LONG PAPER Enhancing education through natural interaction with physical paper

Abstract Pervasive computing environments have per-meated current research and practice, unobtrusively aug-menting existing environments with digital content. The present work, following a pervasive computing approach, proposes a framework to augment an educational envi-ronment, being a typical classroom or any studying envi-ronment. 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 applica-tions 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.