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One of the most interesting innovations introduced by modern game console technologies has been that of new interaction systems which allow a large amount of people to interact all together with cultural artifacts and exhibits. Thank to them, human beings can interact with, manipulate and in some circumstances even hack digital contents, playing an active role and becoming part of cultural performance exhibitions. In this paper we present and discuss our recent experience in designing, implementing and putting in practice a hands-free interactive technology which lets visitors explore a hyper-multimedia system, playing a role of those who are able to transform historical audio clips and videos into a piece of public culture which needs to be lived together on a public place. The hands-free system in use is a part of a wider project (called “di Piazza in Piazza”), which comes with the initiatives of the University of Bologna, currently chosen to be displayed at the 2015 Universal Exposition in Milan (EXPO 2015).

We present an overview or the video games available at the Film Library of Bologna. This institution, in collaboration with the University of Bologna, has a whole collateral branch dedicated to the video games, as they can be considered a recreational activity somehow related to movies. This collection of video games conceptually starts from the ones that are strictly connected to movies, and than expands to a wider class of video games. A video game could be related with movie either as the direct inspiration of the movie, they could be a prequel or a collateral plot, or as a direct consequence of the movie. The expansion of the collection available in the Library includes an historical set of video games. In this paper we discuss the historical perspective of the relationship between technology and video games. Several dedicated consoles are still in working conditions and could be used by the visitors of the Library. We provide a complete historical view of the video games by means of the titles and the consoles available in the Library.

Internet and the latest correlated technologies, such as Web 2.0, represent inventions that have changed the world with their social contribution. Yet, digital divide and cyber-balkanization are Internet's discriminatory phenomena well known by field experts. In addition, we want now to raise the attention on the actual employment of these technologies: the vast potential within the Internet is currently dispersed in millions of applications devoted to frivolous and egocentric utilizations. Being (almost) the only use people have made of the most pervasive communication system ever made, this represents an unacceptable waste of opportunities. To revert this trend, we propose a novel utilization paradigm of Internet technologies which is aimed at liberating part of resources that are captured but not used by egocentric applications to give them back to a possible common (and altruistic) use.

Wireless technology has the great merit to allow users' mobility. However, this may affect the functioning of all the applications and traditional protocols, worsening the already known problems with wireless connections and requiring the design and evaluation of novel solutions. Scenarios involving high mobility can be very complex; think, for instance, to a realistic case involving several nodes, representing people and cars moving under the coverage of several base stations. Since the geographical width and the number of involved nodes in such a scenario, simulations represent a fundamental tool to analyze the state of the art and newly proposed solutions. Unfortunately, modeling mobility with the most popular network simulator in the scientific community (i.e., NS-2) is not an easy task as its handoff mechanism appears faulty when coupled with a realistic model for wireless transmissions. In this paper, we discuss this problem and propose a new simulation module for mobile IP able to guarantee smooth handoffs even with realistic simulation set-ups.

As the technology available on cars is increasing, a wide range of applications, from safety to entertainment, are becoming factually accessible to passengers. Many of these applications involves a one-to-many transmission model where a single car broadcasts a message that has to be forwarded, even with multiple hops, in a very short time to all the other cars located within a range of few kilometers from the source. Since the high mobility and density of a car network scenario, specific solutions need to be devised to choreograph a fast-delivery multi- hop broadcast. To this aim, we developed a practical and efficient technique that allows cars to estimate their communication range with the help of a very limited message exchange and exploit this information to reduce the number of transmissions, as well as the hops to be traversed, and hence the time, required by a broadcasted message to reach all the cars following the sender within a certain distance.

Ensuring fairness among players engaged in online games is a challenging task. Yet, it is a fundamental requirement that can make the difference between having customers that persist or desist in using this kind of application. Answering to this demand, we present here an event delivery mechanism among mirrored game servers able to effectively uplift the fairness degree during game sessions through the heterogenesis of ends in targeting interactivity. We also provide extensive results that sustain our claim.