This article explores the possibility of using dynamic Educational Virtual Environments (EVEs) for helping students with limited background in physics and mathematics to deeply understand Quantum Mechanics principles and create the correct mental images of atomic models. Taking under consideration the results of our pilot study we have created “The Quantum Atom”, an educational environment with...

To develop advanced multi-modal displays, it is important that various sensory information is presented with proper amount. Previous studies have pointed out that vibration information enhances participants’ immersive experience from virtual display. Therefore, vibration information should be considered when people develop advanced multimedia systems. We have focused on the effect of full-body ...

Serious games are generally designed with two goals in mind: promoting learning and creating compelling and engaging experiences (sometimes termed a sense of presence). Presence itself is believed to promote learning, but serious games often attempt to further increase pedagogical value. One way to do so is to use an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) to provide feedback during gameplay. Some re...

In this paper, we have investigated the concept of "Cultural Robotics" with regard to the evolution of social into cultural robots in the 21st Century. By defining the concept of culture, the potential development of a culture between humans and robots is explored. Based on the cultural values of the robotics developers, and the learning ability of current robots, cultural attributes in this re...

Approximately 1/5 of adolescents develop depressive symptoms. Given that youths spend a good deal of their lives at school, it seems plausible that supportive relationships with teachers could benefit their emotional well-being. Thus, the purpose of this study is to examine the association between emotionally supportive teacher relationships and depression in adolescence. The so-called principl...

vAcademia is a 3D virtual world designed for collaborative learning. It enables a new approach to educational activities in virtual worlds, which is based on a new vision of content and learning process. The most distinct feature of vAcademia is 3D recording which allows capturing everything in a given virtual world location in dynamics. The resultant recordings can be not only watched later, b...

In this paper, we present a system that combines Augmented Reality and autostereoscopic visualization. We also report a study for comparing different aspects using an autostereoscopic display and a common display, in which 44 children aged from 8 to 10 years old have participated. From our study, statistically significant differences were found between both displays for the depth perception and...

The use of virtual simulation-based training continues to expand, as organizations explore alternative methods to reduce the cost of training. While virtual simulation has been empirically validated to be effective in the transfer of skills to the live environment, what is still unknown is what effect, if any, that an individual’s sense of presence in the simulation has on their performance. In...

The concept of "presence" is a major part of the discourse of VR. Creating a sense of presence can be crucial to the effectiveness of museum exhibits and VR presentations. Sound can play various roles in technology-based presentations, by creating or enhancing a sense of presence, and providing a continuity of experience. This paper discusses these points and how presence and sonic identificati...

In this paper we describe the results of experiments whose goal is to investigate the effect of enhancing a virtual reality experience with the sound of synthetic footsteps. Results show that the sense of presence is enhanced when the sound of one’s own motion is added. Furthermore, the experiments show that the threshold for detection of latency between motion and sound is raised when visual s...