Enhancing education through natural interaction with physical paper

Pervasive computing environments have permeated current research and practice, unobtrusively augmenting existing environments with digital content. The present work, following a pervasive computing approach, proposes a framework to augment an educational environment, being a typical classroom or any studying environment. In this context, the work presented in this paper investigates unobtrusive interaction and support of active educational or studying activities through appropriate context-sensitive information. To this end, passive visual sensing is employed in order to unobtrusively perceive the current context and users’ actions, thus providing novel ways to implement natural interaction. The suitability of the proposed interaction technologies and overall approach has been demonstrated through three interactive applications integrated in the framework, each one supporting different interaction techniques and addressing different educational activities. Finally, a user experience evaluation of the three test-bed applications has been carried out, aiming to assess the applicability of the approach and the suitability of each of the proposed technologies to the educational tasks in hand.