Studying what design features are necessary and effective for educational virtual environments (VEs), we focused on two design issues: level of environmental detail and method of navigation. In a controlled experiment, participants studied animal facts distributed among different locations in an immersive VE. Participants viewed the information as either an automated tour through the environment or with full navigational control. The experiment also compared two levels of environmental detail: a sparse environment with only the animal fact cards and a detailed version that also included landmark items and ground textures. The experiment tested memory and understanding of the animal information. Though neither environmental detail nor navigation type significantly affected learning outcomes, the results suggest that manual navigation may have negatively affected the learning activity. Also, learning scores were correlated with both spatial ability and video game usage, suggesting that educational VEs may not be an appropriate presentation method for some learners.

The paper addresses the problem of designing a language independent phonetic inventory for the speech recognisers with multilingual vocabulary. A new clustering algorithm for the definition of multilingual set of triphones is proposed. The clustering algorithm bases on a definition of a distance measure for triphones defined as a weighted sum of explicit estimates of the context similarity on a monophone level. The monophone similarity estimation method based on the algorithm of Houtgast. The clustering algorithm is integrated in a multilingual speech recognition system based on HTK V2.1.1. The ongoing experiments are based on the SpeechDat II databases. So far, experiments included the Slovenian, Spanish and German 1000 FDB SpeechDat (II) database. Current results are very promising. The use of clustering algorithm resulted in a significant reduction of the number of triphones at acceptable level of word and language identification accuracy degradation.