Category: Research

A CAVE system based on the CryEngine2 game engine

We build a CAVE system based on the CryEngine2 game engine. The game engine is a multi-platform game development middleware that provides state of the art, photorealistic real-time visuals and enhanced physics, handling both interior spaces and vast landscapes in single- or multi-player settings.

The improved visuals and performance of the CryEngine2 over the game engines used by similar systems like CAVEUT, confirm CryVE system as a solid alternative to bring state of the art technology and photorealistic graphics to low-cost CAVE systems. CryVE is a low-cost implementation that offers advantages to the scientific, gaming, and graphics enthusiasts communities. Check it out at: http://cryve.id.tue.nl/

Notes on Design and Science

The ICT&S Center at the Salzburg University kindly invited me to present my thoughts on Design and Science. Professor Manfred Tscheligi and Dr Astrid Weiss organized this inspiring evening in the picturesque old city center of Salzburg. Please enjoy this video recording of the presentation. You can link to the video through its DOI: 10.4016/17749.01. A report on this event is available at the ICT&S Center’s website.

Honorable Paper at CHI2010

Our paper entitled “Expressive robots in education – Varying the degree of social supportive behavior of a robotic tutor” received an honorable mentioning from SIGCHI at the CHI2010 conference. This means that our paper has been within the top 5 percent of all full papers. Here is the abstract:

Teaching is inherently a social interaction between teacher and student. Despite this knowledge, many educational tools, such as vocabulary training  programs, still model the interaction in a tutoring scenario as unidirectional knowledge transfer rather than a social dialog. Therefore, ongoing research aims to develop virtual agents as more appropriate media in education. Virtual agents can induce the perception of a life-like social interaction partner that  communicates through natural modalities such as speech, gestures and emotional expressions. This effect can be additionally enhanced with a physical  robotic embodiment. This paper presents the development of social supportive behaviors for a robotic tutor to be used in a language learning application. The effect of these behaviors on the learning performance of students was evaluated. The results support that employing social supportive behavior increases  learning efficiency of students.

Reference:

Saerbeck, M., & Bartneck, C. (2010). Expressive robots in education – Varying the degree of social supportive behavior of a robotic tutor. Proceedings of the 28th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI2010), Atlanta. | DOI: 10.1145/1753326.1753567

The All-In Publication Policy

I presented my paper “The All-In Publication Policy” at the ICDS2010 conference. The video of the presentation is now available:

Abstract: The productivity of scientists and the quality of their papers differ enormously. Still, all papers written get published eventually and the impact factor of the publication channel is not correlated to the citations that individual papers receive. Hence it does not matter where to publish papers. Based on these two conjectures, I conclude that all papers should be published. The review process should focus on feedback that helps authors to improve their manuscripts. But we should no longer waste effort to a selection procedure. This All-In policy would decrease the number of published papers and would refocus the attention of the authors on the quality of their papers and not their quantity.