BESIDE: Immersive System to Enhance Learning Within a Museum

We are developing an immersive learning support system for a paleontological environment within a museum. The system measures the physical movement of a learner using a Kinect sensor and provides a sense of immersion in the paleontological environment by modifying the surroundings according to these movements. As the first stage of this project, we have developed a prototype system that enables learners to experience paleontological environments. We evaluated the operability of the system, the degree of learning support, and the sense of immersion for primary schoolchildren. This paper summarizes the current system and describes the evaluation results.