Shahreen Kasim

Virtual worlds are growing in popularity very quickly. This growing popularity of 3-dimensional (3-D) virtual worlds has drawn attention from educationists. Today, 3-dimensional (3-D) virtual worlds are exploited for online and virtual learning. Unlike the common online learning platforms, a virtual world environment closely resembles a 3-D video games environment. Thus the age of students might affect their sense of presence, interaction, and satisfaction in the said environment. Hence this study was conducted to investigate whether there are differences between students of different age groups on their sense of presence (place presence, social presence, and co-presence) and their learning satisfaction. The study was carried out for six weeks and involved 33 part-time diploma students with the use of interview and questionnaires as instruments. In this study, the researcher developed our own 3-D virtual world, known as ViEW, by using the Open Wonderland open source virtual world program. A nonparametric Mann-Whitney U analysis was applied to explore the differences between young and senior participants in terms of their sense of place presence, social presence, co-presence, and learning satisfaction. The results indicated significant differences between young and senior students in terms of place presence, co-presence, and learning satisfaction, but no differences were identified for social presence. These results might be in regard with the means of conducted the learning, which were in the forms of cooperative and synchronous learning by utilizing audio communication most of the time. Several recommendations for future research related to the study were also provided.

Biometric recognition is gaining attention as most of the organization is seeking for a more secure verification method for user access and other security application. There are a lot of biometric systems that exist which are iris, hand geometry and fingerprint recognition. In biometric system, iris recognition is marked as one of the most reliable and accurate biometric in term of identification. However, the performance of iris recognition is still doubted whether the iris recognition can generate higher accuracy when involving twin iris data. So, specific research by using twin data only needs to be done to measure the performance of recognition. Besides that, a comparative study is carried out using two template matching technique which are Hamming Distance and Euclidean Distance to measure the dissimilarity between the two iris template. From the comparison of the technique, better template matching technique also can be determined. The experimental result showed that iris recognition can distinguish twin as it can distinguish two different, unrelated people as the result obtained showed the good separation between intra and interclass and both techniques managed to obtain high accuracy. From the comparison of template matching technique, Hamming Distance is chosen as better technique with low False Rejection Rate, low False Acceptance Rate and high Total Success Rate with the value of 2.5%, 8.75% and 96.48% respectively.