A museum hybrid space combines physical artifacts co-located with virtual and augmented reality displays. Although the technology exists to provide museums with hybrid space, there are no empirical studies on effectiveness of the museum hybrid space in terms of learning and enjoyment. This article takes an experimental approach and measures the enjoyment and learning (dependent variables) of participants in response to selected environments (independent variables) including a traditional environment (based on photos and labels), a video-enhanced environment (based on projected video clips), and a VR-enhanced environment (based on video game). The main outcome of this article is demonstrating that the use of VR technology and the resulting hybrid space (i.e., VR-enhanced environment) results in novel museum experiences that provide greater impacts on audience in terms of learning and enjoyment.

The number of video games that are developed based on real historical events and evidence is increasing. These history-based video games provide learning opportunities to players, but a certain type of such games-first- and third-person shooters-has not been carefully examined for their potentials. Knowing what players say about their game experience-even if the information and knowledge are inaccurate-helps researchers understand what type of learning could happen with such games. In this article, we propose a systematic approach to assessing games as learning environments, using the method of comparing the authenticity of popular history-based video games. Through a qualitative data analysis, we studied players' comments on the web-based communication services, such as game forums, digital distribution platforms, and discussion websites. Casual players' conversations on these websites showed that there exist several learning potentials in the games for players, including building their understanding about history and historical forces of the time, through personally relating to specific events, social artifacts, and places.

This paper describes the creation of a game-based, bio-inspired, and interactive learning medium for 7-8 year-old children, called Bubble Play, which runs on a typical PC. In this experimental medium, four tasks, namely Color Combination, Arithmetic Operation, Word Formation, and Object Creation can be understood and modeled as a sophisticated translation of the spatial production systems of bubbles. Although Bubble Play has not yet been formally evaluated, its objective is that basic knowledge and skills are acquired by a player through systematic interaction with simulated spatial objects. Bubble Play promotes systems thinking by requiring players' use of visual concepts and is designed to support instruction in basic mathematics and language skills.

Clusters of PCs are increasingly popular as cost-effective platforms for supercomputer-class applications. Given recent performance improvements in graphics accelerators, clusters are similarly attractive for demanding graphics applications. We describe the design and implementation of Lightning-2, a display subsystem for such a cluster. The system scales in both the number of rendering nodes and the number of displays supported, and allows any pixel data generated from any node to be dynamically mapped to any location on any display. A number of image-compositing functions are supported, including color-keying and depth-compositing. A distinguishing feature of the system is its platform independence: it connects to graphics accelerators via an industry-standard digital video port and requires no modifications to accelerator hardware or device drivers. As a result, rendering clusters that utilize Lightning-2 can be upgraded across multiple generations of graphics accelerators with little effort. We demonstrate a renderer that achieves 106 Mtri/s on an 8-node cluster using Lightning-2 to perform sort-last depth compositing.