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 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.

This paper describes the outcomes stemming from the work of a multidisciplinary R&D project of ICS-FORTH, aiming to explore and experiment with novel interactive museum exhibits, and to assess their utility, usability and potential impact. More specifically, four interactive systems are presented in this paper which have been integrated, tested and evaluated in a dedicated, appropriately designed, laboratory space. The paper also discusses key issues stemming from experience and observations in the course of qualitative evaluation sessions with a large number of participants.

In this paper, the design and implementation of a hardware/ software platform for parallel and distributed multiview vision processing is presented. The platform is focused at supporting the monitoring of human presence in indoor environments. Its architecture is focused at increased throughput through process pipelining as well as at reducing communication costs and hardware requirements. Using this platform, we present efficient implementations of basic visual processes such as person tracking, textured visual hull computation and head pose estimation. Using the proposed platform multiview visual operations can be combined and third-party ones integrated, to ultimately facilitate the development of interactive applications that employ visual input. Computational performance is benchmarked comparatively to state of the art and the efficacy of the approach is qualitatively assessed in the context of already developed applications related to interactive environments.

This paper presents a system that supports the exploration of digital representations of large-scale museum artifacts in through non-instrumented, location-based interaction. The system employs a state-of-the-art computer vision system, which localizes and tracks multiple visitors. The artifact is presented in a wall-sized projection screen and it is visually annotated with text and images according to the location as well as walkthrough trajectories of the tracked visitors. The system is evaluated in terms of computational performance, localization accuracy, tracking robustness and usability.

This paper introduces booTable, an interactive coffee table prototype constructed by recycled paper aiming to build upon the paradigm of surface computing, but endeavoring to overcome a number of identified limitations of current design practice. In this respect, the paper first runs through the design requirements, decisions and rationale towards creating a first version of the prototype. Then, the outcomes of the prototyping process are described, along with the results of an informal assessment session and related critique. Following that, the revisions made towards the development of a second version of the prototype are laid out and the final result is presented.

In this paper, the application of computer vision techniques to the localization of multiple persons in a relatively wide gaming terrain is presented. Multiple views are employed both for terrain coverage, but most importantly, for treatment of occlusions. Through the appropriate selection of lightweight operations and acceleration strategies, an adequate frame rate is achieved despite the large volume of input data. The resulting system is employed in the development of multiplayer entertainment applications, which are demonstrated and evaluated.

This paper presents the process and tangible outcomes of a rapid prototyping activity towards the creation of a demonstrator, showcasing the potential use and effect of Ambient Intelligence technologies in a typical office environment. In this context, the hardware and software components used are described, as well as the interactive behavior of the demonstrator. Additionally, some conclusions stemming from the experience gained are presented, along with pointers for future research and development work.