Voice assistants have shown great potential to support older adults at home and improve their quality of life. Nevertheless, its use in nursing home contexts has not been sufficiently explored. The article presents a study carried out with 21 residents, both assisted and autonomous, in a Spanish nursing home. The aim of the study has been to assess the acceptance, and the user experience, both in individual and group interaction with a voice assistant. Aspects analysed include the voice interaction difficulties encountered, the attitudes and emotions felt during interaction, the appropriateness of using games, the usefulness of the display and the feasibility of supporting group interaction. In spite of the challenges encountered, results have been promising, especially regarding group interaction. They have confirmed the feasibility of using voice assistants in nursing home contexts if interaction is adapted to residents’ characteristics and its use is always guided by a mediator.

Among the elements to consider when designing a video game, narrative stands out due to its importance in contextualizing and motivating. However, there are no standard processes for creating interactive digital narratives. In educational video games, a suitable narrative is even more essential to captivate players with a story, which serves as a vehicle for transmitting and evaluating knowledge. Consequently, this article proposes a narrative design process for video games, developed for general application but particularly useful for educational games. It defines a narrative structure, a set of design steps, and the documents generated during the process, each one representing a different perspective of the game’s narrative. To validate the proposal, a narrative-rich game called Time Invaders was designed to teach reading comprehension. It was tested with 237 school-age children, measuring their experience and satisfaction. The study revealed that the narrative was the most valued element of the game.

This work presents integral actions towards women in engineering recognition organized according to educational stages they are directed: Stage 1, from early childhood education, primary education and secondary education; Stage 2, during university and Stage 3 after university. At stage 1 actions are devised to increase girl's interest on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Emphasis is put on showing women in engineering as role models, illustrating engineers work and stressing the importance of diversity in working groups. Stage 2 is focused on making male and female students aware of the gender gap in engineering and the importance of diversity for innovation and training female students on known female narrow circumstances. Finally, at stage 3, the objective is to retain and promote women in the engineering profession. The specific actions developed at the three stages are presented. Their impact is discussed in order to accomplish effective actions for achieving gender balance towards excellence in Engineering.

In this paper StarLoop, a Tangible Programing Language designed to support the learning of computer programing concepts for middle school children, is presented. StarLoop has been designed as a game to be played in an Interactive Space by up to four middle-school children. The StarLoop game uses the four tabletop devices as well as image projection on the Interactive Space walls. A first test with children has been carried out; it has been quite successful and no big usability problems encountered.

In the last years, Affective Computing investigations have focused the efforts in the automatic extraction of human emotions and in increasing the success rates in the emotion recognition task. However, there is a lack of automatic tools that intuitively visualize the users' emotional information. In this work, we propose Emotracker, a novel tool based on the combination of eye tracking and facial emotional recognition technologies that allows the visualization of contents, user emotions and gaze at a glance, and offers a wide range of visualization options, including emotional saccade maps and emotional heat maps. The simultaneous consideration of gaze and emotion opens the door to the evaluation of user engagement, which is of great importance for content creators, but has also other promising fields of application in psychology research and, more specifically, in autism.

Affective Computing researches use to be focused in the automatic extraction of human emotions and in increasing the success rates in the emotion recognition task. However, there is a lack of automatic tools that intuitively visualize the users' emotional information. In this paper, the development of a novel tool that allows the visualization of contents, user emotions and gaze at a glance is presented. The tool, called Emotracker, is based on the combination of eye tracking and facial emotional recognition technologies, and offers a wide range of visualization options, including emotional saccade maps and emotional heat maps. The simultaneous consideration of gaze and emotion opens the door to the evaluation of user engagement in a wide range of applications.

This paper presents "ToyVision": a software toolkit developed to facilitate the implementation of tangible games in visual-based tabletop devices. Compared to other toolkits for tabletops which offer very limited and tag-centered tangible possibilities, ToyVision provides designers with tools for modeling and implementing innovative tangible playing pieces with a high level of abstraction from the hardware. For this purpose, a new abstraction layer (the Widget layer) has been included in an already existing tabletop framework (ReacTIVision), providing the host application with high processed data about each playing piece involved in the game. To support the framework application, a Graphic Assistant tool enables the designer to visually model all the playing pieces into tangible tokens that can be tracked and controlled by the framework software. As a practical example, the complete process of prototyping a tangible game is described.

