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The collaborative virtual worlds can be used to achieve different purposes according to the intended use. The design of 3D collaborative virtual environments for learning has been an important research field for several years. However, the research in this specific field has shown that in most of the cases, the environments do not have appropriate technical characteristics. The design of the educational collaborative virtual environments goal is to produce environments that encourage users to achieve effective learning. In this sense, the current study presents a design model for development of 3D Educational Collaborative Virtual Environments. This model is based on the engineering software techniques and methods. It is supported by a spiral cycle that allows us to develop applications. The process is divided into a set of activities that are being carried out throughout each cycle, producing several work products, with the aim to provide each team member a set of guidelines and tools necessary for to make intelligent decisions about what they do. The model is composed by five steps, namely: Conception, Analysis, Design, Implementation and Evaluation. Each step contains a set of diagrams to support the developer team in their tasks. With this model, the applications are developed in a series of incremental releases, that is, the final system is constructed, based on the refined prototype. These steps include activities that enable to quantify the quality of Educational Collaborative Virtual Environments (ECVE). It is based on the Quantitative Evaluation Framework developed by Escudeiro (Escudeiro, 2007) and allow us to have a degree of freedom in the selection of quality criteria. Thus, we can obtain a single quantitative value of quality for any domain in analysis, i.e., we can adapt it in any domain and valence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of CISTI (Iberian Conference on Information Systems & Technologies / Conferência Ibérica de Sistemas e Tecnologias de Informação) Proceedings is the property of Conferencia Iberica de Sistemas Tecnologia de Informacao and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

To communicate is the deepest will of every human being since their very first minute of existence, as communication is what makes human beings really feel part of a whole. One of the most transversal, barrier-dropper, and universal ways of communicating is creating art. Having that assumption in mind, this paper introduces a proposal for combining technology and arts production using an online educational Community of Practice aimed at encouraging communication and collaboration between blind/low vision individuals and deaf/hearing impaired individuals having the creation of digital artworks using a technologically developed collaborative environment. To provide a framework for this challenge, this study provides a review of concepts and examples related to the art practices from an inclusive point of view, to inclusive design, and to the essential features of reliable Communities of Practice. Furthermore, the proposal for developing a collaborative environment for creating digital artworks, combining the best practices and features of the analyzed examples, targeting at the blind and deaf communities is described as well as the evaluation model - the Quantitative Evaluation Framework - to be used to assess this creative learning and communication environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Promoting equal opportunities and social inclusion for people with disabilities is a concern of modern societies and the European Education Area. However, despite the evolution of science and the availability of new technologies to find solutions to combat this problem, there is still a great difficulty in communication with these communities in their daily life and in different environments in which they are inserted. The educational environment is not currently prepared for these communities, which is a problem, since education has a great impact on the lives of all citizens and the existence of barriers limits future opportunities. The use of serious games in an educational environment stimulates learning and critical thinking, but despite the relevance of serious games regarding communication and social inclusion, from the information gathering we concluded that there are no large array of games and tools that facilitate its creation and are accessible to people with disabilities. In this article we will discuss and present the architecture and the development of the platform that aims to improve social inclusion and access to education for deaf and blind people. For this purpose, we will provide tools which enable these communities to participate in the creation of educational games and also playing along with all other users of the platform, in order to overcome the communication difficulties and barrier faced by these communities in their daily life, especially in the educational environment. The platform developed will allow the creation of educational games, of the genre Quiz with the possibility of integrating iBeacon technology, quickly and simply, by any and for any type of users. Both the platform and the resulting games will have input and output mechanisms that will allow the inclusion of users with disabilities, such as voice synthesis, Virtual Sign (two-way sign language translator) and voice command control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of CISTI (Iberian Conference on Information Systems & Technologies / Conferência Ibérica de Sistemas e Tecnologias de Informação) Proceedings is the property of Conferencia Iberica de Sistemas Tecnologia de Informacao and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Identifying hand configuration is a critical feature of sign language translation. In this paper, we describe our approach to recognize hand configurations in real time with the purpose of providing accurate predictions to be used in automatic sign language translation. To capture the hand configuration we rely on data gloves with 14 sensors that measure finger joints bending. These inputs are sampled at a frequency of 100Hz and fed to a classifier that predicts the current hand configuration. The classification model is created from an annotated sample of hand configurations previously acquired. We expect this approach to be accurate and robust in the sense that the performance of the classification model should not vary significantly when the classifier is being used by one or another user. The results from our experimental evaluation show that there is a very high accuracy, meaning that data gloves are a good approach to capture the descriptive features of hand configurations. However, the robustness of such an approach is not as good as desirable since the accuracy of the classifier depends on the user, i.e., the accuracy is high when the classifier is used by a user who trained it but decreases in other cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]