Mixed Reality And Gamification For Cultural Heritage

This volume on virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) and gamification for cultural heritage offers an insightful introduction to the theories, development, recent applications and trends of the enabling technologies for mixed reality and gamified interaction in cultural heritage and creative industries in general. It has two main goals: serving as an introductory textbook to train beginning and experienced researchers in the field of interactive digital cultural heritage, and offering a novel platform for researchers in and across the culturally-related disciplines. To this end, it is divided into two sections following a pedagogical model developed by the focus group of the first EU Marie S. Curie Fellowship Initial Training Network on Digital Cultural Heritage (ITN-DCH): Section I describes recent advances in mixed reality enabling technologies, while section II presents the latest findings on interaction with 3D tangible and intangible digital cultural heritage. The sections include selected contributions from some of the most respected scholars, researchers and professionals in the fields of VR/AR, gamification, and digital heritage. This book is intended for all heritage professionals, researchers, lecturers and students who wish to explore the latest mixed reality and gamification technologies in the context of cultural heritage and creative industries. It pursues a pedagogic approach based on trainings, conferences, workshops and summer schools that the ITN-DCH fellows have been following in order to learn how to design next-generation virtual heritage applications, systems and services.

This book explains how designing, playing and modifying computer games, and understanding the theory behind them, can strengthen the area of digital humanities. This book aims to help digital humanities scholars understand both the issues and also advantages of game design, as well as encouraging them to extend the field of computer game studies, particularly in their teaching and research in the field of virtual heritage. By looking at re-occurring issues in the design, playtesting and interface of serious games and game-based learning for cultural heritage and interactive history, this book highlights the importance of visualisation and self-learning in game studies and how this can intersect with digital humanities. It also asks whether such theoretical concepts can be applied to practical learning situations. It will be of particular interest to those who wish to investigate how games and virtual environments can be used in teaching and research to critique issues and topics in the humanities, particularly in virtual heritage and interactive history.

This book provides extensive research into the use of augmented reality in the three interconnected and overlapping fields of the tourism industry, museum exhibitions, and cultural heritage. It is written by a virtual team of 50 leading researchers and practitioners from 16 countries around the world. The authors explore the opportunities and challenges of augmented reality applications, their current status and future trends, informal learning and heritage preservation, mixed reality environments and immersive installations, cultural heritage education and tourism promotion, visitors with special needs, and emerging post-COVID-19 museums and heritage sites. Augmented Reality in Tourism, Museums and Heritage: A New Technology to Inform and Entertain is essential reading not only for researchers, application developers, educators, museum curators, tourism and cultural heritage promoters, but also for students (both graduates and undergraduates) and anyone who is interested in the efficient and practical use of augmented reality technology.

Virtual heritage has been explained as virtual reality applied to cultural heritage, but this definition only scratches the surface of the fascinating applications, tools and challenges of this fast-changing interdisciplinary field. This book provides an accessible but concise edited coverage of the main topics, tools and issues in virtual heritage. Leading international scholars have provided chapters to explain current issues in accuracy and precision; challenges in adopting advanced animation techniques; shows how archaeological learning can be developed in Minecraft; they propose mixed reality is conceptual rather than just technical; they explore how useful Linked Open Data can be for art history; explain how accessible photogrammetry can be but also ethical and practical issues for applying at scale; provide insight into how to provide interaction in museums involving the wider public; and describe issues in evaluating virtual heritage projects not often addressed even in scholarly papers. The book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in museum studies, digital archaeology, heritage studies, architectural history and modelling, virtual environments.

This book provides insights into the state of the art of digital cultural heritage using computer graphics, image processing, computer vision, visualization and reconstruction, virtual and augmented reality and serious games. It aims at covering the emergent approaches for digitization and preservation of Cultural Heritage, both in its tangible and intangible facets. Advancements in Digital Cultural Heritage research have been abundant in recent years covering a wide assortment of topics, ranging from visual data acquisition, pre-processing, classification, analysis and synthesis, 3D modelling and reconstruction, semantics and symbolic representation, metadata description, repository and archiving, to new forms of interactive and personalized presentation, visualization and immersive experience provision via advanced computer graphics, interactive virtual and augmented environments, serious games and digital storytelling. Different aspects pertaining to visual computing with regard to tangible (books, images, paintings, manuscripts, uniforms, maps, artefacts, archaeological sites, monuments) and intangible (e.g. dance and performing arts, folklore, theatrical performances) cultural heritage preservation, documentation, protection and promotion are covered, including rendering and procedural modelling of cultural heritage assets, keyword spotting in old documents, drone mapping and airborne photogrammetry, underwater recording and reconstruction, gamification, visitor engagement, animated storytelling, analysis of choreographic patterns, and many more. The book brings together and targets researchers from the domains of computing, engineering, archaeology and the arts, and aims at underscoring the potential for cross-fertilization and collaboration among these communities.

With the proliferation of technology, science became a medium used to create and interpret heritage in a way that redefines human achievements. The recent advances in technology are providing us with a variety of tools aimed at exploring, experiencing and interacting with heritage in a completely new way, which was unimaginable up until a few decades ago. Suddenly, heritage has become accessible and exciting to those who might not have previously considered it interesting. This book presents a selection of approaches in various topics such as artificial intelligence, gamification, and virtual and augmented reality, and uses practical examples to show how they can be deployed in real-world scenarios. As such, it inspires a wide variety of stakeholders and helps them experience our common heritage through a new lens.

This book constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings of the Final Conference of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Initial Training Network for Digital Cultural Heritage, held in Olimje, Slovenia, in May 2017. The 29 revised full papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 198 submissions. They focus on interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary research concerning cutting edge cultural heritage informatics, -physics, -chemistry and -engineering and the use of technology for the representation, documentation, archiving, protection, preservation and communication of cultural heritage knowledge.

This is the second of two comprehensive volumes that provide a thorough and multi-faceted research into the emerging field of augmented reality games and consider a wide range of its major issues. These first ever research monographs on augmented reality games have been written by a team of 70 leading researchers, practitioners and artists from 20 countries. Volume II explores the most important and challenging issues that have been raised by the use of the Augmented Reality approach and technology in the gamification of education, healthcare, medicine and art. The volume deals with a systematic analysis of educational augmented reality games, their use for health promotion in old age and for improving people’s well-being, the gamification of augmented reality art and immersive reading experiences, among other topics. Augmented Reality Games II is essential reading not only for researchers, practitioners, game developers and artists, but also for students (graduates and undergraduates) and all those interested in the rapidly developing area of augmented reality games.