Interactive Visual Supports for Children with Autism: Gillian Hayes' work at the Social and Technology Action Research Group:

Here is an update about the work of Gillian Hayes, an assistant professor at the School of Informatics at the University of California at Irvine. Much of her work focuses on technology that supports young people with autism spectrum disorders. Hayes received her Ph.D. from Georgia Tech:  Documenting and Understanding Everyday Activities through the Selective Archiving of Live Experiences pdf  (2007).

In the YouTube video below, Gillian Hayes discusses her work with technology with young people with autism spectrum disorders.


Photos from the STAR website:

The STAR group is researching the SenseCam, too!


About the SenseCam, from the Microsoft Research SenseCam Website:

"SenseCam is a wearable digital camera that is designed to take photographs passively, without user intervention, while it is being worn. Unlike a regular digital camera or a cameraphone, SenseCam does not have a viewfinder or a display that can be used to frame photos. Instead, it is fitted with a wide-angle (fish-eye) lens that maximizes its field-of-view. This ensures that nearly everything in the wearer’s view is captured by the camera, which is important because a regular wearable camera would likely produce many uninteresting images."

New study proves that Microsoft's sensory innovation aids memory recall
Technology Review Article 
Images from Microsoft Research:


The SenseCam application has the potential to be a resource for people who have developmental delays, traumatic brain injury, severe attention deficits, and autism spectrum disorders. It would be a great tool for special educators, occupational and speech/language therapists, and rehabilitation specialists.
SenseCam Videos      Research and Publications


RELATED

STAR:: Social and Technology Action Research Group
Interactive Visual Supports for Children with Autism

Technology helps teach kids with autism: Informatics assistant professor designs computer devices to aid instruction, record-keeping.

Monibi, M., Hayes, G.R. Mocotos: Mobile Communication Tools for Children with Special Needs. Proceedings of Interaction Design and Children, pages 121-124 ACM, 2008

Sen H. Hirano, Michael T. Yeganyan, Gabriela Marcu, David H. Nguyen, Lou Anne Boyd, Gillian R. Hayes vSked: Evaluation of a System to Support Classroom Activities for Children with Autism. To Appear In CHI 2010 (Atlanta, GA, 2010).(pdf)

"Particularly interesting for students with autism who often struggle with group work and social interaction, we also uncovered the potential for these types of interactive classroom technologies to support these challenging focus areas."

vSked

Note:  I think the following website contains the vSked prototype application. I poked around the site and it looks teacher-friendly. 

vSked Teachers View

Two topics: Visualizing Unemployment by County over Time; Kurt Squire's Recent Work on ( Video) Game-Based Learning

Below is a screen shot of a web page that shows the increase in the number of unemployed people, by county, in the U.S. from January 2007 until November 2009. According to information from the web site, the data is from the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics.

From what I can tell from the URL, this visualization was a multimedia final project of Latoya Egwuekwe. Here is the link to the webpage: Unemployment Rates by County, January 2007 through November 2009

Here is the YouTube version:



Thanks to Kurt Squire for the link!

About Kurt Squire:
Kurt is an assistant professor of educational communications and technology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is associated with the Academic ADL Co-lab.   He previously was the research manager of the Games-to-Teach Project at MIT and co-director of the Education Arcade.  He also was a Montessori and primary school teacher.

I encourage you to take a look at Kurt Squire's recent research and work.  I reviewed some of his earlier work for a paper I wrote back in 2004, when he was  It is exciting to see how far his research in the area of game-based learning environments has come since then.

Here are links to a few of Kurt Squire's publications:
Video game-based learning: An emerging paradigm for Instruction
Open-Ended Video Games: A Model for Developing Learning for the Interactive Age
From Information to Experience: Place-Based Augmented Reality Games as a Model for Learning in a Globally Networked Society
Video Games and Education: Designing learning systems for an interactive age
Video-Game Literacy: A Literacy of Expertise (To appear in J. Coiro, M. Knobel, D. Leu, & C. Lankshear, Handbook of research on new media literacies. New York: MacMillan.)


