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In the context of e-learning, it is challenging to incorporate emerging technologies, such as alternate reality games or Virtual Reality (VR), within current learning trends. Microlearning is such a current trend. It divides large and complex chunks of content into small and elementary learning nuggets. These single self-contained nuggets are then composed to overarching lessons or courses. The concept of VR nuggets dovetails this educational trend. VR nuggets are standalone, self-contained, and rather short VR experiences that can be combined with other learning nuggets. By using initial implementations of VR nuggets, they can be used to let authors create VR earning content, for example, to let learners experience alternate realities. In this paper, we further investigate the VR nugget authoring concept and extent it. We introduce two novel authoring toolkits that rely on VR nuggets – one based on context-related module interaction (CoNMoD) and one based on visual scripting (ViNS Tiles). In two separate user studies, we examine the acceptance of the toolkits and compare them to existing authoring environments that also rely on VR nuggets but utilize different interface techniques. These studies' results emphasize the importance of exchanging content between different established tools and indicate the acceptance of our tools regarding their hedonic and pragmatic qualities, also compared to existing tools from related work. As a conclusion, we propose an exchange format for VR nuggets that supports their reusability. It enables authors that use different toolkits to work together. They can utilize VR nuggets created with other toolkits and still use their own preferred toolkit. By means of an expert survey, we draw conclusions on technical aspects and a suitable platform to make VR nuggets available to the community. This survey indicates that potential authors would use such an exchange-approach for creating and presenting VR content and that they are willing to share their work and to contribute in a VR nugget authoring community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Augmented reality (AR) technology allows users to view and interact in real-time with virtual information layered on top of the physical environment. Interaction technique development is based on the AR application context. In some cases, using an AR basic interaction technique is unsuitable as it only allows translation and rotation of the virtual object. For example, kitchen design requires various manipulation functions, especially in changing the features of a virtual kitchen cabinet. Existing AR tangible interaction techniques specified to the kitchen design context enable alteration of the features of virtual furniture despite requiring extra input and output devices, such as a stylus, head-mounted displays (HMDs), and projectors. Such devices are not suitable for AR as they are rarely accessible in daily life. Therefore, this study aimed to develop an AR tangible interaction technique on a mobile platform with authoring capabilities for the kitchen design process. The technique uses a cube and a card as the physical medium and features manipulation functions, such as virtual object placement, position changing, deletion, and changing kitchen cabinet features. The tangible interaction technique recorded a faster mean task completion time than the AR basic interaction technique. The tangible interaction technique also recorded higher usability than the basic interaction technique. Younger and experienced users performed better. Gender did not impact the interaction technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds on theoretical developments that view entrepreneurship as emancipation, i.e., entrepreneurial activities as generators of change and pursuit of freedom from perceived constraints. Using a representative data set of 1095 SMEs owned by Indigenous entrepreneurs in Canada, the authors investigate how pursuit of this freedom affects (i) the way entrepreneurs enact several aspects of their ventures and (ii) the performance outcomes achieved. Findings reveal how the initial motivations of entrepreneurs (seeking change for the social collective of which they are a part versus seeking autonomy for themselves) lead to distinct business practices, which in turn impact differentially entrepreneurial outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work investigates the possibility of using a novel "minimal AR" authoring approach to optimize the visual assets used in augmented reality (AR) interfaces to convey work instructions in manufacturing. In the literature, there are no widely supported guidelines for the optimal choice of visual assets (e.g., CAD models, drawings, and videos). Therefore, to avoid the risk of having AR technical documentation based only on the author's preference, our work proposes a novel authoring approach that enforces the minimal amount of information to accomplish a task. Minimal AR was tested through a simulated AR LEGO-based assembly task. The performance (completion time, mental workload, errors) of 40 users was evaluated with 4 combinations of visual assets in 4 tasks with an increasing amount of information needed. The main result is that visual assets with an excess of information do not significantly increase performance. Therefore, the location of a specified object should be "minimally" authored by an auxiliary model (e.g., a circle and an arrow). For identifying an object within a couple, color coding is preferred to using additional visual assets. If more than two objects must be identified, a drawing visual asset is also needed. Only when the orientation of a selected object must be conveyed, animated product models are required. These insights could be helpful for an optimal design of AR work instructions in a wide range of industrial fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When defining virtual reality applications with complex