This paper reports on the design, development and evaluation of a framework which implements virtual humans for information provision. The framework can be used to create interactive multimedia information visualizations (e.g., images, text, audio, videos, 3D models) and provides a dynamic data modeling mechanism for storage and retrieval and implements communication through multimodal interaction techniques. The interaction may involve human-to-agent, agent-to-environment or agent-to-agent communication. The framework supports alternative roles for the virtual agents who may act as assistants for existing systems, standalone “applications” or even as integral parts of emerging smart environments. Finally, an evaluation study was conducted with the participation of 10 people to study the developed system in terms of usability and effectiveness, when it is employed as an assisting mechanism for another application. The evaluation results were highly positive and promising, confirming the system’s usability and encouraging further research in this area.

The evolution of Information Technology (IT) and the emergence of the Ambient Intelligence paradigm have drastically affected the way users live and learn. Ambient Intelligence is a vision of the future that offers great opportunities to enrich everyday activities (e.g., on the road, at home, at work, etc.) and has been proven to play an important role in education. In smart learning environments, learning activities are enhanced with the use of pervasive and mobile computing. This paper presents an extensible software infrastructure that empowers teachers to design and program purposeful and engaging learning activities for formal and informal learning environments, by combining and orchestrating cloud-based, ambient and pervasive facilities and services.

Pervasive computing environments have permeated current research and practice, unobtrusively augmenting existing environments with digital content. The present work, following a pervasive computing approach, proposes a framework to augment an educational environment, being a typical classroom or any studying environment. In this context, the work presented in this paper investigates unobtrusive interaction and support of active educational or studying activities through appropriate context-sensitive information. To this end, passive visual sensing is employed in order to unobtrusively perceive the current context and users’ actions, thus providing novel ways to implement natural interaction. The suitability of the proposed interaction technologies and overall approach has been demonstrated through three interactive applications integrated in the framework, each one supporting different interaction techniques and addressing different educational activities. Finally, a user experience evaluation of the three test-bed applications has been carried out, aiming to assess the applicability of the approach and the suitability of each of the proposed technologies to the educational tasks in hand.

This paper reports on the design and implementation of BeThereNow, a public interactive information system where users are depicted immersed in various sceneries. The work is focused on the domain of info-tainment in public spaces using large displays and aims on short-time usage. The implemented system employs a mixed reality application through which users are informed about different sceneries and also create personalized digital postcards. This process is accomplished using computer vision algorithms in order to depict users and objects, while removing the background of the scene. Finally, the lessons learned from the long-term deployment of the system out-in-the-wild are presented, providing an insight on the users’ actions and reactions and feedback on future research directions.

This work regards fingertip contact detection and localization upon planar surfaces to provide interactivity in augmented displays implemented upon these surfaces, by projector-camera systems. In contrast to the widely employed approach where user hands are observed from above, lateral camera placement avails increased sensitivity to touch detection. An algorithmic approach for the treatment of the laterally acquired visual input is proposed and is comparatively evaluated against the conventional.

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.