This paper presents an educational Ambient Intelligent (AmI) environment, named AmI Playfield. AmI Playfield is grounded on contemporary learning principles to build a natural playground enriched by computational vision techniques, which provides the basis for physical (kinesthetic) collaborative play and performance measurement. Visual displays, mobile controllers and sound facilities support the player strategy, while their customizations allow the easy development of a wide variety of learning applications. This paper: (i) discusses the design, implementation and evaluation of AmI Playfield, (ii) illustrates an educational arithmetic game, named Apple Hunt, developed in order to test and validate the AmI playfield environment, and (iii) discusses the evaluation of Apple Hunt in terms of both methodology and results.

The theme of this paper is an exhibition of prototypical interactive systems with subjects drawn from ancient Macedonia, named "Macedonia from fragments to pixels". Since 2010, the exhibition is hosted by the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki and is open daily to the general public. Up to now, more than 165.000 people have visited it. The exhibition comprises 7 interactive systems which are based on some research outcomes of the Ambient Intelligence Programme of the Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas. The digital content of these systems includes objects from the Museum’s permanent collection and from Macedonia.

This paper presents a computer vision system that supports non-instrumented, location-based interaction of multiple users with digital representations of large-scale artifacts. The proposed system is based on a camera network that observes multiple humans in front of a very large display. The acquired views are used to volumetrically reconstruct and track the humans robustly and in real time, even in crowded scenes and challenging human configurations. Given the frequent and accurate monitoring of humans in space and time, a dynamic and personalized textual/graphical annotation of the display can be achieved based on the location and the walk-through trajectory of each visitor. The proposed system has been successfully deployed in an archaeological museum, offering its visitors the capability to interact with and explore a digital representation of an ancient wall painting. This installation permits an extensive evaluation of the proposed system in terms of tracking robustness, computational performance and usability. Furthermore, it proves that computer vision technology can be effectively used to support non-instrumented interaction of humans with their environments in realistic settings.

This paper presents a computer vision system that supports non-instrumented, location-based interaction of multiple users with digital representations of large-scale artifacts. The proposed system is based on a camera network that observes multiple humans in front of a very large display. The acquired views are used to volumetrically reconstruct and track the humans robustly and in real time, even in crowded scenes and challenging human configurations. Given the frequent and accurate monitoring of humans in space and time, a dynamic and personalized textual/graphical annotation of the display can be achieved based on the location and the walk-through trajectory of each visitor. The proposed system has been successfully deployed in an archaeological museum, offering its visitors the capability to interact with and explore a digital representation of an ancient wall painting. This installation permits an extensive evaluation of the proposed system in terms of tracking robustness, computational performance and usability. Furthermore, it proves that computer vision technology can be effectively used to support non-instrumented interaction of humans with their environments in realistic settings.

This paper presents an advergame installation for promoting the brand and products of a food company producing various types of traditional Cretan rusks. The paper first presents some background and related work. Then the requirements set towards creating the game are outlined, followed by concept creation and design decisions taken in order to meet these requirements, as well as a description of the user interface, gameplay and implementation characteristics of the resulting game. The game has already been installed with remarkable success in two different food exhibitions.

Information and Communication technologies have the potential to permeate the classroom and modernize the educational process. However, in the context of a smart classroom, building educational applications poses unique challenges from an HCI perspective, due to the diversity of user and context requirements. This paper introduces a framework that facilitates the design, development and deployment of pervasive educational applications that can automatically transform according to the context of use to ensure their usability. The collection of widgets incorporates both common basic widgets (e.g., buttons, images) and mini interfaces frequently used in educational applications, as ready-to-use modules. The designer can either (i) combine and customize widgets from both categories to build an interface just once, or (ii) build and incorporate it as a custom-made mini interface in the collection for future reuse. Finally, the framework's usability has been evaluated with users obtaining very positive results and potential suggestions for extensions.

Today, augmented reality is evolving towards sophisticated approaches exploiting the opportunities offered by immersive environments and high quality 3D graphics. Such systems can prove to be very useful in the context of education, especially when learning involves reading and writing activities. However, the majority of existing systems relies on touch-based interaction, or on interaction with proprietary technological artifacts. This paper presents an approach to enhancing reading and writing on physical books through smart augmentation. It is based on the intuitive and unobtrusive monitoring of students gestures during reading and writing activities through cameras, facilitating context-aware content sensitive assistance without requiring any special interaction device.

This paper discusses a line of research targeted to investigate and introduce innovative solutions for efficient learning in smart environments through integrating AmI technology in the learning process. Following a discussion of current approaches to technology integration in the classroom, the overall concept of the Student-Centric “Intelligent” Classroom and the related software are described. Potential future improvements are outlined.

This paper discusses a framework that supports collaborative learning activities in smart environments. When designing or developing collaborative environments numerous fundamental requirements should be taken into consideration to maximize their potentials. These best-practices outline strategies regarding (i) group formation, (ii) role assignment, (iii) personalized support, and (iv) activity monitoring. A multi-tier architecture scheme is employed, on top of the “ClassMATE” system, where every module addressees some of these aspects and their combination results in a complete framework that enables both online and offline collaboration in the smart classroom.

This paper presents the application of the PaperView system in the domain of cartographic heritage. PaperView is a multi-user augmented-reality system for supplementing physical surfaces with digital information, through the use of pieces of plain paper that act as personal, location-aware, interactive screens. By applying the proposed method of reality augmentation in the cartographic heritage domain, the system provides the capability of retrieving multimedia information about areas of interest, overlaying information on a 2D or 3D (i.e., scale model) map, as well as comparing different versions of a single map. The technologies employed are presented, along with the interactive behavior of the system, which was instantiated and tested in three setups: (i) a map of Macedonia, Greece, including ancient Greek cities with archeological interest; (ii) a glass case containing a scale model and (iii) a part of Rigas Velestinlis’ Charta. The first two systems are currently installed and available to the general public at the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, Greece, as part of a permanent exhibition of interactive systems.