procedures, such as medical operations or mechanical assembly or maintenance procedures, the complexity and the variability of the procedures make the definition of the scenario difficult and time-consuming. Indeed, the variability complicates the definition of the scenario by the experts, and its combinatorics demand a comprehension effort for the developer, which is often out of reach. Additionally, the experts have a hard time explaining the procedures with a sufficient level of details, as they usually forget to mention some actions that are, in fact, important for the application. To ease the creation of scenario, we propose a complete methodology, based on (1) an iterative process composed of: (2) the recording of actions in virtual reality to create sequences of actions and (3) the use of mathematical tools that can generate a complete scenario from a few of those sequences, with (4) graphical visualization of the scenarios and complexity indicators. This process helps the expert to determine the sequences that must be recorded to obtain a scenario with the required variability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to differentiate between writing and authoring. In order to teach young authors, we believe transforming our thinking and our language surrounding the act of writing is necessary. This paper works in opposition to top-down, scripted, and pre-set curriculum guides. Instead, this process centered, inquiry-based view of authoring views the teacher as an accompanist to student learning and creation. Using Teale and Sulzby's (Emergent literacy: writing and reading, Ablex, Norwood, NJ, 1986) stages of writing development as a springboard, we provide 6 milieux; each offering a snapshot of the authoring, the theory, and the teacher moves that support student learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Functional safety standards such as IEC 61508 and ISO 26262 advocate a particularly stringent requirements engineering where safety requirements must be structured in a hierarchical manner and specified in accordance with the system architecture. In contrast to the stringent requirements engineering in functional safety standards, according to previous studies, requirements engineering in industry is in general of poor quality. Contracts theory has been previously shown to be suitable for supporting such a stringent requirements engineering effort; this support has also been implemented in tools. However, to use these contract-based tools, requirements must be formalized, which is a major challenge in industry. Therefore, to support current industrial requirements engineering practice and the stringent requirements engineering in functional safety standards, it is shown how tool support can be provided even when requirements, and also architectures, are not formalized. This is achieved by enforcing syntactic, yet formal, conditions in contracts theory. Despite the need for further validation, initial findings in an industrial case study indicate high potential in realizing the proposed support in an industrial setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Generalized Intelligent Framework for Tutoring (GIFT) is a research prototype with three general goals associated with its functions and components: 1) lower the skills and time required to author Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) in a variety of task domains; 2) provide effective adaptive instruction tailored to the needs of each individual learner or team of learners; and 3) provide tools and methods to evaluate the effectiveness of ITSs and support research to continuously improve instructional best practices. This special issue focuses primarily on the third goal, GIFT as a research testbed. A discussion thread covers each article within this special issue and discusses its actual and potential impact on GIFT as a research tool for AIED. Our primary motivation was to introduce the AIED community to GIFT not just as a research tool, but as an extension of familiar challenges taken on previously by AIED scientists and practitioners. This preface provides a high level overview of the GIFT functions (authoring, instructional delivery and management, and experimentation) and presents its primary design principles. To learn more about GIFT, freely access the software, documentation, and associated technical papers visit www.GIFTtutoring.org. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current scientific publishing landscape, there is a need for an authoring workflow that easily integrates data and code into manuscripts and that enables the data and code to be published in reusable form. Automated embedding of data and code into published output will enable superior communication and data archiving. In this work, we demonstrate a proof of concept for a workflow, org-mode, which successfully provides this authoring capability and workflow integration. We illustrate this concept in a series of examples for potential uses of this workflow. First, we use data on citation counts to compute the h-index of an author, and show two code examples for calculating the h-index. The source for each example is automatically embedded in the PDF during the export of the document. We demonstrate how data can be embedded in image files, which themselves are embedded in the document. Finally, metadata about the embedded files can be automatically included in the exported PDF, and accessed by computer programs. In our customized export, we embedded metadata about the attached files in the PDF in an Info field. A computer program could parse this output to get a list of embedded files and carry out analyses on them. Authoring tools such as Emacs + org-mode can greatly facilitate the integration of data and code into technical writing. These tools can also automate the embedding of data into document formats intended for consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an ongoing effort toward an online collaborative framework allowing Deaf