VS-Games 2019 presentations

Recently, I was in Vienna, Austria, in order to attend the 11th International Conference on Virtual Worlds and Games for Serious Applications (VS-Games 2019) and present two papers (mine and my colleague’s one). It took place at the Natural History Museum, Vienna. My paper presents an initial work involving the design of a pedagogical scenario to facilitate teaching of socially appropriate and inappropriate behaviors when entering and standing in a small group of people, a common occurrence in collaborative social situations. This is proposed through the use of virtual characters and a virtual reality (VR) environment for supporting situated learning in multiple contexts. It has a teacher dashboard which enables teachers to modify group formations, monitor and capture students’ behaviors and replay recorded video for them in order to show their behavior from different perspectives. Work done thus far on the demonstrator scenario and anticipated potentials, pitfalls and challenges involved in the approach are described. Our paper was accepted as a poster in the “Educational – Serious Games” track of this conference and has been published in the IEEE proceedings (ISBN: 978-1-7281-4540-2). If you are interested in reading this paper, you can download the pre-print here.

Fortunately, the VS-Games conference gives a 10-minute oral presentation to each poster paper. This was a great and unique opportunity for me to present my paper orally for entire audiences in 10 minutes and receiving their feedback.

Finally, I have also presented my colleague’s (Fangkai Yang) short-paper on social-aware navigation in crowds with static and dynamic groups in VS-Games 2019. His work is related to my PhD topic and it was a good chance for me to practice on and present his paper. His paper was about a machine learning approach for generating trajectories for mobile robots into small groups. If you are interested to know more about our lab and our research areas, you can follow this link.