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Esta comunicación da cuenta de las interacciones y de los procesos vinculados a la Investigación Formativa (IF) que surgen a la interna de una Comunidad Profesional de Aprendizaje (CPA), conformada por docentes y estudiantes de profesorado de un Centro Regional de Profesores. Se encuentra enmarcada en un proyecto de investigación donde se planteó el objetivo de desarrollar Estrategias Investigativas (EI) y evaluar su grado de desarrollo en estudiantes de formación docente en el marco del Aprendizaje Ubicuo (AU). Se buscó que los estudiantes desarrollaran competencias investigativas (CI) a través de la construcción de experiencias de investigación que articularan pedagogías, tecnologías y estrategias culturalmente relevantes y coherentes con su formación profesional. Se enmarcó en la investigación-acción con enfoque mixto. Los datos analizados en esta comunicación surgen de la aplicación de instrumentos tales como observaciones de los espacios de encuentro sincrónicos y documentos, así como focus group de docentes y de estudiantes. El análisis fue eminentemente cualitativo. Algunos hallazgos dan cuenta de la interacción genuina que se dio a la interna de la comunidad. En lo que refiere al trabajo en la CPA conformada, el “profesionalismo dialógico” jugó un rol protagónico. Asimismo, se identificó que la reflexión actuó como eje vertebrador de los acuerdos y decisiones. En cuanto a las tensiones, la flexibilidad fue la piedra angular para la búsqueda de soluciones. En relación con los procesos, se constató que la conformación de CPA y el trabajo en IF supone afrontar múltiples dificultades, pero como contrapartida se destaca el despliegue de diferentes estrategias. En este contexto, caracterizado por la ubicuidad, la inclusión de tecnologías digitales fue clave. A modo de conclusión, es posible afirmar que el trabajo en IF llevado adelante por la comunidad conformada en esta investigación logró potenciar procesos de reflexión que favorecieron el desarrollo profesional de sus integrantes.

The creation of video games involves multidisciplinary processes that are not accessible to the general public. Currently, the development environments are very powerful tools, but they also require an advanced technical level to even start using them. This article presents a 2D game development environment to propose an alternative model to reduce the technical complexity existing in these systems, presenting a data model and a game editor that allows fulfilling this goal. In order to test its capabilities, several games have been successfully implemented in the proposed environment. With this achievement, it can be stated that it is possible to create video games simply and affordably for the general public without giving up its potential and remarking that there is still a long way to go to reach democratization in the creation of video games and the need to continue working in this field.

Terrain is an essential part of any outdoor environment and, consequently, many techniques have appeared that deal with the problem of its automatic generation, such as procedural modeling. One form to create terrains is using noise functions because its low computational cost and its random result. However, the randomness of these functions also makes it difficult to have any control over the result obtained. In order to solve the problem of lack of control, this paper presents a new method noise-based that allows procedural terrains creation with elevation constraints (GPS routes, points of interest and areas of interest). For this, the method establishes the restrictions as fixed values in the heightmap function and creates a system of equations to obtain all points that they depend this restrictions. In this way, the terrain obtained maintains the random noise, but including the desired restrictions. The paper also includes how we apply this method on large terrain models without losing resolution or increasing the computational cost excessively. The results show that our method makes it possible to integrate this kind of constraints with high accuracy and realism while preserving the natural appearance of the procedural generation.

In recent years, the increasing popularity of casual games for mobile and web has promoted the development of new editors to make video games easier to create. The development of these interactive applications is on its way to becoming democratized, so that anyone who is interested, without any advanced knowledge of programming, can create them for devices such as mobile phones or consoles. Nevertheless, most game development environments rely on the traditional way of programming and need advanced technical skills, even despite today’s improvements. This paper presents a new 2D game engine that reduces the complexity of video game development processes. The game specification has been simplified, decreasing the complexity of the engine architecture and introducing a very easy-to-use editing environment for game creation. The engine presented here allows the behaviour of the game objects to be defined using a very small set of conditions and actions, without the need to use complex data structures. Some experiments have been designed in order to validate its ease of use and its capacity in the creation of a wide variety of games. To test it, users with little experience in programming have developed arcade games using the presented environment as a proof of its easiness with respect to other comparable software. Results obtained endorse the concept and the hypothesis of its easiness of use and demonstrate the engine potential.

