Virtual environments have been valued as being extremely motivating for learners and therefore are employed as an innovative, more accessible framework to deliver education and entertainment to the public. Recent advances in creating videogame applications imbedded with effective learning principles, along with the evolution of human computer interfaces performed within the entertainment industry, suggests that a combination of successful practices in these areas could potentially transform virtual environments to a significant educational tool that could facilitate the learning process. This paper describes a virtual reality exhibit implemented for the museum of Thermopylae located at the site of the original battle, near the city of Lamia in Greece. We utilized storytelling techniques and principles of modern videogames to disseminate historical knowledge about the battle and the associated legends. After describing the hardware and software components comprising this installation we elaborate over the educational techniques designed to reinforce the strength of virtual reality technology as a mean of designing educational experiences in the context of historical events.

The problem of the restoration of broken artifacts, where large parts could be missing, is of high importance in archaeology. The typical manual restoration can become a tedious and error-prone process, which also does not scale well. In recent years, many methods have been proposed for assisting the process, most of which target specialized object types or operate under very strict constraints. We propose a digital shape restoration pipeline consisting of proven, robust methods for automatic fragment reassembly and shape completion of generic three-dimensional objects of arbitrary type. In this pipeline, first we introduce a novel unified approach for handling the reassembly of objects from heavily damaged fragments by exploiting both fracture surfaces and salient features on the intact sides of fragments, when available. Second, we propose an object completion procedure based on generalized symmetries and a complementary part extraction process that is suitable for driving the fabrication of missing geometry. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using real-world fractured objects and software implemented as part of the European Union--funded PRESIOUS project, which is also available for download from the project site.

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A new adaptive estimation algorithm is presented. It is the result of a combination of the LMS and the fast Newton transversal filters (FNTF) class. The main characteristic of the proposed algorithm is its improved convergence rate as compared to LMS, for cases where it is known that LMS behaves poorly. This improved characteristic is achieved in expense of a slight increase in the computational complexity while the overall algorithmic structure is very simple (LMS type). The proposed algorithm seems also to compare relatively well against €US and FNTF.

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