Today, many forms of art are influenced by the emergence of interactive technologies, including the mixing of physical media with digital technology for forming new hybrid works of art and the usage of mobile phones to create art projected on public spaces. Many artists and painters use digital technology to augment their work technically and creatively. In the same context many believe that the time of transition from traditional analogue art to postmodern digital art, that is, to an art grounded in codes rather than images has arrived. The research work described in this paper contributes towards supporting, through the use of Ambient Intelligence technologies, traditional painters’ creativity, as well as methods and techniques of art masters. The paper presents the design and implementation of an intelligent environment and its software infrastructure, to form a digitally augmented Art Workshop. Its practical exploitation was conducted in an Ambient Intelligence (AmI) simulation space and four feasibility studies were conducted. In each of these studies an oil painting was created following an alternative, yet accredited by artists, approach.

This paper reports the design, development and evaluation of a technological framework for learning applications, named AmI Playfield, aimed at creating challenging learning conditions through play and entertainment. AmI Playfield is an educative Ambient Intelligent (AmI) environment which emphasizes the use of kinesthetic and collaborative technology in a natural playful learning context and embodies performance measurement techniques. In order to test and assess AmI Playfield, the "Apple Hunt" application was developed, which engages (young) learners in arithmetic thinking through kinesthetic and collaborative play, observed by unobtrusive AmI technology behind the scene. "Apple Hunt" has been evaluated according to a combination of methodologies suitable for young testers, whereas Children Committees are introduced as a promising approach to evaluation with children. The obtained results demonstrate the system's high potential to generate thinking and fun, deriving from the learners' full-body kinesthetic play and team work.

This paper discusses a learner-centric approach towards supporting instructors on improving the learning process in ambient educational environments. The proposed system introduces an intelligent multi-agent infrastructure that monitors unobtrusively the students’ activities and notifies the teacher, in real-time, about potential learning weaknesses and pitfalls that need to be addressed. For that to be achieved several applications have been developed: (i) a real-time classroom activity visualizer, (ii) a behavioral reasoner that aims to identify common behaviors by analyzing classroom statistics records, and (iii) various mini-tools like the classroom attendance record, the schedule manager, etc. Following the system’s description, findings of the preliminary expert-based evaluation are presented and future extensions are proposed.

This paper presents an interactive desk that augments physical books that are placed upon its surface with multimedia content and interactive applications. Such content is dynamically displayed in augmentation to the currently open page of the book, that is, aligned in realtime with its 2D orientation upon the desk. The rendered applications are controlled by the users with the use of a stylus, both through contact with the book or desk, as well as, through a small vocabulary of gestures performed with the stylus. The evaluation of the accuracy, robustness, and performance of the proposed computer vision modules supporting this interaction are reported through quantitative experiments. In addition, the system usability was validated and the suitability of educational applications was explored through pilot applications, which include music and digital animation on pages, content-based multimedia presentation, context-based online search, as well as, note-taking through handwriting.

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 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.