Focus
The research aims at developing: (1) methodologies; (2) tools and technologies; (3) applications and services, in real-life environments mainly related to e-learning, e-tourism, and e-culture.
Methodologies
The following research directions are pursued:
- Requirements Analysis and Engineering, with a goal oriented method (AWARE).
- Design of information intensive applications, with an agile design technique (IDM – Interactive Dialogue Model).
- Design of collaborative educational applications, with a design technique emphasizing pedagogical impact, based on 3D Multiuser Virtual Environment.
- Usability/Quality assessment.
- Accessibility (for visually impaired users).
- E-branding perception evaluation method.
Tools
Tools and technologies are conceived as a bridge between methodologies and high quality application development.
- Development of “engines” for effective multimedia applications, e.g., the 1001stories used by more than 12,000 students from all school grades and all over Italy to develop their own multimedia “narratives”.
- Development of an original engine (WebTalk 4) for 3D online multi-user collaborative environments.
- An original technology, based industry standards, for highly accessible (stationary and mobile) web applications particularly effective for visually impaired people.
- An innovative framework (“Talking Paper”) to develop RFID enhanced tangible applications exploiting physical tagged objects to access multimedia contents.
Applications and services
Many real life developments have been carried on, in the fields of e-culture, e-learning, e-tourism (and more):
- Web, mobile and podcast applications have been developed for prestigious cultural institutions. Some of the partners are: the State Museum of Berlin (Germany), Museo Archeologico (Milan), Pinacoteca Ambrosiana (Milan), Ministry of Tourism of Syria, Ministries of Tourism of 8 Mediterranean countries, Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage, the Israel Museum of Jerusalem, etc.
- Technology Enhanced Learning: five different applications of blended learning with 3D collaborative environments have been deployed to more than 9,000 students from Europe, USA and Israel, supported by several agencies, including International Accenture Foundation with a grant of nearly 600k euro.
- Interactive multimedia tales for kids have been deployed to thousands of kids and are licensed to a major national publisher.
- Digital Storytelling for schools and professionals. A toolkit (1001stories) for authoring multimedia and multi-channel “narratives” has been deployed with more than 30 professional applications (in the fields of e-culture, e-tourism etc.) and with hundreds of classes from all around Italy (www.policultura.it).
- A set of tangible multimedia applications have been developed and tested in a real school exploiting the Talking Paper Framework for supporting learning in highly disabled children.