Studio participants will design and prototype tangible board-games for NIKVision: a tabletop computer for young children. The goal of this studio is to give designers and developers hands-on experience of developing a functional prototype of a tangible tabletop application without the intrinsic difficulties of managing electronic sensors, actuators and machine vision algorithms. During the studio attendees will complete a simple but conceptually complete tangible board-game prototype during the workshop day by abstracting the technologies and keeping focus firmly on the application behaviours and the interactions between users, objects and the system. This will be achieved through using the ToyVision toolkit, a set of software tools that lowers the threshold of prototyping both the "bits" and "atoms" of interactive tabletop games.

This paper presents a case study of the design lifecycle of games involving tangible interaction toys handled on an active surface tabletop. The games are oriented to 3--6 year old children, so special care has been taken in the methods used to involve them in a child-centered design lifecycle. The iterative nature of this design paradigm was supported by frequent test sessions where data relating to usability and fun was captured and analyzed in order to guide successive design iterations until a finished product was achieved. The aim is to guide designers intending to involve children in similar tabletop game creation projects. Details are given of how data collected from test sessions with children revealed usability problems and helped to create, evolve and improve the games.

We present a new set of toys and games especially designed to bring tabletop interaction closer to very young children. The use of these toys will be shown in an especially designed tabletop device adapted to children aged between 3 to 6 years old. Nevertheless, it must be pointed out that these toys use a tangible interaction approach that can be easily adapted to any tabletop device based on visual recognition software. The final aim of this work is to combine physical group activities with educative computer games, in a unique interactive experience.

Interactive Digital TV has arisen new forms of interaction not traditionally associated with this medium. One of its applications is the so-called “t-learning” or TV-based interactive learning. To date, most existing t-learning applications confine themselves to edutainment more than to more complex and pedagogical forms of learning, due to the technological constraints imposed by set-top boxes. This paper overcomes those technological barriers to propose the first t-learning affective aware tutoring tool. The tool allows to capture by means of a camera the facial expressions of the student while performing evaluations (tests) through a broadcasted interactive t-learning application at home. It integrates a novel Artificial Intelligence method for facial affect recognition, where facial expressions are evaluated with a psychological 2-dimensional continuous affective approach. Thanks to it, the t-learning tool is able to automatically extract emotional information from the learner, which is further presented in a simple and efficient way to the distance tutor so that he can be aware of student's encountered difficulties and emotional progression during the learning process.

The interpretation of user facial expressions is a very useful method for emotional sensing and it constitutes an indispensable part of affective Human Computer Interface designs. Facial expressions are often classified into one of several basic emotion categories. This categorical approach seems poor to treat faces with blended emotions, as well as to measure the intensity of a given emotion. This paper presents an effective system for facial emotional classification, where facial expressions are evaluated with a psychological 2-dimensional continuous affective approach. At its output, an expressional face is represented as a point in a 2D space characterized by evaluation and activation factors. The proposed system first starts with a classification method in discrete categories based on a novel combination of classifiers, that is subsequently mapped in a 2D space in order to be able to consider intermediate emotional states. The system has been tested with an extensive universal database and human assessment has been taken into consideration in the evaluation of results.

Abstract BqR‐Tree, the data structure presented in this paper is an improved R‐Tree data structure based on a quadtree spatial partitioning which improves the rendering speed of the usual R‐trees when view‐culling is implemented, especially in urban scenes. The city is split by means of a spatial quadtree partition and the block is adopted as the basic urban unit. One advantage of blocks is that they can be easily identified in any urban environment, regardless of the origins and structure of the input data. The aim of the structure is to accelerate the visualization of complex scenes containing not only static but dynamic elements. The usefulness of the structure has been tested with low structured data, which makes its application appropriate to almost all city data. The results of the tests show that when using the BqR‐Tree structure to perform walkthroughs and flights, rendering times vastly improve in comparison to the data structures which have yielded best results to date, with average improvements of around 30%.

