Augmented Reality environments have shown to be relevant and valuable in many instances of the educational process. Accounting for the advantages and conventional gains of learning through physical books and printed matter in general, this paper presents an approach towards augmenting both such media. This work has elementary school as a con-text and presents an approach towards augmenting a physical book and associated learning cards, with the purpose of providing a playful approach to learning the alphabet. The two principal activities involved in studying from an elementary school book are augmented: learning, during which the student receives information about letters, phonemes, and words, and practicing where questions are asked to the young student in order to consolidate the recently acquired knowledge. The proposed implementation is evaluated initially as to its performance and accuracy and then as to its usability and suitability for efficient and intuitive interaction.

This paper presents an innovative advergame installation for promoting the brand and products of a company producing 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 to meet these requirements, as well as a description of the user interface, gameplay and technical characteristics of the resulting game. The game has been installed with remarkable success in two different food exhibitions in key locations in Athens, Greece, where it has been played by more than 500 people of ages ranging from 2 to 76 years old. A large variety of qualitative and quantitative data were collected. The paper presents several findings stemming from these data. Additionally, changes made to the game as a result of the findings are presented, along with lessons learnt from the acquired experience.

This system paper describes two educational mini-games (a multiple-choice quiz and a geography-related game) that combine learning and ambient technology. Their innovative feature is that they offer physical interaction through printed cards on a tabletop setup, where a simple webcam monitors the table's surface and identifies the thrown cards. Following a brief discussion of ambient technology integration in the environment, the overall concept of these games is described and potential future improvements are outlined.

This paper discusses the opportunities and challenges of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) technologies in the context of child development, and presents the methodology and preliminary results of the development of an augmented interactive table which offers to preschool children various AmI educative and entertaining applications. The overall objective of this work is to assess how AmI technologies can contribute to the enhancement of children’s skills and abilities through common play activities during the various stages of their growth and development.

A visual user interface providing augmented, multitouch interaction upon a non-instrumented disk that can dynamically rotate in two axes is proposed. While the user manipulates the disk, the system uses a projector to visualize a display upon it. A depth camera is used to estimate the pose of the surface and multiple simultaneous fingertip contacts upon it. The estimates are transformed into meaningful user input, availing both fingertip contact and disk pose information. Calibration and real-time implementation issues are studied and evaluated through extensive experimentation. We show that the outcome meets accuracy and usability requirements for employing the approach in human computer interaction.

his paper presents the implementation of a smart environment that employs Ambient Intelligence technologies in order to augment a typical hospital room with smart features that assist both patients and medical staff. In this environment various wireless and wired sensor technologies have been integrated, allowing the patient to control the environment and interact with the hospital facilities, while a clinically oriented interface allows for vital sign monitoring. The developed applications are presented both from a patient's and a doctor's perspective, offering different services depending on the user's role. The results of the evaluation process illustrate the need for such a service, leading to important conclusions about the usefulness and crucial role of AmI in health care.

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.