Contributions: This article presents a large-scale study which investigates students' reaction to game-based learning as part of programming courses. The study focuses on knowledge acquisition, learner experience, and game usability. Background: Despite the rapid growth of the information and communication technologies (ICTs) sector, the lack of engagement with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects and high dropout rates in computer science and engineering majors is linked directly to the large number of unfilled vacancies in the ICT employment market. To tackle one of the underlying causes for this crisis, (i.e., traditional teaching paradigms struggle to attract students to rather abstract and difficult STEM subjects such as programming), innovative technology-enhanced learning solutions are sought. Intended Outcomes: A set of serious games were proposed and designed to promote students' understanding of programming concepts, improve their confidence, stimulate their interest in STEM and increase engagement with the courses through vivid and appealing scenarios. Application Design: Targeting undergraduate and postgraduate students, the games focused on several key programming topics. They were designed to visualize the programming concepts in illustrative and entertaining scenarios. A comprehensive assessment methodology which includes surveys, observations, and interviews was employed to investigate the impact of the games. Findings: The results show that by using the games in the teaching and learning process all the students have benefited, although differently based on their location, educational backgrounds, and game played. The impact of detailed demographic aspects, such as participants' use of technology, their initial attitude toward school, and learning STEM on the results needs further study.

Existing multimedia systems used in education mostly address only two senses by using two communication channels (visual and audio) of the five human senses (sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch), limiting the potential efficiency of learning. This paper presents a survey on existing technical opportunities for the development of an immersive learning environment. Four components of the immersive environment - visual, audio, olfactory, and haptic are described and discussed in the paper. In particular 3D displays, head mounted devices, 3D sound systems, olfactory displays, haptic devices, and interaction devices are presented.

Omnidirectional video is becoming increasingly popular among viewers, but its delivery requires considerable amount of network bandwidth. Today’s streaming services are transmitting the full spatial angle of omnidirectional videos, although most of the transmitted content is not utilized. Due to both limited bandwidth availability and its dynamic fluctuations, adaptive delivery solutions play a key role in supporting high user quality streaming of omnidirectional videos. This paper describes research which extends the MPEG-DASH Spatial Relationship Description by adding scalable video encoding to spatial tiling. It proposes a novel tile-layering based gaze adaptation algorithm for omnidirectional video delivery and employs it in conjunction with multiple tiling schemes. The benefits of the proposed algorithm with diverse tiling schemes are evaluated objectively in terms of bandwidth savings and adaptation latency. The results show a reduction of network bandwidth requirements to about 30% of the original bandwidth value with a low processing latency of 70.87ms.

In this paper a role of virtual reality in self-directed learning is introduced and discussed. Within a H2020 project Newton a new platform for distance learning based on student centric model is designed and realized. Fields like learning management system, virtual laboratories, augmented reality, assessment method and multimodal system are important parts of the designed platform and are included in this paper. Main focus is oriented to game-based learning using virtual reality (VR) in education. As an example, game-based VR application describing the functionality of firewall is discussed. “Firewall” application is going to be used in one of the pilot projects for testing the philosophy and Newton platform in education. We describe the proposed integration of the VR applications to the learning platform and propose the usage assessment.

This research aims to increase quality of experience for video consumers by adaptive delivery of multimedia content. We summarize ways of detecting salient regions in observed scene and current state of dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH). We propose to extend DASH video delivery system, based on saliency information gathered using eye tracking. This extension enables to enhance the quality in certain regions in video and is particularly suitable for adaptive multimedia content delivery in 5G Networks.