Past Projects

We research, create and evaluate inclusive media

IMAGINE - Interactive Media, Applied Games, and Implicit Networked Environments

Interactive media has the potential for transmission of political and religious ideas, for advertising new products, for allowing consumers and students to experi­ment with hypothetical products and situations. The IMAGINE network is a group of researchers who are interested in exploring the use of interactive media and computer games for human communication.

Main project goals are to:

1. To experiment with Interactive Media Objects (IMO) as a means for communicating ideas between individuals and groups.
2. To evaluate the effectiveness of IMO methods for communication and compare them against other mechanisms.
3. To create engines and tools that can be used to create new platforms for experimenting with games and environments as communication tools.
4. To create new games and IMOs for evaluation of the tools, and for conducting studies

CLT researchers are working with University of Calgary right now to produce a library of simple, accessible games.

Providing Education by Bringing Learning Environments to Students (PEBBLES)

PEBBLES is an innovative system that combines video conferencing technologies with simple robotics technology to allow a child in the hospital to attend his/her regular school. The classroom end of the system is a child size, yellow device. It is the remote child's representative in the classroom and it transmits a live audio/visual image of the classroom to the child in the hospital. PEBBLES allows a child to maintain a connection and presence in his/her normal environment from an isolated and non-normal setting. Having this connection creates a healthier and less stressful situation for a hospitalized child that may in turn reduce trauma levels and health care costs. It may also ease that child's reintegration back into the classroom. Currently, we are working on a highschool version of PEBBLES. More about PEBBLES

Partners include Telebotics and University of Toronto.

Canadian Network of Inclusive Cultural Experience (CNICE)

The purpose of the Network Research Program is to ensure that Canadian cultural content on-line and the tools available to participate in creating this content are accessible to everyone in Canada, including people with disabilities. The CNICE Research Program is divided into five major themes, each addressing a critical challenge in making Canadian cultural exchange accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities. The five themes are:

1. Inclusive access to rich and interactive media on-line.
2. Inclusive collaboration on-line.
3. Alternative control and display modalities
4. Access to information about accessible Canadian culture as well as training and mentoring opportunities
5. Accessible assessment

The Inclusive Learning Exchange (TILE):

The Inclusive Learning Exchange advanced learning object repository technology to the next level by creating a repository service that responds to the individual needs of the learner. TILE developed the authoring tools, repository architecture, and preference schema needed to support this learner-centric transformation. The service will be implemented across Canada by a network of learning communities from many sectors. TILE will act as an exemplar of inclusive e-learning and form the basis of extensions to international e-learning specifications. By making broadband e-learning inclusive of people with disabilities TILE will advance e-learning functionality for all learners. more about TILE

Partners include University of Toronto, Canadian Learning Television (now Viva), Frontier College and others.

Enhanced Captioning Projects (eSEE):

The eSee project is a catchall for a series of smaller graduate student and grant-based research projects at our Centre that explore opportunities for the creation of new caption delivery systems with broadband, interactive, and digital TV(DTV). We are exploring modality conversion to a much greater degree than what has been applied to commercial closed captioning efforts. Currently, we are exploring audio to visual and audio to tactile experiences. One of our ongoing projects involves the creation of an "emotive captioning" palette to enable a mockup and display system for all non-word sound.

See recent developments of Enhanced Captioning to learn more.

TALK WITH THE HWAET!:

Mechanism facilitates videoconferencing

HWAET!, a Hand Waving Apparatus for Effective Turn-taking, was created to facilitate turn-taking management for sign language users in video conferencing situations. When a deaf person participates in a video conference from a remote location, he is able to activate HWAET! to signal to meeting participants (the interpreter and other hearing individuals) his wish to participate in the discussion.