Serious Games for Cultural Applications

This paper presents a serious game for cultural heritage and in particular for museum environments focusing on the younger generation. The aim of the game is to solve a treasure hunt scenario by collecting medieval objects that used to be located in and around the Priory Undercroft. Located in the heart of Coventry, UK, the Priory Undercrofts are the remains of Coventry’s original Benedictine monastery, dissolved by Henry VIII. Initial user testing demonstrated the potentials of serious games for education in museum environments. Game has been created using innovative aspects as far as 3D content reconstruction is concerned as well as educational scenarios. Thus, the main contribution of this paper lies in the direction of accelerating 3D reconstruction by combining computer vision tools and on the educational dimension of the developed game. In addition, artificial intelligence tools are adopted for conducting the plot of the game.

[1]  Fotis Liarokapis,et al.  Serious Games in Cultural Heritage , 2009 .

[2]  William D. Wells,et al.  Generating enhanced natural environments and terrain for interactive combat simulations (GENETICS) , 2005, VRST '05.

[3]  Petros Daras,et al.  A 3D Shape Retrieval Framework Supporting Multimodal Queries , 2010, International Journal of Computer Vision.

[4]  B. Ribarsky,et al.  3D reconstruction and visualization [Guest Editors¿ Introduction] , 2003 .

[5]  Luís Paulo Santos,et al.  Instant Caching for Interactive Global Illumination , 2009, Comput. Graph. Forum.

[6]  Mary Beard,et al.  The Parthenon , 2002 .

[7]  Pascal Müller.  Procedural modeling of cities , 2006, SIGGRAPH Courses.

[8]  Sabry F. El-Hakim,et al.  Detailed 3D reconstruction of large-scale heritage sites with integrated techniques , 2004, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications.

[9]  Luc Van Gool,et al.  Populating Ancient Pompeii with Crowds of Virtual Romans , 2007, VAST.

[10]  Stefan Greuter,et al.  Real-time procedural generation of `pseudo infinite' cities , 2003, GRAPHITE '03.

[11]  Dimitri Plemenos,et al.  Collaborative Evaluation Using Multiple Clusters in a Declarative Design Environment , 2008, Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Computer Graphics.

[12]  Jeffrey Jacobson,et al.  The Virtual Egyptian Temple , 2005 .

[13]  Junjie Wu,et al.  TOP-K cosine similarity interesting pairs search , 2010, 2010 Seventh International Conference on Fuzzy Systems and Knowledge Discovery.

[14]  Georgios Papaioannou,et al.  The Ancient Olympic Games: Being Part of the Experience , 2004, VAST.

[15]  George Papagiannakis,et al.  Immersive VR decision training: telling interactive stories featuring advanced virtual human simulation technologies , 2003 .

[16]  Jean-Emmanuel Deschaud,et al.  A Fast and Accurate Plane Detection Algorithm for Large Noisy Point Clouds Using Filtered Normals and Voxel Growing , 2010 .

[17]  Martin Oliver,et al.  How can exploratory learning with games and simulations within the curriculum be most effectively evaluated? , 2006, Comput. Educ..

[18]  David G. Lowe,et al.  Object recognition from local scale-invariant features , 1999, Proceedings of the Seventh IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision.

[19]  N. Doulamis,et al.  Optimal Recursive Designers' Profile Estimation in Collaborative Declarative Environment , 2007 .

[20]  Stéphane Sanchez,et al.  A Level of Interaction Framework for Exploratory Learning with Characters in Virtual Environments , 2010 .

[21]  Michael Zyda,et al.  From visual simulation to virtual reality to games , 2005, Computer.

[22]  H. Peter Hofstee,et al.  Rome Reborn , 2008, SIGGRAPH '08.

[23]  Greg Jones,et al.  The Future of Virtual Museums: On-Line, Immersive, 3D Environments. , 2002 .

[24]  Dimitri Plemenos,et al.  Intelligent Computer Graphics 2010 , 2011 .

[25]  Karthik Ramani,et al.  Developing an engineering shape benchmark for CAD models , 2006, Comput. Aided Des..

[26]  Ioannis Stamos,et al.  New Methods for Digital Modeling of Historic Sites , 2003, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications.

[27]  Michael Macedonia,et al.  Games soldiers play , 2002 .

[28]  John Glauert,et al.  Tools for populating cultural heritage environments with interactive virtual humans, open digital cultural heritage systems , 2008 .

[29]  Cordelia Schmid,et al.  Improving Bag-of-Features for Large Scale Image Search , 2010, International Journal of Computer Vision.

[30]  K. Mardia,et al.  Statistical Shape Analysis , 1998 .

[31]  Oliver Deussen,et al.  Interactive Modeling of Plants , 1999, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications.

[32]  J. Fodor.  The Modularity of mind. An essay on faculty psychology , 1986 .

[33]  Bruce H. Thomas,et al.  User evaluation of see-through vision for mobile outdoor augmented reality , 2008, 2008 7th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality.

[34]  Jean Ponce,et al.  Computer Vision: A Modern Approach , 2002 .

[35]  Bryan P. Bergeron,et al.  Developing serious games , 2006 .

[36]  B. Bergeron.  Developing Serious Games (Game Development Series) , 2005 .

[37]  Bill Triggs,et al.  Histograms of oriented gradients for human detection , 2005, 2005 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR'05).

[38]  Jean-François Condotta,et al.  Qualitative Constraints Representation for the Time and Space in SAT , 2007 .