The use of Information Visualization techniques and research into genetics have greatly improved knowledge in medicine, health, animal breeding, and even in commerce itself. The data is often complex in structure and difficult to understand. Researchers have obtained patterns and knowledge about these data, and with this, the processes of discovery about drugs for diseases, improvement in the cultivation of crops, and in animal breeding itself for a better yield in each of these areas. The goal is, through a tool with visualization techniques, to assist in the monitoring of genetic improvement in fish breeding belonging to the genetics laboratory of a partner university. The requirements survey was carried out with Ph.D. and Ph.D. students in the Aquaculture area.

In this study, we propose the use of four visualizations techniques (trade deficit, 3D scatter plot, circle packing, and chord diagram) to better understand and analyze four important issues in cost management of a private medical work cooperative. These issues have been determined during 11 interview sessions with directors and managers from said cooperative and are: monthly revenues and expenses that the cooperative has with patient care, by contract; viability of contracts; requests for examinations made by professionals licensed by the cooperative in which they are the executors; and requests for exams performed by professionals licensed by the cooperative that are executed by other professionals licensed by the cooperative. The visualizations are then demonstrated with real data obtained from the database of cooperative, which are first filtered using the interquartile range test and analyzed using the violin plot technique. The use of Visualization techniques aim to highlight possible problems that may occur, such as medical abuse, fraud, feasibility of contracts with companies or even medical errors that directly or indirectly influence the cost of the health organization.

Anatomy learning is very important for many courses, and it requires understanding three-dimensional (3D) shapes, most forms of anatomy teaching are offered to students through two-dimensional (2D) resources, such as images and videos. Many software solutions were developed with the purpose of assisting anatomy teaching and learning, arranging varied techniques and assets, as interaction and visualization of 3D virtual models. Despite great features, these solutions lack standards utilization and pedagogical methodology. This paper aims to present a 3D content generation technique to Moodle, one of the most popular platforms for teaching and learning management, built upon a specific pedagogical methodology, and validated by educational experts. The standard used in this technique allow sharing and reuse of content not only among Moodle systems, which are used by a large number of educational institutions and professors but also in other Virtual Learning Environments.

A process-scheduling algorithm is a fundamental operating system function that manages the assignment of CPU (Central Processing Unit) processes. It aims to make the system efficient, fast, and fair, allowing as many processes as possible to make the best use of the CPU at any given time. Understanding scheduling algorithms and their impact in practice is a challenging and time-consuming task for students, given the differing features of each operating system. Operating system simulators are usually based on either a command line or bidimensional front-end interface. This paper presents a process-scheduling simulator based on virtual reality technology that allows students to develop their empirical skills while learning process-scheduling algorithms. The simulator allows the learner to navigate inside a computer motherboard and interact with its components in multi-projection environments such as CAVE-like systems (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment), on a desktop, in a Web browser, or using an HMD (head-mounted display) such as Google Cardboard.

Software libraries allow developers to create software projects upon basic functions already implemented. In this way, it is possible to focus on more complex activities to achieve the software solution aims. Software libraries features and availability on the Internet are the reason for these valuable project resources are widely used. However, there may be some issues in software projects that integrate several libraries, since they are independent projects that must work together. This paper presents LibViews, an information visualization application to create visual representations over libraries metrics and usage on software projects. LibViews was developed to provide a better understanding of libraries versions and their role in software projects, helping in the maintenance of these projects identifying previously unknown information. As use case, LibViews was applied in an university corporate software project, pointing out as a useful tool to understand the relationship between software project and its third-party libraries.

Visualization applications can be performed on distinct platforms, such as mobile devices and multi-projection systems. Each platform offers specific features to provide further data understanding, and a system that integrates these platforms in a complementary manner is a real challenge. In this paper, we present an immersive and interactive visualization system that aims to explore data from relational databases using 3D graphs representations, where multiple simultaneous users can visualize and interact with the data through a multi-projection system and mobile devices. A single visualization application was created for both platforms using the Unity game engine, and an Unity external package for Virtual Reality applications development, that supports multi-projection system over a PC cluster and passive stereoscopy. Our visualization system aims to provide the users a better data understanding using a 3-screens multi-projection system as data overview, and mobile devices as display and interaction device for navigation and additional information visualization. We also introduce an user case, where the visualization system is used in order to support developers regarding structural problems in a large relational database.

Improving the way that totally or partially deaf people communicate with the world is a challenging task for our society. One way to improve their communication is to learn sign language, which is a visual language based on hand shapes, orientations, and movements of the hands, arms, or body, and facial expressions. This paper aims to present a 3D virtual reality environment to allow deaf users to communicate with each other in a real-time, synchronous, instantaneous fashion via an online chat room and to assist the teaching-learning process of Brazilian Sign Language (LIBRAS). A three-dimensional avatar was developed which can translate words or sentences from Portuguese to LIBRAS. It was performed two experiments to evaluate the communication via the chat room: (1) with chat history enabled (visible) and (2) with chat history disabled (invisible). These evaluations involved 30 end-users, which confirmed that the virtual environment as developed here is effective to distance classes.

The wide availability of database systems and low cost of hardware allow enterprises and researchers the opportunity to store large data collections. The challenge then became the understanding of these data. To overcome this problem Information Visualization (IV) techniques have been employed to amplify the human cognitive ability through graphical data representations, that show properties and relationships from these data. This work presents an approach to overcome the visual scalability by using a Multi-projection system, allowing the exploration of large datasets. Additionally, this approach allows collaborative interaction and exploration by using mobile devices like tablets and smart phones.

Gesture-based applications have particularities, since users interact in a natural way, much as they interact in the non-digital world. Hence, new requirements are needed on the software design process. This paper shows a software development process model for these applications, including requirement specification, design, implementation, and testing procedures. The steps and activities of the proposed model were tested through a game case study, which is a puzzle game. The puzzle is completed when all pieces of a painting are correctly positioned by the drag and drop action of users hand gesture. It also shows the results obtained of applying a heuristic evaluation on this game.

This paper focuses on the use of the CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) platform as a middleware layer to support distributed virtual environments, particularly those based on the WorldToolKit software. Some results of an application implemented by using the ILU (InterLanguage Unification) software that is compatible with the CORBA platform, are also discussed.