More about the Academic ADL Co-Lab:
Local Games Lab
"Many kinds of games can be made about local environments. At the moment we are most engaged with augmented reality (AR) games in which players use digital technologies to enhance their immediate experience of walking around in real-life locations. We are also interested, among other possibilities, in classroom simulations, board games, virtual tours, and desktop video games."


CivWorld!

"This is a site for people interested in using Sid Meier's Civilization for learning academic content, including history, geography, or even game design. We have custom-designed game scenarios, curricula, case studies, and experts on using Civ for learning. Our goal is to help players, students, parents, and even teachers use the game at home, in after school centers and maybe even classrooms."

Teach Paperless Blog "Seeking social solutions to the mysteries of 21st century teaching" -Quick Links

Here is a good blog for educators interested in using technology to transform education:

Teach Paperless "Seeking social solutions to the mysteries of 21st century teaching"
(Shelly Blake-Plock, author)

I especially liked this post:
Top Eleven Things All Teachers Must Know About Technology

About:
"The objective of TeachPaperless is to help classroom teachers merge Green Thinking and Interactive Technology into their everyday classroom experience. The result is a classroom that not only only uses zero paper, but that recognizes and utilizes the best features of the growing Internet to extend learning opportunities to students. Furthermore, we want to see students benefit from and gain experience in real-life problem solving, task determination, and creative thinking through total immersion in an authentic 21st century digital workspace."


RELATED
SOCIAL TECHNOLOGY IN EDUCATION LESSON PLAN WIKI

Darkstar, I Never Got To Know Ye: Oracle squashed Sun's open-source application server for 3D multi-player online games!

 I never had a chance to explore Darkstar, and I'm sad to share the news that Oracle squashed it before I had a chance to explore it.  The Darkstar project was on my long list of "future" topics for this blog.  

What is Project Darkstar?

"Project Darkstar is a software platform that simplifies the development of horizontally scalable servers for online games, virtual worlds, and social networking applications. Its revolutionary design will eliminate serious problems like zone overloading, data corruption, and inefficient server utilization, while enabling new dimensions of play such as evolvable virtual worlds and very large scale battlefields."

Why am I disappointed?
Darkstar interested me because it could be a good tool for creating collaborative multi-player educational games that students could play at school and at home.  It was up my alley, given my background as a school psychologist and fairly recent coursework (VR for education & training, online learning & communication tools, game design/development, AI for games, information visualization/communication, HCI, etc.).  It was designed to help people like me "avoid the complexities of multi-threaded and distributed systems programming".


Information from the Project Darkstar website:
2/2/10:
Today is a difficult day for all of us associated with Project Darkstar. Regretfully, we must inform our community members that Sun Labs engineering effort is no longer being applied to Darkstar development. You will hear from the individual engineers about what this means for them, but the organized lab project will not be moving forward...
 (More on the Darkstar Community Forums) Jim Waldo 




Here are links to examples how Darkstar has been used to develop 3D multi-user applications, from the Darkstar application list page:

• 1 MilMo
• 2 Leelh
• 3 Sorpresas Mágicas

"Sorpresas Mágicas is an online educational video game developed by Proyecto Metáforas at the Universidad de Chile. Sorpresas Mágicas is a turn based game, each team (composed by 12 players) have to make a bet tryiing to guess what is inside a box.What is inside a box depends on the the properties of the box (color, width, height and length). So the users have to use statistics to discover the surprise inside the box.

Twice in a year we are running in Chile a national tournament, the last was on October 23, with more than 5000 childrens playing this game. You could get more information about our game onSorpresas Mágicas, if you want a credential to access the game feel free to ask one to the email at the bottom.

Visit us at Proyecto Metaforas.For more information, please contact (Lead Programmer) at manuel [at] metaforas cl"

• 4 TRZZ Online
• 5 Spirits of Gaia
• 6 Aktalita
• 7 X-Shift Online
• 8 Modern Society: Online
• 9 Dark Frontiers
• 10 Project Wonderland - Toolkit for Building Virtual 3D Worlds
• 11 6thSpace
• 12 Call of the Kings - The Mirror Black
• 13 The Aceituna Project (Game Name suggestions accepted)
• 14 CampFU
• 
  'The Monkey Wrench platform delivers unprecedented levels of real-time interactivity for casual gamers as well as persistent in-game and in-world avatars, badges and achievements, and a robust virtual goods management system.'
  
