BESIDE: Body Experience and Sense of Immersion in Digital Paleontological Environment

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