EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES ON INTERFACES FOR ENGINEERING LECTURING

With the recent appearance in the market of low cost 3D vision sensors such as Microsoft Kinect, of other sensors such as haptic devices, accelerometers, etc., and of new computing paradigms such as tablets with gesture based interfaces, a new paradigm for interaction in presentation software for lectures and education is to be defined.

Nowadays, the only practical approximation to give engineering lectures with complex mathematical content is the use of chalk blackboards and standard digital presentation tools; the latter tend to accelerate the lecture pace making the students difficult to follow the delivery of information.

In this work in progress we address the definition of new interaction methods and gestures by using novel sensors and interfaces to enhance the student and lecturer experience. The paper will describe a set of gestures to allow a rich and natural interaction with displayed content, and will include the design of a classroom prototype implementation to experiment with gesture identification for lectures. The main sensors/devices to be investigated will be Kinect and iPad.

Additionally, concepts to enable enhanced interactivity with virtual objects and representations, potentially usable in other areas of application (such as circuit analysis, mechanical or architectural description of real objects, ...) will be described in the paper.

The paper will set up the basis to build an experiment lecture, and to design a user-based study to collect the feedback from students and teachers about the use of such technologies in undergraduate engineering courses, in order to draw some initial conclusions on the acceptability of this kind of interactions in the classroom.