Minimizing costs and increasing sales are a goal for every busi- ness nowadays. This fact, together with the development of new technologies, have driven the emergence of virtual applications where the customers can configure the product they are interested in only interacting with the images where the products appear. Many applications are available on Internet or app stores for this purpose. In all of them, a high realism is required. However, this fact is directly related to a high cost of storage of data and to the difficulty of generating the images of the scenes where the product is exposed. This paper presents a virtual configurator addressed to tile factories that solves these problems maintaining a high realism. The developed application generates the configurable images by rendering 3D modeled environments and the customization is performed taking advantage of the graphics hardware. It is in charge of performing the tiling of any size tiles in real time. The presented image mapping system is based on the real measurements of the walls or floor of the environment that appear in the image and on the dimensions of the tile to map. Taking these data into account, the application performs the final appearance adapting the final image to the requirements of the user. The presented method reduces the amount of stored information maintaining the realism of the customized images.

Introduction Bacterial sexually transmitted infections (STIs) have an important impact on reproductive health, highlighting the increase in Chlamydia trachomatis infection rates among young people. To reduce the costs of STI detection, the pooling strategy is beneficial for high-throughput tests in low-prevalence populations using non-invasive samples. Objectives (1) To describe the performance of a 7-STI PCR assay using the pooling of three urine samples to detect C. trachomatis, Neisseria gonorrhoeae and Mycoplasma genitalium; (2) to estimate the cost saving of the pooling strategy; (3) to describe the prevalence, risk factors and coinfections of C. trachomatis, N. gonorrhoeae and M. genitalium in young people ≤25 years in Catalonia. Methods cross-sectional prevalence study conducted in 2016 among young people ≤25 years of age seen in sexual and reproductive health centres throughout Catalonia from pools of three urine samples. A standardized questionnaire was used to collect clinical-epidemiological and behavioural variables. Results 1032 young people were tested. The prevalence of C. trachomatis, N. gonorrhoeae and M. genitalium was 8.5%, 0.6% and 3.5%, respectively. The pooling strategy provided a 33% savings in reagent costs. Conclusions The pooling strategy implemented for epidemiological studies in our context provides a savings that has an impact on the viability of STI detection programmes. In the same way, this study shows that C. trachomatis prevalence continues to increase in this population and, for the first time in Catalonia, the prevalence of M. genitalium in young people is shown.

One of the problems in virtual globes technologies is the real-time representation of vegetal species. In forest or garden representations, the low detailed plants produce a lack of realism. Efficient techniques are required to achieve accurate interactive visualisation due to the great number of polygons the vegetal species have. This article presents a multi-resolution model based on a geometric representation of vegetal species that allows the application to perform the progressive transmission of the model, that is, the transmission of a simple representation followed by successive refinements of it. It has a hardware-oriented design in order to obtain interactive frame rates. The geometric data of the objects are stored in the graphics processing unit and, moreover, the change from one approximation to another is obtained by performing mathematical calculations in this graphics hardware. The multi-resolution model presented here enables instancing: as many vegetal species as desired can be rendered with different levels of detail, while all of them are accessing the same geometric data. This model has been used to build a real-time representation of a not imaginary scenario. This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology (Project TIN2010-21089-C03-03) and Feder Funds and Generalitat Valenciana (Project PROMETEO/2010/028).

Plants and trees are an essential part of outdoor scenes. They are represented by such a vast number of polygons that performing real-time visualization is still a problem in spite of the advantages of the hardware. Some methods have appeared to solve this drawback based on point- or image-based rendering. However, geometry representation is required in some interactive applications. This work presents a simplification method that deals with the geometry of the foliage, reducing the number of primitives that represent these objects and making their interactive visualization possible. It is based on an image-based simplification that establishes an order of leaf pruning and reduces the complexity of the canopies of trees and plants. The proposed simplification method is viewpoint-driven and uses the mutual information in order to choose the leaf to prune. Moreover, this simplification method avoids the pruned appearance of the tree that is usually produced when a foliage representation is formed by a reduced number of leaves. The error introduced every time a leaf is pruned is compensated for if the size of the nearest leaf is altered to preserve the leafy appearance of the foliage. Results demonstrate the good quality and time performance of the presented work.

The current world economic situation makes it necessary to develop new ways of establishing commercial relationships. One possible solution is to explore the advantages of virtual worlds, and for this reason online virtual trade fairs are becoming more popular in the business world. They enable companies to establish a trade relationship with their customers without the need to visit them in person. This is very attractive for exhibitors because it can save them money, which is a priority for many companies today. In this line, this article presents a multiuser virtual trade fair developed using 3D game engine technologys. Users represented by avatars can interact with each other while they are visiting the virtual fair, which has some interactive objects included in the stands to provide information about the exhibitors. This virtual world is accessible online, and visitors only require a plug-in on their computers to be able to enter the virtual world. The game technology makes it possible to obtain a high degree of realism: very real lighting, cast shadows, collision detection, etc. Moreover, the virtual world presented builds the 3D objects automatically. Participants in the trade fair can customize their virtual stand and the application will generate the code necessary for its inclusion in the rendered virtual world.

