iSocial: A Virtual Social Space for Youth with ASD, built with Croquet

iSocial is a 3D environment developed to support conversation and positive social skills for young people who have autism spectrum disorders. iSocial is a work in progress, designed by a team of researchers at the University of Missouri.

iSocial runs on Croquet, an open-source 3D SDK/tool designed to build 3D virtual collaborative environments. (EduSim applications also run on Croquet.)

iSocial Video

3D Virtual Learning Environment: Quest Atlantis

Quest Atlantis is an immersive 3-D learning environment for students, developed by researchers at the University of Indiana. For more information and links, read the post on the TechPsych blog.

Interaction Tomorrow: SIGGRAPH Course Materials On-line

If you are interested in interaction design for the future, take a look at the course notes from Interaction Tomorrow, presented at SIGGRAPH 2007.

Here is the course abstract:

"This course provides a comprehensive overview to user interface technologies on the newly emerging interactive tabletops and large wall displays. The course will cover input devices, interface metaphors, modality of interaction, sensing technologies, applications, and future directions. Materials will be drawn from both commercial systems and research prototypes." The Interaction Tomorrow is a document that contains 172 pages of pictures and text.

The course was organized by Michael Haller, from the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences, and Chia Shen, from the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories. The lecturers included Gerald Morrison, from Smart Technologies, Bruce H. Thomas, from the University of Southern Australia, and Andy Wilson from Microsoft Research.

Bios

The course website http://www.interactiontomorrow.org/

This was cross-posted on the Technology Supported Human-World Interaction blog.

Link to post: How to use FireFox to use internet resources off-line

If you use digital media with students with special needs and you have limited Internet access, you are not alone. Kay, the author of the "Teaching Students with Multiple Special Needs", on a recent post, shares a way to use FireFox to use internet resources online. You can check out my recent TechPsych post on the topic, or access Kay's original post here.

More touch-screen videos...

Here is an interesting video about TouchTable's $59,000.00 system:



ESRI's ArcGIS running on a TouchTable:



The application supports collaboration. People can interact with one another around a single table, with others at remote tables, and people using laptops and mobile devices out in the field.

Link: ESRI's GIS for K12 Schools

Interactive information visualization: Digg labs website

I thought I'd share a view examples of information visualization as it relates to on-line news. Stories are grouped in various configurations over time. Click on the images below to see each example in real-time:

NEWSMAP

Click on the image to link to Newsmap.

" Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap's objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe."

DIGG

Click an image to see digg visualizations in action!
STACK
"Diggers fall from above and stack up on active stories." If you click on a story, you'll get a pop-up that provides more details about the story, including information over time.


SWARM

Digger swarm around different categories of stories and make them grow. You can look at popular stories, newly submitted stories, or all activity. Click on a circle, and you'll get more information, and the option to keep or "kill" the story.

BIGSPY

"Bigspy: Active stories appear at the top when people digg them. Bigger stories have more diggs..." If you click on a story, you'll link to more information about it from the digg website.


ARC

"Stories arrange themselves as users digg them. Larger stories have more diggs." If you click on a story, you'll link to more information about it from the digg wesbsite.

Check back for more examples- and leave a comment if you have others to share.

Related Link:

Article from PBS.org's Idea Lab, by Rich Gordon, about information visualization and journalist-programmers. "Idea Lab is a group blog by innovators who are reinventing community news for the digital age..."