invest(ment)igation

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Synplant: Cymatics Visualization of Plant-Environment Interaction Based on Plants Biosignals
Synplant is an installation consisting of multiple hybrid plant sensing units. By analyzing biosignals, it can interpret the natural environment from the perspective of plants and translate their experiences into audiovisual expressions that can be experienced by humans. This work is based on a supervised learning system that analyzes the changes in biosignals when plants receive environmental stimuli. The analysis results are used to control acoustic-lighting devices to generate variable cymatics patterns. Through the utilization of wind and rain as vehicles to bridge different sensing units, it creates an immersive audiovisual field that represents the trajectories of the invisible interaction between plants and different elements in the natural environment. This work combines an intelligent machine with botanical perception to extend our understanding of the natural environment and to connect with the land from a non-human perspective.”

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Lights! Dance! Freeze!: Exploring the dance-musical filmic space using embodied search in an interactive installation
Conventionally, spectators enjoy films passively. This paper describes an interactive film installation that invites participants to use their entire body as a query to search and explore a large corpus of musical films in a novel way. Using an RGB camera, ML-based skeleton tracking technology and a unique pose and film indexing system, this installation tracks a participant’s movements and mirrors them in real-time by finding matching poses among hundreds of thousands from well-known musicals. When the participant freezes in a pose, the installation instantly plays back the short film clip that begins with that pose, immersing them in the music and dance from musicals of different eras. This approach explores themes of tangible interfaces and the new possibilities that emerge from employing embodied interaction to traverse the dance pose space, which is traditionally difficult to index and interact with in real time. The pose indexing system and whole-body interaction we propose in this paper open new pathways for cultural participation, as they lend themselves to different datasets and require no technical skills from participants.”

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Streamlined approach to 2nd/3rd graders learning basic programming concepts
There is a growing need to teach schoolchildren programming at an increasingly younger age. The goal of this study is to determine if it is possible to teach schoolchildren basic programming concepts in a streamlined manner. In order to present the new knowledge in a way schoolchildren could understand easily, analogies between basic programming concepts and traffic were used. A simple video game was developed with this in mind and an effort was made to avoid design pitfalls commonly found in edutainment titles. The study involved 112 schoolchildren ages 7 to 9. Test group and control group were given a pre-test, a re-test and a post-test. The re-test and the post-test respectively showed 16% and 7% score difference in favor of the test group. Focusing on questions featuring content analogous to basic programming concepts showed 36% and 20% difference in scores.”

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The War on Terror beyond the barrel of a gun: The procedural rhetorics of the boardgame Labyrinth
Thomas Ambrosio, Jonathan Ross

“Utilizing Bogost’s procedural rhetoric framework in his book Persuasive Games, this article examines Labyrinth, a boardgame that simulates the conflict between the United States and global terrorism. The authors systematically integrate ludology (rules/gameplay) and narratology (narratives/representations) to illustrate how Labyrinth was intentionally designed so that players became active participants in a narrative about how good governance undermines the sources of terrorism and the counterproductive nature of militarized counterterrorism, as well as bear witness to the agency of the Muslim world and the region’s political dynamism on the tabletop. This is a very different account of the War on Terror than has previously been studied in the literature, which has focused overwhelmingly on first-person shooter videogames and, in turn, has provided a very limited range of how this conflict can be represented in ludic form. However, Labyrinth is not alone, and the wargames that many players grew up with have given way to a variety of boardgames which approach complex historical or contemporary situations and environments beyond simply killing one’s enemies. This represents a diverse, but largely untapped, resource already in the public space and ready to be investigated. Media studies can therefore benefit from considering how boardgames similar to Labyrinth present alternative ways in which the ‘real world’ has been, and indeed can be, translated through popular culture objects.”

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Gostava de ter acesso a:
“M. Kuwahara and N. Umezu, “Learning Environment based on an Interactive Projection Table for Children,” 2021 IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality (AIVR), 2021, pp. 109-113, doi: 10.1109/AIVR52153.2021.00026.
Abstract: This paper proposes a tabletop learning environment for children. Some physics-based phenomena such as reflection and refraction of light are difficult for children to understand. Our interactive projection significantly help children understand behaviors of light through watching simulated light particles and interacting with them by moving real objects on the table. Our system consists a PC, video projector, and depth sensor. Depth-based object detection is performed with each of captured frames at 60 FPS. In the prototype of our implemented system for learning behaviors of light, simulated light particles reacts in realtime with actual objects moved by a user hand, which would greatly help people including children understand behaviors of light such as propagation and reflection. Our future work includes to conduct a series of user experiments in local museums to evaluate usability of the proposed system. Development of other learning applications are also of high importance”

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eu gostava de ter acesso/I would like to have access to your article..
Bases for Summative Evaluation of Educational Digital Games and Their Implications in School Scenario – LINK

Gostava de ter acesso/access to your article,

Farkhondeh Hassandoust, Angsana A. Techatassanasoontorn, and Felix B. Tan (March 2016)
Factors Influencing the Infusion of Information Systems: A Literature Review
http://aisel.aisnet.org/pajais/vol8/iss1/2/