Developing Mixed Reality Educational Applications: The Virtual Touch Toolkit

Mateu, Juan; Lasala, Maria Jose; Alamán Roldán, Xavier

UAM_Biblioteca

Author

Mateu, Juan; Lasala, Maria Jose; Alamán Roldán, Xavier

Entity

UAM. Departamento de Ingeniería Informática

Publisher

MDPI

Date

2015-09-01

Citation

Sensors 15.9 (2015): 21760-21784

ISSN

1424-8220

DOI

10.3390/s150921760

Funded by

We want to thank the IES Ernest Lluch and the IES Joan Coromines for all their support during the experience. The work reported in this paper was partially funded by the Spanish Research plan (project TIN2013-44586-R) and by the Madrid Research Plan (project S2013/ICE-2715).

Project

Gobierno de España. TIN2013-44586-R; Comunidad de Madrid. S2013/ICE-2715/EMADRID

Editor's Version

http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s150921760

Subjects

Virtual worlds; Tangible user interfaces; Mixed reality; Education; Informática

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/10486/674185

Note

Rights

Esta obra está bajo una Licencia Creative Commons Atribución 4.0 Internacional.

Abstract

In this paper, we present Virtual Touch, a toolkit that allows the development of educational activities through a mixed reality environment such that, using various tangible elements, the interconnection of a virtual world with the real world is enabled. The main goal of Virtual Touch is to facilitate the installation, configuration and programming of different types of technologies, abstracting the creator of educational applications from the technical details involving the use of tangible interfaces and virtual worlds. Therefore, it is specially designed to enable teachers to themselves create educational activities for their students in a simple way, taking into account that teachers generally lack advanced knowledge in computer programming and electronics. The toolkit has been used to develop various educational applications that have been tested in two secondary education high schools in Spain.

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