Los Entornos Virtuales de Enseñanza y Aprendizaje (EVEA), o Learning Management Systems (LMS), han sufrido una rápida revolución en los últimos cinco años, fundamentalmente aquellos especializados en el sector universitario. Ello ha determinado que en muchas instituciones de Educación Superior hoy en día coexistan varios entornos virtuales, debido a que fueron adoptados por diferentes unidades académicas en diferentes momentos o etapas, o porque algunas de ellas hayan decidido migrar a otro entorno que en últimos tiempos haya dado un salto cualitativo de importancia o se adapte mejor a su realidad institucional. Tampoco hay un consenso en cuanto a determinar cuál es el mejor EVEA ya que en éste terreno intervienen diversos factores tanto institucionales, como políticos y económicos.

<div>The use of virtual reality technologies in education and training can provide an opportunity to reduce training costs while increasing the attractiveness and safety for trainees in the manufacturing industry. This thesis strives to show a virtual world which is based upon real world imagery can be embedded in a virtual reality environment and augmented with underlying real world mathematical models to show in real time the consequences of user selected parameters on a running manufacturing process.</div><div>An interactive virtual operator training environment is presented utilizing a VR headset in conjunction with a VR gaming engine which supports the headset and also embeds the behavior details of the underlying manufacturing process.</div><div>To demonstrate this approach an example is developed based on a steel industry roughing mill in which steel slabs are ultimately rolled into coils. This example shows the software application development process given as applied to an interactive training simulator intended for plant operator training which includes the use of the gaming engine Unity 3D, 360-degree video, 3Ds Max and several other software tools.</div><div>The resulting example is a controllable model of the steel plant roughing mill which can be used to enhanced the knowledge of plant operational personnel as to the effects various operating parameters have on the final rolled product while enhancing the understanding of this mill operation for new plant operators.</div>

Transitions is a three part series, examining themes which define our human condition. Utilizing traditional, digital, and interactive media, including sound, video, clay, paper, polyvoile material, and electronic devices, I create responsive installation environments that allow me to share my personal stories with those of the viewers. Collaboratively and co-creatively we examine issues of existence, self-awareness, and embodied spatiality within an arena that incorporates stories, memories and histories. As the viewer engages and participates in the work, they become the conduit between the brief moments of the present and the fragmented illusory images of the past.

Transitions is a three part series, examining themes which define our human condition. Utilizing traditional, digital, and interactive media, including sound, video, clay, paper, polyvoile material, and electronic devices, I create responsive installation environments that allow me to share my personal stories with those of the viewers. Collaboratively and co-creatively we examine issues of existence, self-awareness, and embodied spatiality within an arena that incorporates stories, memories and histories. As the viewer engages and participates in the work, they become the conduit between the brief moments of the present and the fragmented illusory images of the past.

Este trabalho tem por objetivo elaborar uma sistematização de conhecimentos técnicos, funcionais e compositivos, complementares aos conhecimentos tradicionais da arquitetura e do design, para o desenvolvimento de ambientes virtuais digitais interativos para jogos digitais e cenografia virtual para televisão. Para tanto, é elaborada uma fundamentação teórica baseada em pesquisa bibliográfica e é estudado um caso de produção de um cenário virtual para televisão. Como experiência de validação, é criado um ambiente virtual para jogo digital, utilizando-se a sistematização de conhecimentos proposta. / This paper aims to draw up a systematization of technical, functional and compositional knowledge, complementary to traditional knowledge of architecture and design, to the development of digital interactive virtual environments for videogames and virtual set design for television. Therefore, it is elaborated a theoretical framework based on literature review, and a case is studied where a virtual set for television is developed. As a validation experiment, it is created a virtual environment for a digital game, using the knowledge systematization proposed.

