Interactive Edutainment: A Technologically Enhanced Theme Park

Heraklion Christmas Castle is a joint effort between ICS-FORTH and the Municipality of Heraklion-Crete (Municipal Public Service Enterprise of Heraklion), trying to pioneer and be innovative in the presentation of Christmas customs and ideas by creating a festive neighborhood governed by interactive technology. The approach followed by this research work was to employ interactive systems to give a feeling of Christmas to children and adults through the combination of education and entertainment. This work presents the innovative systems designed and developed for the Christmas Castle to augment and enhance the festive spirit through multimodal interaction techniques, such as virtual environments, kinesthetic interaction, physical object identification and serious games. All the systems were designed and integrated within art artefacts (special constructions) that match the Christmas look-and-feel and provide a user-centric design.

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