▪ This article starts with a brief review of the European Employment Strategy (EES) and a general evaluation of its scope and limitations, then provides an assessment of the five-year review conducted by the European Commission. It examines the new form that has been given to the EES for the 2003 exercise, on the basis of the conclusions drawn from the five-year review. It argues that this chan...

—This article describes the design of the two application scenarios of the Virtual Human project and its integration into the Virtual Human system. This includes overall concepts and considerations of the demonstrators for the two application scenarios (learning, edutainment) as well as underlying methodic-didactic aspects for knowledge transmission and narrative concepts for story structure an...

Our mixed-reality installation features two cooperating characters that integrate multiple users by location-based tracking into the interaction, allowing for dynamic storylines.

In this paper we present eCoology, an AR edutainment application for children in which emotional and social aspects are taking into consideration to improve flow or optimal experience. Particularly, we investigate the introduction of emotional agents that react and move within the AR environment according to their emotional state. We propose a model for emotional agents and a path finding mecha...

Virtual Reality edutainment can provide pleasant environments for educating students through VR-games. However, as a side effect, it may impose extra difficulties to students due to the complexity of VR-game user interfaces. Moreover, creating tutoring systems that combine teaching with the sophisticated environments of VR-games can be very complicated for instructional designers. Solutions to ...

In our research we utilized the domain of entertainment robotics to educate children on the principles of environmental awareness by playful means outdoors. Our research revolved around the iterative design of Floffy: the environmental robot, which was essentially a playful toy robot that would respond positively to interaction that was beneficial for the environment and the child’s own well be...

This paper presents quantitative measurements/metrics of qualitative entertainment features within computer game environments and proposes artificial intelligence (AI) techniques for optimizing entertainment in such interactive systems. A human-verified metric of interest (i.e. player entertainment in real-time) for predator/prey games and a neuro-evolution on-line learning (i.e. during play) a...

Entertainment computing is on its way getting an established academic discipline. The scope of entertainment computing is quite broad (see the scope of the international journal Entertainment Computing). One unifying idea in this diverse community of entertainment researchers and developers might be a normative position to enhance human living through social transformation. One possible option ...

This research aims to examine the key success factors for the diffusion of mobile entertainment services in Malaysia. The drivers and barriers observed in this research include perceived benefit; concerns pertaining to pricing, product and technological standardization, privacy and security; as well as influences from peers and community. An analysis of a Malaysian survey of 384 respondents bet...