Immersive technologies such as virtual environments and augmented reality have a clear potential to support the experiencing of cultural heritage by the large public, complementing the current tools and practices based on tangible goods such as museums, exhibitions, books and visual content. Serious games-videogames designed for educational objectives-appear as a new tool to learn cultural content in an engaging way. In this paper, we will provide an extensive portrait of the current proposition of serious games in the cultural sector, highlighting the educational objectives of games in this domain and analysing the complex relations between genre, context of use, technological solutions and learning effectiveness. We finally identify and discuss the most significant challenges in the design and adoption of educational games in cultural heritage. 1. Research aims This paper aims at providing the state-of-the-art of serious games in the humanities and heritage field, highlighting the educational objectives of games in this domain and analysing the complex relations between genre, context of use, technological solutions and learning effectiveness.

The definition of a molecular surface which is physically sound and computationally efficient is a very interesting and long standing problem in the implicit solvent continuum modeling of biomolecular systems as well as in the molecular graphics field. In this work, two molecular surfaces are evaluated with respect to their suitability for electrostatic computation as alternatives to the widely used Connolly-Richards surface: the blobby surface, an implicit Gaussian atom centered surface, and the skin surface. As figures of merit, we considered surface differentiability and surface area continuity with respect to atom positions, and the agreement with explicit solvent simulations. Geometric analysis seems to privilege the skin to the blobby surface, and points to an unexpected relationship between the non connectedness of the surface, caused by interstices in the solute volume, and the surface area dependence on atomic centers. In order to assess the ability to reproduce explicit solvent results, specific software tools have been developed to enable the use of the skin surface in Poisson-Boltzmann calculations with the DelPhi solver. Results indicate that the skin and Connolly surfaces have a comparable performance from this last point of view.

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There is an increasing awareness about the potential of serious games for education and training in many disciplines. However, research still witnesses a lack of methodologies, guidelines and best practices on how to develop effective serious games and how to integrate them in the actual learning and training processes. The process of integration heavily depends on providing and spreading evidence of the effectiveness of serious games. In this paper we present an overview on the factors that make serious games effective in the perspective of maximizing the learning impact. Such recommendations are the result of an extensive survey of the current proposition of serious games in different application domains.

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is an open access repository that collects the work of Arts et Métiers ParisTech researchers and makes it freely available over the web where possible. AbstractThis paper addresses the designers' activity and in particular the way designers express an object shape in 2D sketches through character lines and how these lines form a basis for sketching shapes in 3D. The tools currently available in commercial CAS/CAD systems to manipulate the digital models are still not sufficiently suited to support design. In this paper, the so-called fully free-form deformation features (d-F 4 ) are introduced as a modelling method to take into account the curve-oriented stylists' way of working. Both the advantages of a free-form surface deformation method and a feature-based approach are merged to define these high-level modelling entities allowing for a direct manipulation of surfaces through a limited number of intuitive parameters. Such features incorporate several characteristics designed to handle the uncertainties and/or inconsistencies of the designer's input during a sketching activity. In addition, a d-F 4 classification is proposed to enable a fast access to the desired shape according to its semantics and characteristics.

The design of a new car is guided by a set of directives indicating the target market, specific engineering, and aesthetic constraints, which may also include the preservation of the company brand identity or the restyling of products already on the market. When creating a new product, designers usually evaluate other existing products to find sources of inspiration or to possibly reuse successful solutions. In the perspective of an optimized styling workflow, great benefit could be derived from the possibility of easily retrieving the related documentation and existing digital models both from internal and external repositories. In fact, the rapid growth of resources on the Web and the widespread adoption of computer-assisted design tools have made available huge amounts of data, the utilization of which could be improved by using more selective retrieval methods. In particular, the retrieval of aesthetic elements may help designers to create digital models conforming to specific styling properties more efficiently. The aim of our research is the definition of a framework that supports~semi!automatic extraction of semantic data from three-dimensional models and other multimedia data to allow car designers to reuse knowledge and design solutions within the styling department. The first objective is then to capture and structure the explicit and implicit elements contributing to the definition of car aesthetics, which can be realistically tackled through computational models and methods. The second step is the definition of a system architecture that is able to transfer such semantic evaluation through the automatic annotation of car models.