L'apprentissage de geste est un processus complexe, impliquant de nombreux processus sous-jacents (psychomoteurs, cognitifs, biophysiques). Cet apprentissage peut être divisé en plusieurs grandes phases, définies par la capacité de l'apprenant à produire et à percevoir son geste. A l'instar d'un formateur adaptant son discours et son attitude à l'apprenant, un environnement d'apprentissage doit pouvoir adapter les aides qu'il fournit, d'une part en analysant l'état de l'apprenant, et d'autre part en prédisant les aides qui bénéficieront à son apprentissage. Nous proposons une approche modélisant les interactions entre l'apprenant et l'environnement d'apprentissage; c'est-à-dire l'évolution de l'état de l'apprenant en fonction des configurations successives de l'environnement, permettant une adaptation automatique et dynamique de la sélection d'aides. En s'appuyant sur des travaux portant sur la reconnaissance de gestes et les tuteurs intelligents, nous proposons un cadre formel permettant de représenter la qualité de l'activité gestuelle dans un espace métrique. Cette représentation interprète les résultats issus de modèles probabilistes comme des variables floues illustrant le niveau de l'apprenant sur chacune des dimensions du geste. Nous représentons l'environnement comme l'ensemble des actions possibles, chaque action étant représentée par un vecteur de paramètres estimant la situation dans laquelle l'action est la plus pertinente. Dans un premier temps, ces paramètres sont fixés par des experts, et nous considérons cette expertise comme parfaite. Dans un second temps, nous étudions une problématique omniprésente dans les domaines des environnements d'apprentissage, qui fait état de l'écart entre l’expertise et la réalité. Les domaines "mal définis" sont en effet répandus, du fait du coût et de la difficulté à réunir des experts, et de la complexité inhérente à la définition précise d'un domaine. Ne considérant plus le seul avis des experts, le processus de sélection d 'aides peut alors être vu comme une séquence de décisions dont l'objectif est de proposer à chaque itération l'action qui maximisera le gain en matière d'apprentissage. En s'appuyant sur des travaux récents portant sur les séquences de décisions, notre approche considère le processus de sélection d'aides comme un problème de bandit. Le problème de bandit vise à maximiser un gain lors d'une séquence de décisions, et modélise le compromis entre exploration (choisir une action dont l'influence est inconnue), et exploitation (choisir la meilleure action connue). Nous proposons dans ce cadre une extension des méthodes SoftMax. L'implémentation de notre modèle sur une plateforme d'apprentissage de la calligraphie a été réalisée dans le cadre d'une collaboration avec des experts de ce domaine. Nous montrons, au travers de deux cas d’étude, l'intérêt de notre modèle pour l'apprentissage de la calligraphie. Dans le premier cas d’étude, l'adaptation est construite depuis notre représentation du geste, et un ensemble de règles fixées par des experts. Nous y montrons l'avantage apporté par l'apport d'une diversité d'aides. Dans le second cas d'étude, nous comparons deux types d 'adaptation : une adaptation basée sur des règles, et une adaptation basée sur notre approche dynamique. Nous montrons les différences entre ces deux approches, et illustrons les avantages de l'approche dynamique lorsque les règles sont imprécises. / Gesture learning is a complex and multi-step process where trainees are supposed to improve several psychomotor and cognitive skills. This process can be divided into phases depending on trainees’ ability to perform and perceive their gestures. As human tutors adapt their behavior according to their perception and understanding of trainees learning situations' a learning environment should select an appropriate behavior from a representation of trainees’ learning states and a prediction of the potential influence of every possible behavior. The work presented in this document describes an approach modeling the interactions between a trainee and a learning environment: it represents trainees’ consecutive performances and the influence of the environment on these performances. This approach aims at permitting an adaptive selection of the pedagogical actions (i.e. behaviors) implemented in the environment. Relying on related works in the domains of gesture recognition and intelligent tutoring systems, we propose to represent the gestural activity in a metric space. This representation interprets results from a probabilistic mode as fuzzy variables highlighting trainees' level on every aspect of the gesture. We represent the environment as the set of actions it can select, every action being represented by a feature vector describing the learning situation maximizing the action's influence. As a first step, these features are given by a set of experts, and we consider the rules provided as perfect. As a second step, we study an ubiquitous issue in the field of learning environments, which is the difference between the rules provided by experts and the reality of trainees’ needs toward feedback. Ill-defined domains are indeed more and more common, as collecting expert knowledge is difficult and costly, and as studied learning domains are becoming more and more complex and difficult to define. In this second step, the selection process does not rely on expert knowledge, and this process can be seen as a sequence of decisions. At each iteration, the goal is thus to select the action which would maximize the reward in terms of benefits for trainees' learning. The action selection process is represented as a multi-armed bandit problem, where the goal is to compromise between exploration of unknown actions and exploitation of known actions. We present an extension of SoftMax methods which handles multi-dimensional contextual rewards. Taking advantage of the collaboration with calligraphy experts, a calligraphy training platform was implemented as part of this work. Two studies, where participants train on this platform, show the benefits of the proposed approach on calligraphy learning. In a first experiment, action selection is based on expert rules, and we show that providing a diversity of feedback improves skill acquisition. In a second experiment, we compare two configurations of the environment: a selection of actions based on expert rules, and a selection of actions based on the SoftMax method. We describe the difference between the influence of these two approaches on trainees' learning, and we point out the benefits of using dynamic rules.

