Link to a great post about serious games and virtual reality in business

Elaine Alhadeff's Future-Making Serious Games blog has a wealth of interesting information for people interested in how interactive multimedia technology can impact the present- and the future. Take the time to visit her blog and take a look!

Here is a slice from one of her latest posts:

Via: daytaOhio - Barco and daytaOhio Equipped Collaborative Visualization Complex at Wright State’s Joshi Research Center
"Barco, a leading global provider of visual display systems, has partnered with daytaOhio to implement the industry’s most advanced virtual collaboration and visualization complex at Wright State University’s Joshi Research Center. "

It is exciting to learn about the growth in collaborative visualization! The businessmen below seem to be enjoying the experience:

For more interesting ideas, look at Eliane's archived posts about serious games.

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