Browsing by Author "Dörner, Ralf"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Conveying Firsthand Experience: The Circuit Parcours Technique for Efficient and Engaging Teaching in Courses about Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality
    (The Eurographics Association, 2021) Dörner, Ralf; Horst, Robin; Sousa Santos, Beatriz and Domik, Gitta
    Providing the opportunity for hands-on experience is crucial when teaching courses about Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). However, the workload on the educator's side for providing these opportunities might be prohibitive. In addition, other organizational challenges can arise, for example, demonstrations of VR/AR application in a course might be too time-consuming, especially if the course is attended by many students. We present the Circuit Parcours Technique to meet these challenges. Here, in a well-organized event, stations with VR/AR demonstrations are provided in parallel, and students are enlisted to prepare and conduct the demonstrations. The event is embedded in a four-phase model. In this education paper, the technique is precisely described, examples for its flexible usage in different teaching situations are provided, advantages such as time efficiency are discussed, and lessons learned are shared from our experience with using this method for more than 10 years. Moreover, learning goals are identified that can be achieved with this technique besides gaining personal experience.
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    Gamification Mechanics for Playful Virtual Reality Authoring
    (The Eurographics Association, 2020) Naraghi-Taghi-Off, Ramtin; Horst, Robin; Dörner, Ralf; Biasotti, Silvia and Pintus, Ruggero and Berretti, Stefano
    An increasing number of companies, businesses and educational institutions are becoming familiar with the term gamification, which is about integrating game elements into a non-playful context. Gamification is becoming more important in various fields, such as e-learning, where a person needs to be motivated to be productive. The use of Virtual Reality (VR) is also being researched in various application areas. Authoring of VR content is a complex task that traditionally requires programming or design skills. However, there are authoring applications that do not require such skills but are still complex to use. In this paper, we explore how gamification concepts can be applied to VR authoring to help authors create VR experiences. Using an existing authoring tool for the concept of VR nuggets as an example, we investigate appropriate gamification mechanics to familiarize authors with the tool and motivate them to use it. The proposed concepts were implemented in a prototype and used in a user study. The study report shows that our participants were able to successfully use the gamified authoring prototype and that the participants felt motivated by various gamification aspects, especially visual rewards and story elements.
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    Towards the Gamification of VR Authoring Environments
    (The Eurographics Association, 2022) Horst, Robin; Schmitt, Marcel; Leipe, Andreas; Naraghi-Taghi-Off, Ramtin; Dörner, Ralf; Theophilus Teo; Ryota Kondo
    The creation of content for educational Virtual Reality (VR) environments is still challenging - particularly for non-experts in the field of VR, resulting in a lack of motivation. Gamification is a tool that has shown motivational benefits in different fields, however, it remains unclear if and how it can be applied to VR authoring. In this paper, we investigate the use of established lightweight gamification mechanics within a VR authoring tool and conclude (based on user study) that our gamification improved the software quality by pragmatic qualities.
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    Virtual Reality Callouts - Demonstrating Knowledge With Spatial-Related Textual Information
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) Horst, Robin; Degreif, Anika; Mathy, Marvin; Dörner, Ralf; Vidal, Franck P. and Tam, Gary K. L. and Roberts, Jonathan C.
    Virtual (VR) and augmented reality (AR) can bring an added value during the demonstration of knowledge, as for example within an interactive research demo. Callouts are strings of text which are connected by a line to a specific feature of an object. These visual annotations can be used during such demos and can be placed in different kinds of media, such as illustrations, technical drawings, images and videos. Callouts are also used in virtual 3D environments to anchor textual information to a specific point in space. Therefore they can be a valuable tool for virtually demonstrating knowledge. The alignment of callouts in such information rich environments is an elemental factor within the view management of the VR scene. In this paper we propose a concept for interactive microlearning application for knowledge demonstration that uses callouts as a fundamental element. We distinguish three types of interactive callout-representations by their alignment relative to the user, for being static or dynamic in their position and orientation. Within an implementation of the different callout versions we show the feasibility and in a user study we indicate a user-preference towards static positioned callouts.