Reminiscence is known to play an important part in helping to mitigate the effects of dementia. Within the HCI community, work has typically focused on supporting reminiscence at an individual or social level but less attention has been given to supporting reminiscence in residential care settings. This lack of research became particularly apparent during the COVID pandemic when traditional forms of reminiscence involving physical artefacts and face-to-face interactions became especially challenging. In this paper we report on the design, development and evaluation of a reminiscence system, deployed in a residential care home over a two-year-period that included the pandemic. Mnemosyne comprises a pervasive display network and a browser-based application whose adoption and use we explored using a mixed methods approach. Our findings offer insights that will help shape the development and evaluation of future systems, particularly those that use pervasive displays to support unsupervised reminiscence.

Modern games make creative use of First- and Third-person perspectives (FPP and TPP) to allow the player to explore virtual worlds. Traditionally, FPP and TPP perspectives are seen as distinct concepts. Yet, Virtual Reality (VR) allows for flexibility in choosing perspectives. We introduce the notion of a perspective continuum in VR, which is technically related to the camera position and conceptually to how users perceive their environment in VR. A perspective continuum enables adapting and manipulating the sense of agency and involvement in the virtual world. This flexibility of perspectives broadens the design space of VR experiences through deliberately manipulating perception. In a study, we explore users’ attitudes, experiences and perceptions while controlling a virtual character from the two known perspectives. Statistical analysis of the empirical results shows the existence of a perspective continuum in VR. Our findings can be used to design experiences based on shifts of perception.

The pervasive availability of media in foreign languages is a rich resource for language learning. However, learners are forced to interrupt media consumption whenever comprehension problems occur. We present BrainCoDe, a method to implicitly detect vocabulary gaps through the evaluation of event-related potentials (ERPs). In a user study (N=16), we evaluate BrainCoDe by investigating differences in ERP amplitudes during listening and reading of known words compared to unknown words. We found significant deviations in N400 amplitudes during reading and in N100 amplitudes during listening when encountering unknown words. To evaluate the feasibility of ERPs for real-time applications, we trained a classifier that detects vocabulary gaps with an accuracy of 87.13% for reading and 82.64% for listening, identifying eight out of ten words correctly as known or unknown. We show the potential of BrainCoDe to support media learning through instant translations or by generating personalized learning content.

The C programming language plays an important role in the education of engineers especially in the field of embedded systems. on the other hand C is often a burden for students in the first yer, as they have many difficulties in writing their own programs and the failure rates of course examinations are typically high. We have inverstgated different approaches at our faculty in the last years, how to enhance the students' capabilities in C programming and how to lower the failure rate of the C-programming course. Several concepts involved are: visualization of control and data flow, game programming and automated assessment tools with plagiarism detection. we have integrated some of these concepts into the programming environment Virtual-C IDE. This paper discusses the educational benefits of using the Virtual-C IDE for lectures, self-learning and as a platform for programming assignments and reports our first practical experiences.

To be successful with global software development (GSD), development knowledge needs to be shared among the developers and stakeholders, and the quality of the exchanged information must be assured. Therefore, mature processes, methods and tools have to be in place. If a unified and integrated solution does not exist, this impedes the exchange of knowledge (and the migration of people between projects). In GSD, such a diversity can lead to new problems: offshore development teams have to repeatedly re-adjust to method variants used by the respective business units. This can lead to misinterpretation of information and risks for project success. We report on re-aligning the varying software engineering methods and unifying the methodology throughout Capgemini sd&m. We also standardized quality assurance procedures and tightly integrated them with the engineering methodology. By this, we arrived at a comprehensive company-wide Enterprise Software Engineering Model that effectively supports knowledge transfer from clients to the onshore and offshore team.