Giancarlo Nascimento - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

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Papers by Giancarlo Nascimento

Figure 1: JECRIPE- a game for children with special needs Abtract There are not many initiatives ... more Figure 1: JECRIPE- a game for children with special needs Abtract There are not many initiatives in the area of game development for children with special needs, specially children with Down syndrome. The major purpose of our research is to promote cognitive development of disabled children in the context of inclusive education. In order to do so, we address aspects of interaction, communication and game design in stimulating selected cognitive abilities. By using a Human-Computer Interaction method based on the Inspection of Evaluation, it was possible to study and understand user interaction with the interface and thus examine the positive aspects as well as the communicability problems found with the JECRIPE game- a game developed specially for children with Down syndrome in pre-scholar age.

Most game engines are based on game objects inheritance and/or componentization of behaviors. Whi... more Most game engines are based on game objects inheritance and/or componentization of behaviors. While this approach enables a clear visualization of the system architecture, good code reuse and fast prototyping, it brings some issues, mostly related to the high de-pendency between game objects/components instances. This de-pendency often leads to static casts and null pointer references that are difficult to debug. In this paper we propose the use of the De-pendency Injection design pattern to safely initialize game objects and alleviate the role of the programmer in the handling of these issues both during prototyping and production fases. Since these dependencies are attributes in game objects and the injection oc-curs only at the initialization pass, there is no performance penalty at the game loop. Keywords:: game engine architecture, dependency injection, ob-ject composition

This paper presents an educational tool to help teachers in the process of the construction of kn... more This paper presents an educational tool to help teachers in the process of the construction of knowledge in the area of Chemistry. This game was built for the web platform and it is based on

The Microsoft MultiPoint technology is commonly used to develop software with focus on e-learning... more The Microsoft MultiPoint technology is commonly used to develop software with focus on e-learning since its main feature is the possibility to use several mouse devices on the same screen, allowing many students to interact with the same computer at the same time. This work aims to use this interesting technology in a different way. The idea is to create a multi-user game that will help on the research of the behavior of candidates in a group dynamics, providing an innovative and useful tool for psychologists and human resources professionals to evaluate the candidates.

In many working facilities, employees face problems such as bad equipment disposition and narrow ... more In many working facilities, employees face problems such as bad equipment disposition and narrow corridors. In these situations, workers struggle to move inside the laboratory, they constantly need to interrupt their tasks to make room for others, and often find themselves in a bad posture that causes long-term injuries. To overcome these issues, this paper presents a virtual environment simulator that will help analyze the physical disposition of the workers and furniture in the environment and how these elements affect the way the tasks are performed. By understanding how these variables are related to each other, it is possible to develop better room configurations that optimize workflow and circulation.

sbgames.org

Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology - ACE '10, 2010

Digital games are usually developed to provide fun for people of all ages. Although games have be... more Digital games are usually developed to provide fun for people of all ages. Although games have been mostly used for entertainment purposes, they have great potential as an intervention tool in health care. Digital games can be applied in health care helping users to learn or to experience something in a fun way. However, there are important issues to be considered to achieve this goal, specially in the development of applications for people with special needs. In this work, we are concerned specifically with Down syndrome needs, and we present an unhackneyed game for children with Down syndrome between 3 to 7 years old. Children in pre-scholar age need to be stimulated considering different cognitive areas. The stimulation of such cognitive areas can provide good results in the development over the years. Given the current demand and absence of games that fulfill Down syndrome special needs, we developed JECRIPE. JECRIPE is a digital game that stimulates the specific cognitive abilities: imitation, perception, fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination and receptive and expressive verbal language. This paper describes how these cognitive areas are used to stimulate children with Down syndrome in pre-scholar age and some technical issues in the development of the game.

… Symposium on Games …, 2010

∗ Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil 24210240 Email: 1andrebrandao... more ∗ Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil 24210240 Email: 1andrebrandao,daniela,bmoreira,gtaveira,crisnv,estebanl@ic.uff.br, pedrothiago@hotmail.com Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brasil ...

ABSTRACT Face, gender, ethnic and age group classification systems often work through an alignmen... more ABSTRACT Face, gender, ethnic and age group classification systems often work through an alignment, feature extraction, and identification pipeline. For that reason, the classification capacity depends on the quality of the source data. For instance, the classification can be affected by color or depth data with small flaws or damaged regions. Appropriate image reconstruction is therefore crucial for the correct operation of those systems. This work presents an elegant and effective method for aligning and reconstructing facial depth images from damaged depth data in a completely automatic way. The approach uses information extracted from valid pixels to adjust a smooth interpolating function that naturally reconstructs the depth information of missing pixels and computes smooth transitions among existing ones. The approach also explores facial landmarks in order to determine the actual position and orientation of the imaged face in the 3-dimensional space. The relation between the set of landmarks in the actual face and a set of canonical landmarks is used to map the shape of the imaged face to a standard space where the resulting aligned image is generated by ray casting the reconstructed surface. In contrast to existing solutions, the proposed approach is straightforward and easily fits into popular processing pipelines. It can also be extended to produce correct color images for resulting depth images. The experiments show that the approximation errors produced by the proposed method are up to two orders of magnitude smaller than those using 2-dimensional alignment with linear interpolation. This work also presents a comparative study among four distinct interpolation methods (i.e., nearest-neighbor, linear, natural-neighbor and Thin Plate Spline) using the proposed alignment method (in the 3-dimensional domain). Each interpolation method was applied as part of a gender classification process available in the literature. From the obtained results it is possible to state which interpolation approach is better to be applied with direct or iterative classifiers.

In many working facilities, employees face problems such as bad equipment disposition and narrow ... more In many working facilities, employees face problems such as bad equipment disposition and narrow corridors. In these situations, workers struggle to move inside the laboratory, they constantly need to interrupt their tasks to make room for others, and often find them-selves in a bad posture that causes long-term injuries. To overcome these issues, this paper presents a virtual environment simulator that will help analyze the physical disposition of the workers and furniture in the environment and how these elements affect the way the tasks are performed. By understanding how these variables are related to each other, it is possible to develop better room configurations that optimize workflow and circulation.

sbgames.org

Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology - ACE '10, 2010

… Symposium on Games …, 2010

In many working facilities, employees face problems such as bad equipment disposition and narrow ... more In many working facilities, employees face problems such as bad equipment disposition and narrow corridors. In these situations, workers struggle to move inside the laboratory, they constantly need to interrupt their tasks to make room for others, and often find them-selves in a bad posture that causes long-term injuries. To overcome these issues, this paper presents a virtual environment simulator that will help analyze the physical disposition of the workers and furniture in the environment and how these elements affect the way the tasks are performed. By understanding how these variables are related to each other, it is possible to develop better room configurations that optimize workflow and circulation.