Este trabalho tem por objetivo elaborar uma sistematização de conhecimentos técnicos, funcionais e compositivos, complementares aos conhecimentos tradicionais da arquitetura e do design, para o desenvolvimento de ambientes virtuais digitais interativos para jogos digitais e cenografia virtual para televisão. Para tanto, é elaborada uma fundamentação teórica baseada em pesquisa bibliográfica e é estudado um caso de produção de um cenário virtual para televisão. Como experiência de validação, é criado um ambiente virtual para jogo digital, utilizando-se a sistematização de conhecimentos proposta. / This paper aims to draw up a systematization of technical, functional and compositional knowledge, complementary to traditional knowledge of architecture and design, to the development of digital interactive virtual environments for videogames and virtual set design for television. Therefore, it is elaborated a theoretical framework based on literature review, and a case is studied where a virtual set for television is developed. As a validation experiment, it is created a virtual environment for a digital game, using the knowledge systematization proposed.

Este trabalho tem por objetivo elaborar uma sistematização de conhecimentos técnicos, funcionais e compositivos, complementares aos conhecimentos tradicionais da arquitetura e do design, para o desenvolvimento de ambientes virtuais digitais interativos para jogos digitais e cenografia virtual para televisão. Para tanto, é elaborada uma fundamentação teórica baseada em pesquisa bibliográfica e é estudado um caso de produção de um cenário virtual para televisão. Como experiência de validação, é criado um ambiente virtual para jogo digital, utilizando-se a sistematização de conhecimentos proposta. / This paper aims to draw up a systematization of technical, functional and compositional knowledge, complementary to traditional knowledge of architecture and design, to the development of digital interactive virtual environments for videogames and virtual set design for television. Therefore, it is elaborated a theoretical framework based on literature review, and a case is studied where a virtual set for television is developed. As a validation experiment, it is created a virtual environment for a digital game, using the knowledge systematization proposed.

Yes / In this work we propose a talking head system for animating facial expressions using a template face generated from Partial Differen- tial Equations (PDEs). It uses a set of preconfigured curves to calculate an internal template surface face. This surface is then used to associate various facial features with a given 3D face object. Motion retargeting is then used to transfer the deformations in these areas from the template to the target object. The procedure is continued until all the expressions in the database are calculated and transferred to the target 3D human face object. Additionally the system interacts with the user using an artificial intelligence (AI) chatterbot to generate response from a given text. Speech and facial animation are synchronized using the Microsoft Speech API, where the response from the AI bot is converted to speech.

Information technology (IT) have for several decades been used in university education. An increasing number of classrooms today are built around a concept which uses IT in collaboration with the room itself. However, little is known about the experience of university teachers when working in such classrooms. This study examines the views and opinions of teachers at a Swedish university regarding using and interacting with these classrooms. Furthermore, we identify possible underlying factors that influence these views. Using data from qualitative interviews we apply Technology acceptance model (TAM) and Activity theory (AT) used in both education and human computer interaction to identify how different factors interact to form these opinions. Our study finds that teachers experience a lack of proper training in the use of classrooms as a concept and tend to stay in established norms of how education is to be conducted. These results leads to questions whether education in the use of these classrooms is adequate for teachers or if education needs to focus more on outcomes of the concept and changing established norms rather than to focus on the use of technology. Our study also shows that teachers do not view the classrooms as a whole where artefacts enable and form each other. Rather they view the physical room, the technology and themselves as separate entities that operate separately from each other.