Developing Mixed Reality Educational Applications: The Virtual Touch Toolkit

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.

Collaborative Educational Environments Incorporating Mixed Reality Technologies: A Systematic Mapping Study

“…On the other hand, systematic literature reviews are more detailed studies of very specific research areas, with the aim of aggregating evidence and answering the hypothesis. This means that the process is different and more rigorous quality assessment is required for conducting a systematic literature review, involving considerably more effort and time [4], [21].…”

“…There are numerous examples in the literature where systematic mapping has been adopted: Barn et al [4] used the method of Petersen et al to review and report an entire publication output of the Indian Software Engineering Conference (ISEC), visually representing the nature of Indian Software Engineering academic research between 2008 and 2012, and identifying what ideas are being studied, what the main approaches are and who is carrying out the research. Overall, the systematic mapping approach has made it possible to determine the overarching landscape of that particular area.…”

A Review on Mixed Reality: Current Trends, Challenges and Prospects

“…Ref. [104] used the virtual touch-middleware, which creates a relationship between the sensor information and the virtual world. This middleware detects the object in real space using image processing and a sensing device, and then transmits this information via scripting to the virtual environment.…”

“…This concept is especially important in virtual touch middleware. In a common structure, users involve different messaging through middleware modules because of processing on different servers; therefore, these servers need to be installed on the same local network to achieve an acceptable response time; however, modern structures will facilitate the process [104]. The improvement in middleware helps support real-time capability for video streaming [105].…”

Living in Virtual and Real Worlds: A Didactic Experience

“…In some projects various user interface controls (i.e., a joystick) are used as tangible objects to interact in the virtual world [16,19]. On the other hand, Mateu et al [20] presents a toolkit to develop mixed reality environments with tangible objects and virtual worlds. Three projects are described: (i) Cubic; that allows the teaching of classification algorithms [21], (ii) Touch Eye: that allows the learning of the Catalan language [22], and (iii) Touch Book: that allows the student to carry out activities according to the knowledge acquired [23].…”