INESC TEC creates software for online inclusive artistic education

INESC TEC creates software for online inclusive artistic education

The Tele-Média-Arte project, in collaboration with the Information Centre for Information Systems and Computer Graphics (CSIG) of INESC TEC, carried out the final tests with users, which took place in the INVITRO exhibition and research space, at the headquarters of the Universidade Aberta (UAb), in Lisbon. This technology will be applied during 2018 in the Digital Media Arts PhD and in the course "The experience of diversity through Art".

10th January 2018

Under the coordination of the UAb, the Tele-Média-Arte project has as main objective the improvement of the process of online and distance education in arts, through the exploration of multimodal telepresence facilities in the visual, auditory and sensorial channels and in the gesture/body interaction, making it inclusive for blind and partially sighted people.

This INESC TEC technology is based on the automatic 3D capture of human body movements by low cost devices (Kinect) in order to convert each movement and position of the joints of the body into sound. It provides instant and continuous feedback from the movement, integrated into an e-learning platform. This way, blind students can perceive whether or not their movement corresponds to the sound of the movement previously exemplified by the teacher, remotely.

Although it focuses on digital media arts education, the results of the project can be used in other areas of education, such as exact or social sciences.

The INESC TEC researchers involved were José Eduardo Dias, Leonel Morgado and Vítor Rocio from CSIG and Rui Penha from the Centre for Telecommunications and Multimedia (CTM).

The project is funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation within the scope of the Qualificação das Novas Gerações – Projetos Inovadores no Domínio Educativo (Qualification of New Generations – Innovative Projects in Education) programme. In addition to INESC TEC, it has the partnership of CIAC (Research Centre for Arts and Communication) and APEC (Association for Education of the Blind).

The researchers mentioned in this news piece are associated with INESC TEC, UP-FEUP and UAb.