  
  RELATED
  Oracle: destroyer of virtual worlds
  Austin Modin, The Register, 2/4/10
  
  
  
  Oracle kills Project Darkstar; adios to virtual worlds
  Dean Takahashi, Venture Beat, 2/4/10
  Scalable Data Storage in Project Darkstar
  Tim Blackman, Jim Waldo Oracle News, 10/8/09
  Sun's Project Darkstar aims for gaming services
  Stephen Shankland, CNET News, 3/27/06
  
  
  Darkstar's sister, Project Wonderland, will also be unsupported by Oracle:
  
  Good News and Bad News
  Project Wonderland Virtual World Toolkit Blog, 2/30/2010
  
  
  Oracle cuts off Project Wonderland
  Maria Korolov

More Multi-Touch: DISPLAX on thin polymer film fits all sorts of surfaces, can interact by blowing on it, too!

The photos below are from a recent article on the Physorg.com website about DISPLAX Systems multi-touch polymer film, Multi-touch "Skin" Transforms Surfaces Into Interactive Screens:




DISPLAX™ Optimus Concept Store - Casa da Música (Porto - Portugal) from Displax on Vimeo.

From the DISPLAX press kit materials:
"DISPLAX™ Multitouch Technology turns any non-conductive material into an interactive multi-touch surface. Based on projected capacitive technology, DISPLAX™ Multitouch Technology has been developed using a transparent thinner-than-paper polymer film which can be applied to a variety of flat and curved surfaces including glass, plastic and wood."

"DISPLAX™ Multitouch Technology was primarily developed to enable touch screen integration for LCD and projection displays. Application of the technology ranges from converting entire store windows into a touch surface, creating information screens, or developing innovative user interfaces. Potential customers are found in retail and diverse industries such as telecoms, museums, property, broadcast, pharma or finance. The technology will also be available for LCD manufacturers, audiovisual integrators or gaming platforms."



"DISPLAX works with partners and directly with customers to deliver multi-touch rich-media  

applications, enabling people to take full advantage of the latest developments. DISPLAX  

Multitouch Technology will be available in the market with several embedded business  

applications at no extra cost, designed especially for the kind of installations that interactive  

technology companies work on. This Apps Pack will allow customers to display photo and 

video streams, provide users access to Google Maps and social networks, integrate news  

streams via RSS and play multitouch games. More applications will be available later in 2010 

directly from DISPLAX and other developers."

DISPLAX SHOWREEL

DISPLAX™ Interactive Projects Showreel from Displax on Vimeo.

DISPLAX is a company of the EDIGMA GROUP.

Touchco, Ken Perlin & Ilya Rosenburg's Multitouch Company, Bought By Amazon

Here is the scoop:
Amazon buys touchscreen startup Touchco, merging with Kindle division
Ross Miller, Engadget, 2/3/2010

Amazon Said to Buy Touch Start-Up
Nick Bilton and Brad Stone, New York Times, 2/3/2010


Is Amazon Building a SuperKindle?
Nick Bilton, NYT, 2/3/2010
"Unlike traditional capacitive sensors, our patent-pending system can detect any object — not just a finger — and can determine how much pressure is being applied to every point on a sensor simultaneously. IFSR sensors are natively multitouch, use less power than capacitive sensors, and are much less expensive to produce, making them a highly disruptive technology with widespread market applications."

RELATED
Here is my Aug. 29 post:
Natural User Interface Surfaces:  TouchCo - IFSR Technology company, founded by NYU Media Research Lab's Ken Perlin and Ilya Rosenburg


TOUCHCO GUI:

Touchco GUI example from Nick Bilton on Vimeo.

A Touch of Ingenuity:  Inexpensive pressure-sensitive pad could make surfaces smarter
Kate Green, MIT Technology Review, Sept-Oct


Multitouch Screens Could Enliven New Devices
Nick Bilton, NYT, 12/20/09


TouchCo was an outgrowth of the UnMousePad research at NYU.


Photo from the UnMousePad website:



Photo from NYT:

Photo from NYT:

Photo from NYT:



Ken Perlin