. Past history of motion sickness and video game play have the best predictive power of cybersickness of the factors studied. A model to estimate the likelihood of cybersickness using background characteristics is posed.

In recent years there has been significant use of regular cross-polytopes (regular octahedrons or hyper-diamonds) as constructs to simplify problem solving in high-dimensional database queries, collision detection algorithms and graphic rendering techniques. Many of the algorithms for these applications use minimum volume bounding boxes as approximations of the polytopes to minimize computational complexity. The standard method [1] for finding these boxes in three dimensions uses the constraint of having two edges of a polyhedron coincident with two adjacent faces of the minimum bounding box. In this paper, we show that for a uniform cross-polytope in three dimensional space, a minimum volume bounding box would have a face flush with the convex hull of the polytope for all possible orientations of the polyhedron defined. We also show that the projections of the minimum bounding box of an n-dimensional regular cross-polytope are locally optimal with respect to the projections of the enclosed cross-polytope. We use this result to provide a necessary condition for the minimum bounding boxes of such polytopes. Finally, we show that if the two dimensional planar projections of a three dimensional uniform cross-polytope are simultaneously locally optimal then the polytope itself is optimally oriented.

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a neurological affliction that impacts primarily the aged due to brain tissue deterioration. It has been shown that this deterioration can be slowed down by engaging the person with daily interactive activities that include gaming, social interaction, memory exercises and physical activity. In this paper, we describe ZPLAY, a game-based user interface system which is designed to be web-based and to provide intervention therapy for AD. ZPLAY has two versions: the @lab version which is designed for diagnosis and used to measure different brain activation responses of AD and the @home version which is used to promote subject engagement and rehabilitation in a home environment in-between visits to the clinic.

Patients in the early stages of dementia are often subject to a variety of dangerous symptoms and behaviors including depression, wandering, and aggression. These conditions severely influence both quality of life and the degree of caretaker intervention that is necessary. Non-pharmacological interventions can alleviate these symptoms in some cases and are preferred as an alternative to medication when possible. This paper explores alternatives to the traditional definition of intervention, wherein the involvement of a caregiver is assumed, using a new modality wherein interventions are automatically instigated in response to conditions detected by physiological and behavioral measures. The environment is automatically manipulated in these methods in response to detected symptoms, intervening without the immediate assistance of a caregiver.

The attention funnel is a general purpose AR interface technique that interactively guides the attention of a user to any object, person, or place in space. The technique utilizes dynamic perceptual affordances to draw user attention "down" the funnel to the target location. Attention funnel can be used to cue objects completely out of sight including objects behind the user, or occluded by other objects or walls.An experiment evaluating user performance with the attention funnel and other conventional AR attention directing techniques found that the attention funnel increased the consistency of the user's search by 65%, increased search speed by 22%, and decreased mental workload by 18%. The attention funnel has potential applicability as a general 3D cursor or cue in a wide array of spatially enabled mobile and AR systems, and for applications where systems can support users in visual search, object awareness, and emergency warning in indoor and outdoor spaces.

Although there has been much speculation about the potential of Augmented Reality (AR), there are very few empirical studies about its effectiveness. This paper describes an experiment that tested the relative effectiveness of AR instructions in an assembly task. Task information was displayed in user's field of view and registered with the workspace as 3D objects to explicitly demonstrate the exact execution of a procedure step. Three instructional media were compared with the AR system: a printed manual, computer assisted instruction (CAI) using a monitor-based display, and CAI utilizing a head-mounted display. Results indicate that overlaying 3D instructions on the actual work pieces reduced the error rate for an assembly task by 82%, particularly diminishing cumulative errors - errors due to previous assembly mistakes. Measurement of mental effort indicated decreased mental effort in the AR condition, suggesting some of the mental calculation of the assembly task is offloaded to the system.

This paper describes a keyframe summarization method for client-server applications. This technique is designed for applications where a camera is collecting content on a continuous basis that must be transmitted in a summarized form to a remote database server over wireless network. The system combines three keyframe selection methods including a novel fast motion-based selection method, keyframe pooling and clustering for bandwidth control, and network bandwidth estimation.