No abstract

The results of a clinical, sonographic and sialographic study in 10 children (aged 4-10 years) with recurrent sialectatic parotitis are presented. Alteration in the sonographic pattern of the parotid glands, consisting of multiple hypoechogenic areas in the parenchyma, were found in four cases; milder nonhomogeneity was seen in four cases, and an almost normal pattern in two cases. Sonographic follow-up in two children showed a parallel reduction in non-homogeneity with symptomatic improvement. A probable therapeutic action following sialography using fat-soluble contrast medium was observed in four of the 10 children. The familial nature of the disease, which has not previously been described, is documented.

In recent years a number of techniques have been studied for augmenting the ease of use of 3D worlds: methodologies for adapting both navigation and content allow a user to interact with a customized 3D world; adaptable navigation paradigms offer parallel modalities for different classes of users. In both cases the goal is to reduce the cognitive load needed for interaction.This work focuses on interaction adaptivity, trying to anticipate the user behaviors by monitoring their interaction patterns. Identification of recurring patterns of interaction is used for shortening users interaction when they approach objects belonging to the same class of those ones previously accessed.An agent based approach is used for monitoring the user activity and for proactively adapting interaction: a pair of agents, called numen (bound to the user) and genius loci (associated with the interaction areas called interaction loci) observe and mediate the users' interaction and adapt the 3D world in order to match their needs.The users are always made aware by the system about the changes in the 3D world and they are always in control. They can deactivate adaptiveness for a while, letting the system only to monitor their actions without applying automatically interaction shortcuts. An implementation architecture and a demonstration prototype are presented. A case study related to virtual fairs is examined, discussing a number of adaptive interaction examples.

3D environments represent a great opportunity for universal access to information, as they offer an intuitive interaction paradigm, similar to what is experienced by humans in their everyday lives. In spite of that, several 3D interfaces are characterized by poor structures and are hard to navigate. This paper presents the multimodal concept of the Interaction Locus (IL) as a means to give structure to 3D scenes, helping the user to interact with and access information inside them. The concept was initially developed with particular reference to desktop virtual reality (2.5 D virtual reality), but it is general enough to be extended to other contexts, such as real 3D scenes. The final part of this work shows how the IL concept addresses the need for a unified authoring methodology, capable of allowing access to different target user groups from a variety of different devices.

Abstract. This work illustrates the design of a context-aware software architecture supporting the narration of interactive stories for mobile users. The peculiarity of this work is the use of an extended set of context dimensions, including the surrounding environment and the user social network, for enhancing the engagement and the emotional impact on the users experiencing the story.