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The purpose of this work is to explore a teaching methodology aimed at communicating topics and subjects not typically studied and analyzed in the (Italian) secondary school. We focused specifically on the use of videogames as a…
Physics instructors often rely on demonstrations when teaching, using real-time examples to appeal to student intuition or tinkering with a physical system to develop a deeper and more natural understanding of a topic. However, some…
Our study's concern is about how to enlarge the scope of the virtual museum concept from the mediation activities as they are carried out in today's digital planetariums to training activities dedicated to the public. We assume that these…
Fieldwork still is the first and foremost source of insight in many disciplines of the geosciences. Virtual fieldwork is an approach meant to enable scientists trained in fieldwork to apply these skills to a virtual representation of…
The rapid development of technology has introduced new formats of human-computer interaction, which have in turn produced many new forms of media and a whole new field of interactive multimedia. One of the major mediums that has grown in…
Astronomical images can be fascinating to the general public, but the interaction is typically limited to contemplation. Numerical simulations of astronomical systems do permit a closer interaction, but are generally unknown outside the…
We report on our ongoing efforts to develop, implement, and test VR activities for the introductory astronomy course and laboratory. Specifically, we developed immersive activities for two challenging "3D" concepts: Moon phases, and stellar…
For centuries, the rich nocturnal environment of the starry sky could be modelled only by analogue tools such as paper planispheres, atlases, globes and numerical tables. The immersive sky simulator of the twentieth century, the…
We present Playable Environments - a new representation for interactive video generation and manipulation in space and time. With a single image at inference time, our novel framework allows the user to move objects in 3D while generating a…
The development of Information and Communication Technologies suggests some spectacular changes in the methods used for teaching scientific subjects. Nowadays, the development of software and hardware makes it possible to simulate processes…
A timely combination of new theoretical ideas and observational discoveries has brought about significant advances in our understanding of cosmic evolution. Computer simulations have played a key role in these developments by providing the…
We present an investigation of game-like simulations for physics teaching. We report on the effectiveness of the interactive simulation "Real Time Relativity" for learning special relativity. We argue that the simulation not only enhances…
Scientists across all disciplines increasingly rely on machine learning algorithms to analyse and sort datasets of ever increasing volume and complexity. Although trends and outliers are easily extracted, careful and close inspection will…
Interactive visualization and simulation of astrophysical phenomena help astronomers and enable digital planetariums and television documentaries to take their spectators on a journey into deep space to explore the astronomical wonders of…
In the study of the process of cosmic structure formation numerical simulations are crucial tools to interface observational data to theoretical models and to investigate issues otherwise unexplored. Enormous advances have been achieved in…
We describe the work of the Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA), the first professional scientific organization based in virtual worlds. MICA was an experiment in the use of this technology for science and scholarship,…
Recent advancements in deep learning, computer vision, and embodied AI have given rise to synthetic causal reasoning video datasets. These datasets facilitate the development of AI algorithms that can reason about physical interactions…
During the last couple of years, observers have started to make plans for a Virtual Observatory, as a federation of existing data bases, connected through levels of software that enable rapid searches, correlations, and various forms of…
This paper introduces foundations for a new kind of cosmology. We advocate that computer simulations are needed to address two key cosmological issues. First, the robustness of the emergence of complexity, which boils down to ask: "what…
Kinematics is a core topic in early physics courses, yet students often struggle to interpret motion and its graphical representations. To tackle these difficulties, we developed MissionMotion, a physical-computational videogame where…