Online virtual trade fairs are becoming more popular in the business world. They enable companies to establish a economic trade relationship with their customers. This article presents a multi-user virtual trade fair developed using the technology of 3D game engines. This makes it possible to obtain a high degree of realism and benefit from every advantage of using this software: very real lighting, cast shadows, collision detection, animation, etc. Moreover, the virtual trade fair is accessible online only requiring a plug-in to be installed on the visitor’s computer for them to be able to enter the virtual world. In order to facilitate management of the business fair, our application builds the 3D objects automatically. Participants in the trade fair can customize their virtual stand and the application will generate the necessary code for it to be included in the rendered virtual world. In addition, some interactive objects can be added to the virtual stand to provide fair visitors with essential information such as business contact details, publicity catalogues and so on. Finally, users, who are represented by avatars, can interact with each other while they are visiting the virtual fair.

This article presents a new method for foliage illumination which takes into account direct, indirect illumination and self-shadowing. Both indirect illumination and self-shadowing are approximated by means of a novel technique using depth maps. In addition, a new shadow casting algorithm is developed to render shadows produced by the foliage onto regular surfaces which enhances the appeareance of this kind of shadows compared to traditional shadow mapping techniques.

Real-time rendering of vegetation is currently a problem in need of a solution. The large number of polygons that form this kind of objects means that current hardware cannot achieve interactive rendering of outdoor scenes. This paper deals with the problem and it presents a multiresolution scheme that allows us to represent the whole geometry of the trees using both uniform and variable levels of detail. The method presented here models the trees using two multiresolution models. This is due to the different characteristics of the geometry that forms them. The trunk is modelled by LodStrips, a model oriented towards representing continuous meshes, and the foliage is modelled by the multiresolution model Level of Detail Foliage, presented in a previous work. In this paper, it has been efficiently implemented and extended to allow us to change the level of detail in a variable way, by adapting the resolution of this part of the tree to certain criteria determined by the application. Both of them have been designed to be hardware-oriented. They take advantage of the graphics hardware by adapting the data structures and the rendering algorithms to make the visualisation time efficient. Finally, the multiresolution scheme presented in this paper is compared with the only work that has appeared up to now that uses the same technique.

Interactive rendering of outdoor scenes is currently one of the most important challenges in computer graphics. This article presents a new method of real-time visualization of trees and plants that combines both multiresolution modeling techniques and the dynamic generation of impostors. In our method, trees and plants are represented by continuous view-dependent levels of detail. This enables us to represent many complex tree models with variable resolution. The number of primitives rendered per tree is reduced according to their importance in the scene without loss of leafiness. Furthermore, trees are visualized using dynamic impostors that take advantage of the frame-to-frame coherence inherent in tree-dimensional scenes. The impostors avoid the need to redraw all the geometry of the scene continuously. This method permits visualization of outdoor scenes with a high number of trees in interactive applications such as computer games or virtual reality, adapting the level of detail to the capability of graphic systems.

One of the most important challenges in Computer Graphics is real-time rendering of terrain. This is due to the huge number of polygons used to represent these surfaces. Up to now, several works have appeared that attempt to reduce terrain visualisation time, some of which are based on multiresolution modelling. This method adapts the number of polygons of an object as a function of particular criteria in order to reduce the information that has to be computed for each frame. The ultimate purpose of this work is to compare the most popular multiresolution algorithms to have appeared in recent years, while at the same time examining some of the fundamental concepts underlying real-time terrain visualisation.

Nowadays, university students have grown up surrounded by Web 2.0 technologies, which they are able to use with ease. These technologies provide an opportunity to improve the learning/teaching process through collaboration, the exchange of knowledge and above all, the motivation created by the use of these technologies that are generally utilised by students in their day-to-day social life. The integration of Web 2.0 technologies into the learning/teaching process must be addressed in a critical way, taking into account the objectives to be achieved and the type of teaching to be undertaken. Teachers can find a wide range of available Web 2.0 technologies and it is often difficult for them to decide which type is the best one for their needs. This paper proposes a methodology based on software engineering methods and designed for software selection that provides recommendations to evaluate the function and options of Web 2.0 technologies according to the specific needs and characteristics of the subject to be taught and the types of students involved in higher education. The methodology consists of a formal guide to aid teachers when they need to select and put Web 2.0 technologies into practice in a learning/teaching process. In order to offer a practical demonstration of the application of this methodology, the experiences of various teachers in engineering degrees are described.