individuals to author intelligible signs using a dedicated 3D animation authoring interface. The results that are presented mainly focus on the design of a dedicated user interface assisted by novel input devices. This design cannot only benefit the Deaf but also the linguists studying sign language by providing them with a novel kind of study material. This material would consist of a symbolic representation of intelligible sign language animations together with a fine-grained log of the user's edit actions. Two user studies demonstrate how Leap Motion and Kinect-like devices can be used together for recording and authoring hand trajectories as well as facial animation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing complexity and the technology advancement of equipment pose challenges to the maintenance operators nowadays. In this paper, a context-aware augmented reality (AR) system is proposed to assist the operators in routine and ad hoc maintenance tasks by providing them with context relevant information. This system integrates AR technology and context-awareness. It is able to analyze the contexts of the maintenance tasks and provide relevant and useful information to the operators through rendering the information on the real equipment and environment. In addition, the authoring of context-aware AR contents, which is essential for developing such applications, is explored. The properties of AR contents and their context-adaptation schemes are discussed, and a low-level authoring approach is proposed for constructing context-aware AR information. Finally, a case study is conducted to evaluate the system performance, and the results demonstrated that the system can adapt to dynamic maintenance situations to provide context relevant information to assist the maintenance operators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With growing bandwidths in the Internet and seemingly unlimited storage capacities on web servers, media became more and more important in the daily use of the World Wide Web. While about ten years ago only text and images with small file sizes (and as a result small resolutions) could be used, it is possible to watch high quality multimedia presentations nowadays. But those rarely exist because of tedious to learn authoring tools. A specialization to one main medium, in our case video, allows creating efficient authoring tools using well known paradigms. This work introduces an authoring tool called SIVA Producer. An iterative process for improving the usability of the authoring tool is described. Furthermore, a distinction of the terms 'interactive video', 'annotated video', 'non-linear video' and 'hypervideo' is given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing complexity and the technology advancement of equipment pose challenges to the maintenance technicians nowadays. Augmented reality (AR) technology can be used to assist the maintenance technicians by providing useful information through visual interactions, e.g., superimposing the maintenance instructions virtually on the real equipment. However, to improve the usability of the state-of-the-art AR-assisted maintenance systems in routine and ad hoc maintenance activities, the virtual information provided should be adapted to the various contexts, i.e., context relevant. For example, the information provided should accord to the status of the activity and the user's expertise level. In addition, the rendered AR contents should not be 'read-only', such that the maintenance technicians become passive information receivers. Providing the technicians with the means to interact with the AR contents actively is useful as they can rectify any incorrect AR contents that have been created by the AR developers and author AR contents to record and share the accumulated knowledge and experience on equipment maintenance with other technicians. In this paper, an authorable context-aware AR System (ACARS) is proposed to assist the maintenance technicians. To make ACARS context-aware and authorable, a bi-directional authoring tool, which enables the AR developers to create context-relevant information via a desktop 2D user interface and the maintenance technicians to author AR contents on-site, is proposed. A prototype system has been developed, and a case study has been conducted to demonstrate the usability of ACARS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we discuss the problem of how to discriminate moments of interest on videos or live broadcast shows. The primary contribution is a system which allows users to personalize their programs with previously created media stickers-pieces of content that may be temporarily attached to the original video. We present the system's architecture and implementation, which offer users operators to transparently annotate videos while watching them. We offered a soccer fan the opportunity to add stickers to the video while watching a live match: the user reported both enjoying and being comfortable using the stickers during the match-relevant results even though the experience was not fully representative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fifteen years ago, research started on SQL-Tutor, the first constraint-based tutor. The initial efforts were focused on evaluating Constraint-Based Modeling (CBM), its effectiveness and applicability to various instructional domains. Since then, we extended CBM in a number of ways, and developed many constraint-based tutors. Our tutors teach both well- and ill-defined domains and tasks, and deal with domain- and meta-level skills. We have supported mainly individual learning, but also the acquisition of collaborative skills. Authoring support for constraint-based tutors is now available, as well as mature, well-tested deployment environments. Our current research focuses on building affect-sensitive and motivational tutors. Over the period of fifteen years, CBM has progressed from a theoretical idea to a mature, reliable and effective methodology for