On September 27th, the DIVR Science Awards ceremony took place in Dortmund, Germany, a prestigious recognition for outstanding research in the fields of Augmented, Virtual, and Mixed Reality in Europe. This event is considered one of the most important in the realm of Virtual Reality and immersive technologies, standing out for rewarding innovative research projects. Throughout the day, both a panel of experts and the attending public had the opportunity to interact with the projects, explore them, ask questions, and evaluate them before proceeding with the awards ceremony.
The award for Best Concept was given to EduAvatars, an application developed by Inés Miguel Alonso, a member of XRAILab belonging to ADMIRABLE (Advanced Data MIning Research And (Business intelligence | Bioinformatics | Big Data) LEarning) at the University of Burgos, in collaboration with Anjela Mayer from the IMI research team at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT, Germany), and Kevin Kastner from the University of Mannheim (Germany).
EduAvatars is an innovative application that allows users to create a full-body avatar in Virtual and/or Mixed Reality environments. Through this tool, the user’s actions and voice are recorded so that another user, asynchronously, can replay them and follow the same instructions, facilitating learning and training. Additionally, if the second user has questions, they can record them and send them to the first user, who can respond individually. This asynchronous interaction optimizes feedback and the educational process.
The project emerged from the collaboration between these three researchers: Anjela Mayer, a specialist in avatars and asynchronous communication; Inés Miguel Alonso, focused on education and training through immersive technologies; and Kevin Kastner, whose work focuses on training at the University of Applied Sciences, where students learn to operate a Pumpstation and interpret technical indicators, such as pressure.
As a result, EduAvatars was initially oriented towards teaching at the Pumpstation, but its application is flexible and can be adapted to other educational contexts, offering new learning opportunities in various disciplines.
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