Virtual Reality in Object Location

Currently, virtual reality (VR) is a computer technology that is growing in terms of developments and discoveries. Virtual reality has been introduced in different areas due to the growing interest it has caused in people. The development of applications with virtual reality is increasingly varied, covering activities, tasks, or processes of everyday life in the fields of industry, education, medicine, tourism, art, entertainment, design, and modeling of objects, among others. This chapter will focus on describing the latest advances and developments in virtual reality within the scope of representing reality in the process of locating objects. With the support of virtual environments and intelligent virtual agents, the author has managed to develop a computational model that generates indications in natural language, for the location of objects considering spatial and cognitive aspects of the users.

How Do We Interact in Collaborative Virtual Reality?

Nonverbal interaction includes most of what we do; the interaction resulted from other means than words or their meaning. In computer-mediated interaction, the richness of face-to-face interaction has not been completely achieved. However, multiuser virtual reality, a computer-generated environment that allows users to share virtual spaces and virtual objects through their graphic representation, is a highly visual technology in which nonverbal interaction is better supported when compared with other media. Still, like in any technology media, interaction is accomplished distinctively due to technical and design issues. In collaborative virtual reality, the analysis of nonverbal interaction represents a helpful mechanism to support feedback in teaching or training scenarios, to understand collaborative behavior, or to improve this technology. This chapter discussed the characteristics of nonverbal interaction in virtual reality, presenting advances in the automatic interpretation of the users' nonverbal interaction while a spatial task is collaboratively executed.

Connecting the Dots Between Human Factors and Software Engineering

Software engineering (SE) is a human-intensive activity where human factors play a fundamental role. As such, SE is an inherently sociotechnical endeavor on which different social and technical aspects are involved. In fact, it is recognized that successful SE not only depends on technical or process issues, but also it is influenced by human factors. They have been proved to have impact on software process and their study is a growing research field. The summary presented in this chapter highlights the results obtained in a five-year effort research aiming at understanding the role that human factors play in SE. As a result, a holistic view of human factors on software process is given.

Boosting the Competitiveness of Organizations With the Use of Software Engineering

Software has become the core of organizations in different domains because the capacity of their products, systems, and services have an increasing dependence on software. This fact highlights the research challenges to be covered by computer science, especially in the software engineering (SE) area. On the one way, SE is in charge of covering all the aspects related to the software development process from the early stages of software development until its maintenance and therefore is closely related to the software quality. On the other hand, SE is in charge of providing engineers able to provide technological-base solutions to solve industrial problems. This chapter provides a research work path focused on helping software development organizations to change to a continuous software improvement culture impacting both their software development process highlighting the human factor training needs. Results show that the implementation of best practices could be easily implemented if adequate support is provided.

Striving for Inclusion in E-Learning and E-Health

The purpose of this chapter is to present a seven-year journey to understand the barriers that people face when interacting with e-learning and e-health online platforms and to come up with software engineering solutions to make these platforms more inclusive. This chapter per the author presents a set of contributions intended to serve as steppingstones to future research efforts. These contributions include a literature review about accessibility of e-learning platforms; the accessibility audit of e-learning and e-health platforms; the identification of accessibility requirements; the design of architectures, process, and models to improve accessibility; and the definition of a life cycle for the management of accessible online courses. In this context, this chapter relate the evolution of the research process followed and summarize the results obtained so far.

Lessons Learned About Gamification in Software Engineering Education

Software engineering courses traditionally mix theoretical aspects with practical ones that are later used in the development of projects. Teaching software engineering courses is not easy because in many cases the students lack motivation to exercise the topics prior to project development. This chapter presents the application of gamification on some topics of a software engineering course to engage students and increase their motivation. The authors argue that with the proper motivation, the students can better exercise the topics and obtain stronger knowledge. The authors have created five games to help in the learning process of the software engineering course. The games are related to risk management, BPMN modeling, Scrum process, design and inspection of class diagrams, and COSMIC functional size measurement. Gamification has been applied during four years in the software engineering course, resulting in an improved learning experience for the students. Finally, lessons learned are presented and discussed.

Innovation and Creativity in Software Engineering Education

The last decade has increased the demand of software products in several economy sectors; therefore, the need to train people in software engineering is growing. Software engineering, as a discipline, requires developing in engineers technical and social/soft competencies. For all the above, we have been working on the incorporation of new strategies in software engineering education, seeking that students build up software products aligned with organizations business processes. The core of most of such educational strategies is the ‘game' constitutes a dynamic element that changes the ways of interaction and support in the learning processes. The authors present a set of approaches centered on innovation and creativity in which they have made significant contributions along the 10 last years, from the following work branches: 1) methodological, comprising methodologies, methods, techniques, and strategies; 2) application, presenting proposals oriented to games; and 3) support, including guidelines and instruments to evaluate and help in classroom practice.

Fuzzy Data Warehouse in the Field of Education

Currently, educational organizations have a large amount of local information from their academic processes, curricular management processes, diagnostic processes of university admission, among others. Also, educational organizations have access to large external databases with standardized test information that students have taken. In this sense, the data warehouse (DW) is presented as a technology that makes it possible to integrate educational information because it provides for the storage of large amounts of information that come from different sources, in a multidimensionally structured format for historical analysis. In this chapter, the authors present one example of DW applied to the field of education using fuzzy logic. A fuzzy DW will be defined as “a DW that allows storing and operating fuzzy measures, fuzzy relationships between levels and fuzzy levels.” This chapter ends with a critical discussion of the advances and possibilities of technologies such as the DW applied to the field of education.

Technological Development for the Inclusion of People With Disabilities

The chapter presents some experiences carried out in Computer Sciences Department of the Universidad Católica del Norte (Chile) related to the development of technological products at the service of people with disabilities. Since 2006, the author has been working with institutions made up of people with disabilities in co-creating solutions to problems that affect their independence and inclusion in different areas. Products have been created for the blind, deaf, and children belonging to autism spectrum disorder. The work teams of each project have been made up of the author of this chapter together with students from Computer Science and the Master's Program in Computer Engineering. Results have been satisfactory. The challenge is to achieve an effective universal design, which should include, from the early stages of each project, not only typical end users, but also those who present conditions that require special considerations to access the technology.

From Sociology to ICTs

This chapter addresses the inclusion of women in the field of information technology from a perspective that promotes the creation of interdisciplinary spaces, making visible the knowledge inherent to the different professions capable of adding value to technological development. The model presented here was created to evaluate the level of technological development that will allow the determining of the components needed for the transformation towards Industry 4.0, from which you can determine the knowledge necessary for the development of products in their real context of use. Areas such as data science, virtual reality, or human-computer interaction design techniques, models, and/or tools for the construction of solutions that do not require strictly engineering-based knowledge. This chapter proposes a journey towards the development and adoption of technologies in the industry, which requires the inclusion of interdisciplinary knowledge, hence giving new meaning to the role of women in technological development.