developing effective tutors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of instructional software is a complex process, posing high demands to the technical and didactical expertise of developers. Domain specialists rather than professional developers are often responsible for it, but authoring tools with pre-structured templates claim to compensate for this limited experience. This study compares instructional software products made by developers with low production experience ( n = 6) and high production experience ( n = 8), working with a template-based authoring tool. It is hypothesized that those with high production experience will be more productive and create software with a higher didactical quality than those with low production experience, whereas no differences with regard to technical and authoring quality are expected. The results show that the didactical quality was unsatisfactory and did not differ between groups. Nevertheless the templates compensated for differences in experience because the technical and authoring quality was equal for both groups, indicating that templates enable domain specialists to participate successfully in the production process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

CrossTalk is a self-explaining virtual character exhibition for public spaces. This paper presents the CrossTalk system, including its authoring tool SceneMaker and the CarSales exhibit. CrossTalk extends the commonplace human-to-screen interaction to an interaction triangle. The user faces two separated screens inhabited with virtual characters and interacts through a frontal touch screen. One screen features the exhibition’s hostess, an agent who explains exchangeable exhibits located in the opposing screen. The current exhibit is CarSales, a demonstration of automatically generated dialogue, performed by virtual actors. The physical presence of the characters is established through the separation of screens and intensified by inter-character conversations across screens, tying hostess and exhibit together. CrossTalk utilises a combination of both automatically generated and pre-scripted scenes, and a context memory to adapt to the user and the environment. CrossTalk’s authoring tool SceneMaker, in a strict separation of narrative structure and content, provides non-experts with a screenplay-like language to create installations for staging exhibitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores a formalism for describing a wide class of multimedia document constraints, based on an interval temporal logic. We describe the requirements that arise from the multimedia documents application area, and we illustrate these requirements using several examples. Then we present the temporal logic formalism that we use. This logic extends existing interval temporal logic with a number of new features: actions, framing of actions, past operators, a projection-like operator called filter and a new handling of interval length. The notation is applied to the specification of the examples, and in particular a set of logical manipulations, providing feedback to an author, is presented. A model theory, logic and satisfaction relation are defined for the notation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

MediaTouch is a visual based authoring tool for creating MHEG-5 applications. It is based on the native approach, which enables the author to operate at the level of MHEG-5 objects, in order to get the most out of the standard's features. Specialized editing functions facilitate the author's work, especially when setting properties such as the hierarchical structure of an application, dynamic behavior and appearance of objects. The paper introduces the problem of authoring multimedia applications, motivating the adoption of a standard solution, and explaining the functionality of MediaTouch, and in so doing, providing an example of use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multimedia database systems have become more and more important as the tool to extract and generate additional values from multimedia ‘Contents’. In this paper, four multimedia database systems are proposed from the view point of promising contents sources; the Network multimedia databases, the Stream MM database systems, the Library MM database systems, and the Real world MM database systems. Important problems to be solved, i.e., ‘what to do’, are also discussed for each databases. Three concrete multimedia systems by authors' research group, are then introduced and discussed as the embodiments of these multimedia systems; (1) the open Global Image Retrieval and Linking System, GIRLS, for mediation WWW data pace as the network MM database systems, (2) the flexible multimedia database platform GOLS, and (3) the higher level authoring system for the Stream MM environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present IMP, a platform to support the authoring and run-time management of interactive multimedia applications in distributed environments. The multi-level platform model encourages 'slot-in' extensibility to cater for the evolving environment. We illustrate with our prototype platform built above the Cambridge multimedia environment. The authoring model emphasises reusability, tailorability and use of environment features in a uniform way. We have shown the validity of our approach by constructing a variety of application types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital documents in the networked information environment fundamentally change the ways that visual materials can be used in education and scholarly discourse. These new uses raise questions about research library strategies with regard to digitized visual materials as a part of their collections, challenge assumptions underlying intellectual property rights for images and their scope, and offer ways in which visual literacy can become a more integral part of the common educational experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]