This paper describes a tabletop prototype that allows kindergarten children to take the benefits of the new pedagogical possibilities that tangible interaction and tabletop technologies offer to manipulative learning. After analyzing children's cognitive and psychomotorial skills, we have designed and tuned a prototype game suitable for children aged 3 to 4 years old. Our prototype uniquely combines low cost tangible interaction and tabletop technology with tutored learning. The design has been based on observations of the children using the technology, letting them freely play with the application during three play sessions. These observational sessions informed the design decisions for the game whilst also confirming the children's enjoyment with the prototype.

In this paper, it is described a method of curved ray tracing capable of depicting phenomena that arise, under certain conditions, when light propagates through an inhomogeneous atmosphere. As an example application the distortions in the spherical shape of the sun during sunsets are modelled, including split suns, flattened suns and double suns. Nevertheless, the method is general and can be applied to any media in which the index of refraction is a function of the position

Abstract The aim of the work presented here is to generalize a system, developed to treat general participating media, to make it capable of considering volumetric inelastic processes such as fluorescence. Our system, based on the discrete ordinates method, is adequate to treat a complex participating medium such as natural waters as it is prepared to deal with not only anisotropic but also highly peaked phase functions, as well as to consider the spectral behaviour of the medium's characteristic parameters. It is also able to generate detailed quantitative illumination information, such as the amount of light that reaches the medium boundaries or the amount of light absorbed in each of the medium voxels. First, we present an extended form of the radiative transfer equation to incorporate inelastic volumetric phenomena. Then, we discuss the necessary changes in the general calculation scheme to include inelastic scattering. We have applied all this to consider the most common inelastic effect in natural waters: fluorescence in chlorophyll‐a. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We present a data structure specially geared toward the definition and management of synthetic actors in real-time computer graphics. The relation between our proposed data structure and the Silicon Graphics API Performer/spl reg/ makes its implementation possible on a low-cost real-time platform thanks to current accelerating cards. We demonstrate how our data structure is used to generate motion by means of two different applications. Both of them make use of direct and inverse kinematics and may use motion capture. ARTgraph is a development environment devoted to the creation of high-quality real-time 3D-graphics applications (basically, 3D games) and the ALVW system is a general platform that provides and coordinates a sensing-analysis-acting loop to provide behavior for synthetic actors in their own scenario. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the standardization process of multiplatform synthetic actor programs or libraries.

The basis of this study is the concept of double presence in the theoretical mainframe of production-reproduction model. Current Spanish reality has created a conflict between productive and reproductive work and has caused an unequal distribution between women and men, of both the weight and the value of the work. The access of Spanish women scientists and engineers in technically related research fields has been increasing in a spectacular way in Spain in the past few years, giving rise to a new, socially different group regarding its activity and double presence in the productive and reproductive model. From this viewpoint, the university offers apparent workplace flexibility and a different productivity concept that perhaps could be an interesting study case for solving this conflict, tacitly assumed by Spanish society. The study chose technical women (both scientists and engineers) holding university positions at the University of Zaragoza (Spain) as the object of study. The research consists of a questionnaire focused on the tensions due to the double presence of women, and its direct consequences in their vertical professional progress and also in the relative importance given to each role. The results of the study show that there are two different groups of women, one that gives priority to their families, and another that shows the greatest availability not only to travel because of working reasons, but also to move out for promotion. These two groups correspond to different social situations, and also derive from different work positions. General results of their opinion about both their work and their reproductive responsibilities are also given.

Since the appearance of the first woman engineer in the 50's till now, a massive incorporation of women in the technology area (more quantitative than qualitative) is being produced. This evolution has placed Spain over the medium world level. The article intends to gather information to synthesize the present situation of the women-technology relationship in the Aragon Autonomous Region and in Spain. Moreover, the change in the latest years is shown, framed in context of the European reference system. The study of the gender variable is confronted not only at the educational but also at the labour market level. Statistics are presented about the evolution of the presence of women from the first education levels and in the choice of the technological options in the secondary level. The situation at University level and in the technological research world is also outlined. With regard to the labour market, statistical data about the incorporation of women into work with increasing reality since the 80's, are included. The article intends to give keys for the analysis about this quick evolution. It gives a historical perspective inside the Spanish framework and hints at future tendencies.