Spatial abilities are grounded in the way we interact with and understand the world through our physical body. However, existing spatial ability training materials are largely paper- or screen-based; they rarely engage or encourage the use of the body. Tangible and Virtual Reality (VR) technologies provide opportunities to re-imagine designing for spatial ability. We present a game-based system that combines embodiment in VR with tangible interfaces, and is designed around a specific spatial ability known as penetrative thinking. This spatial ability is the capacity to imagine the internal structure of objects based on external cues. This ability is important in areas like design, geosciences, medicine, and engineering. We describe the iterative design, implementation, and testing of our system, including the user study of the final design. The user evaluation results showed that participants had positive experiences when they solved the penetrative thinking puzzles in the tangible VR system.

Virtual field trips have been thought of and implemented for several decades. For the most part, these field trips were delivered through desktop computers and often as interactive but strictly two-dimensional experiences. The advent of immersive technologies for both creating content and experiencing places in three dimensions provides ample opportunities to move beyond the restrictions of two dimensional media. We propose here a framework we developed to assess immersive learning experiences, specifically immersive virtual field trips (iVFTs). We detail the foundations and provide insights into associated empirical evaluations.

A growing body of empirical evidence from the cognitive sciences shows that physical experience can enhance cognition in areas that involve spatial thinking. At the same time, virtual environments provide opportunities to engage learners with novel spatial tasks that cannot be achieved in the real world. Yet combining virtual worlds with tangible interfaces to engage spatial cognition is still not a well-explored area. This paper describes the TASC (Tangibles for Augmenting Spatial Cognition) system, which combines movement tracking and tangible objects in order to create a strong sense of embodiment in a virtual environment for spatial puzzle solving, designed to engage perspective taking ability. We describe the motivation, design process, and development of TASC. We also report the results from our user study, showing the participants' positive experiences, linking to future research opportunities.

Shown in many longitudinal studies, spatial ability is important to learning and career success. This paper, inspired by [2,14], presents the 2nd generation of TASC (Tangibles for Augmenting Spatial Cognition) to illustrate how (re)design lessons can be learned, how existing evaluation methods can be applied, and how new evaluations may be generated or envisioned, when a TEI (tangible and embodied interaction) system is built to study spatial ability.

Urban planning, and campus planning in particular, can benefit greatly from technology that fosters and leverages collaborative, participatory planning which includes all affected stakeholders. Interactive surfaces such as tabletops and walls, and spaces such as 3D environments are examples of such technologies. Our research aims to explore and assess the appropriateness and effectiveness of such technologies in participatory campus planning. We present here a prototype system that combines the tangible and multitouch surfaces with a virtual world platform to provide a participatory planning approach for campus development projects.

In this study, a new approach is developed to facilitate faster decoding of a binary systematic (71, 36, 11) quadratic residue (QR) code. In this decoder, it simplifies the step of calculating the condition and avoids calculating the unknown syndrome, thereby yielding a fast algebraic decoder for correcting four possible errors. Moreover, while using the proposed algorithm, if uses the channel measurement information proposed by Chase to sequentially invert the bits of the received word until one of the errors is cancelled for the five‐error case and apply the new algebraic decoding algorithm mentioned above to correct the remaining four errors, the algorithm has been verified through a software simulation in C‐language. The simulation shows that the decoding scheme developed here is more efficient than the previous decoding algorithm developed for the (71, 36, 11) QR code and it is naturally suitable for software implementation.