Case Study of ASCIT

Abstract

In the ASCIT project, several elements of Multi-user Virtual Environments were integrated into a demonstrator enabling long term sick children to communicate efficiently with their regular school and classroom learning environment. By presenting them with an attractive and game-like interface, combined with state-of-the-art audio and video communication means, the children were encouraged to spend time using the system and to keep up with the day-to-day classroom activities. The authors will describe in detail the three interacting parts in the development cycle. Starting off with the analysis section, the authors describe how the requirements for the system were gathered. In the section on the technical development, they present an overview of the various technical challenges posed by the usage scenario, including real-time transmission of several high quality audio/video streams. Finally, user evaluation was performed on the demonstrator to determine to what extent the system efficiently addressed the identified concerns in the analysis stage.