This paper discusses the implementation details of a child friendly, good quality, English text-to-speech (TTS) system that is phoneme-based, concatenative, easy to set up and use with little memory. Direct waveform concatenation and linear prediction coding (LPC) are used. Most existing TTS systems are unit-selection based, which use standard speech databases available in neutral adult voices. Here reduced memory is achieved by the concatenation of phonemes and by replacing phonetic wave files with their LPC coefficients. Linguistic analysis was used to reduce the algorithmic complexity instead of signal processing techniques. Sufficient degree of customization and generalization catering to the needs of the child user had been included through the provision for vocabulary and voice selection to suit the requisites of the child. Prosody had also been incorporated. This inexpensive TTS system was implemented in MATLAB, with the synthesis presented by means of a graphical user interface (GUI), thus making it child friendly. This can be used not only as an interesting language learning aid for the normal child but it also serves as a speech aid to the vocally disabled child. The quality of the synthesized speech was evaluated using the mean opinion score (MOS).

Agnes Jacob

P. Mythili

Developing a Child Friendly Text-to-Speech System

This paper presents visually enhanced sports entertainment
applications: AR Baseball Presentation System and Interactive AR
Bowling System. We utilize vision-based augmented reality for
getting immersive feeling. First application is an observation
system of a virtual baseball game on the tabletop. 3D virtual
players are playing a game on a real baseball field model, so that
users can observe the game from favorite view points through a
handheld monitor with a web camera. Second application is a bowling
system which allows users to roll a real ball down a real bowling
lane model on the tabletop and knock down virtual pins. The users
watch the virtual pins through the monitor. The lane and the ball
are also tracked by vision-based tracking. In those applications, we
utilize multiple 2D markers distributed at arbitrary positions and
directions. Even though the geometrical relationship among the
markers is unknown, we can track the camera in very wide area.

Yuko Uematsu

Hideo Saito

Visual Enhancement for Sports Entertainment by Vision-Based Augmented Reality

This paper presents guidelines for designers to help them consider what children with autism value in
interactions with their environment. The guidelines were developed during the LINKX project in order
to design a language learning toy for these children and are based on literature study, expert interviews,
generative techniques, and prototype testing with users. We present both the theoretical or practical
background of each guideline together with a discussion how the guideline was evident in the
prototype of LINKX. Testing the prototype in the real world helped us to shape the prototype and the
guidelines. This paper aims to share our guidelines with the design research community, so that others
can use them as steppingstones in their work.

Helma van Rijn

Pieter Jan Stappers

The Puzzling Life of Autistic Toddlers: Design Guidelines from the LINKX Project

End users' expertise in the development of new applications is acknowledged in user-centered and participatory design. Similarly, children's experience of what they find enjoyable and how they learn is a valuable source of inspiration for the design of products intended for them. In this paper, we explore experiences obtained from collaboration with elementary school children in the design of learning environments, based on three projects and three requirements gathering techniques. We also discuss how the children experienced the participation. The children's contribution yielded useful, both expected and unanticipated, outcomes in regard to the user interface and contents of the learning environments under development. Moreover, we present issues related to design collaboration with children, especially in terms of the children's feeling of ownership over the final outcome.

Tuula Nousiainen

Marja Kankaanranta

Exploring Children's Requirements for Game-Based Learning Environments

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