In addition to the technical
papers, DS-RT 2007 program includes two distinguished Keynote Speakers
Date: October 22, 2007, 9.00am
Keynote
title: Spatial Awareness of Digital Artefacts
Prof. Alois Ferscha,
Institut für Pervasive Computing, Johannes Kepler Universität Linz, Austria
Date: October 23, 2007, 8.45am
Keynote
title: Distributed Virtual Reality in Education
Dr. Hannes Kaufmann, ISIS, TU Wien
(Keynote Information, Bio Information)
Keynote
title: Distributed Virtual Reality in Education
Dr. Hannes Kaufmann, ISIS, TU Wien
Abstract:
Educational virtual reality (VR) applications have a huge
potential to support learning and teaching. A brief overview of previous
educational VR applications will be followed by a summary of requirements
specific to this field. In a typical collaborative classroom situation where
large groups of users must be supported, as well as in distance education,
robust and reliable networked environments are of primary importance.
The speaker will present Construct3D, an application for
geometry education that has been developed at the VR group at Vienna University
of Technology throughout the past 6 years. Specific design aspects to allow
distributed collaboration in Construct3D are presented. This concerns
improvements of the user interface, usability and system performance including
bandwidth efficiency.
The results of three evaluations, some of them in
co-located and distributed setups, with a total of more than 500 students in
over 300 teaching lessons will be presented.
Bio:
Hannes Kaufmann is assistant professor at the Institute
of Software Technology and Interactive Systems at Vienna University of
Technology and head of the VR group since 2005. His master study on mathematics
and geometry with the aim of becoming a teacher was succeeded by PhD research
in the Virtual and Augmented Reality group, Vienna University of Technology.
After completing his PhD thesis in 2004 on "Geometry Education with
Augmented Reality" he did postdoc research in the EU-IST project
Lab@Future. He is and was project manager of EU R&D projects, national
research projects and participated in projects in the fields of virtual and
augmented reality, spatial abilities, geometry, educational mathematics and
geometry software and published more than 30 scientific articles up to date.
Since 1999 he develops Construct3D, a distributed virtual
reality application for mathematics and geometry education. Emerging from the
need to keep costs of high quality educational VR systems low, he initiated the
development of a low-cost optical tracking system "ioTracker" that is
commercially available since 2007.