Edutainment & Engagement at Exhibitions: A Case Study of Gamification in the Historic Hammaburg Model

Gamification in the context of interactive exhibitions has enormous potential to attract visitors and improve their engagement, flow, and learning, in particular when other groups of visitors can share the experience. This paper describes a case study in which we use game-design elements for an interactive and collaborative exploration of a virtual exhibition. Using distinct user interfaces and input devices – a head-mounted display (HMD) and a multi-touch table – two players can explore the virtual 3D Model of the “Hammaburg”, which is a medieval castle of the 9 century and the origin of the German city Hamburg. One player is using a multi-touch table from a bird’s eye perspective, whereas the other player is using an immersive HMD in egocentric perspective, combined with a game controller to navigate through the virtual environment (VE). Both players can interactively explore the shared VE and play a mini game together. The mini game consists of collaborative tasks related to a medieval pottery scene. We performed a user study to evaluate the game concepts and user engagement. The results suggest that communication between the players – both verbal and nonverbal – is a challenging task, and seems especially difficult for the HMD player. Furthermore, this paper proposes an exploration of possibilities and challenges of this setup.