Serious Games in Cultural Heritage

Although the widespread use of gaming for leisure purposes has been well documented, the use of games to support cultural heritage purposes, such as historical teaching and learning, or for enhancing museum visits, has been less well considered. The state-of-the-art in serious game technology is identical to that of the state-of-the-art in entertainment games technology. As a result the field of serious heritage games concerns itself with recent advances in computer games, real-time computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the main strengths of serious gaming applications may be generalised as being in the areas of communication, visual expression of information, collaboration mechanisms, interactivity and entertainment. In this report, we will focus on the state-of-the-art with respect to the theories, methods and technologies used in serious heritage games. We provide an overview of existing literature of relevance to the domain, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the described methods and point out unsolved problems and challenges. In addition, several case studies illustrating the application of methods and technologies used in cultural heritage are presented

Developing serious games for cultural heritage: a state-of-the-art review

Although the widespread use of gaming for leisure purposes has been well documented, the use of games to support cultural heritage purposes, such as historical teaching and learning, or for enhancing museum visits, has been less well considered. The state-of-the-art in serious game technology is identical to that of the state-of-the-art in entertainment games technology. As a result, the field of serious heritage games concerns itself with recent advances in computer games, real-time computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the main strengths of serious gaming applications may be generalised as being in the areas of communication, visual expression of information, collaboration mechanisms, interactivity and entertainment. In this report, we will focus on the state-of-the-art with respect to the theories, methods and technologies used in serious heritage games. We provide an overview of existing literature of relevance to the domain, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the described methods and point out unsolved problems and challenges. In addition, several case studies illustrating the application of methods and technologies used in cultural heritage are presented

Experimental Approaches to the Composition of Interactive Video Game Music

This project explores experimental approaches and strategies to the composition of interactive music for the medium of video games. Whilst music in video games has not enjoyed the technological progress that other aspects of the software have received, budgets expand and incomes from releases grow. Music is now arguably less interactive than it was in the 1990’s, and whilst graphics occupy large amounts of resources and development time, audio does not garner the same attention. This portfolio develops strategies and audio engines, creating music using the techniques of aleatoric composition, real-time remixing of existing work, and generative synthesisers. The project created music for three ‘open-form’ games : an example of the racing genre (Kart Racing Pro); an arena-based first-person shooter (Counter-Strike : Source); and a real-time strategy title (0 A.D.). These games represent a cross-section of ‘sandbox’- type games on the market, as well as all being examples of games with open-ended or open-source code

Simulation modelling and visualisation: toolkits for building artificial worlds

Simulations users at all levels make heavy use of compute resources to drive computational simulations for greatly varying applications areas of research using different simulation paradigms. Simulations are implemented in many software forms, ranging from highly standardised and general models that run in proprietary software packages to ad hoc hand-crafted simulations codes for very specific applications. Visualisation of the workings or results of a simulation is another highly valuable capability for simulation developers and practitioners. There are many different software libraries and methods available for creating a visualisation layer for simulations, and it is often a difficult and time-consuming process to assemble a toolkit of these libraries and other resources that best suits a particular simulation model. We present here a break-down of the main simulation paradigms, and discuss differing toolkits and approaches that different researchers have taken to tackle coupled simulation and visualisation in each paradigm

Research on real-time physics-based deformation for haptic-enabled medical simulation

This study developed a multiple effective visuo-haptic surgical engine to handle a variety of surgical manipulations in real-time. Soft tissue models are based on biomechanical experiment and continuum mechanics for greater accuracy. Such models will increase the realism of future training systems and the VR/AR/MR implementations for the operating room

Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

Synthesized cooperative strategies for intelligent multi-robots in a real-time distributed environment : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Computer Science at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand

In the robot soccer domain, real-time response usually curtails the development of more complex Al-based game strategies, path-planning and team cooperation between intelligent agents. In light of this problem, distributing computationally intensive algorithms between several machines to control, coordinate and dynamically assign roles to a team of robots, and allowing them to communicate via a network gives rise to real-time cooperation in a multi-robotic team. This research presents a myriad of algorithms tested on a distributed system platform that allows for cooperating multi- agents in a dynamic environment. The test bed is an extension of a popular robot simulation system in the public domain developed at Carnegie Mellon University, known as TeamBots. A low-level real-time network game protocol using TCP/IP and UDP were incorporated to allow for a conglomeration of multi-agent to communicate and work cohesively as a team. Intelligent agents were defined to take on roles such as game coach agent, vision agent, and soccer player agents. Further, team cooperation is demonstrated by integrating a real-time fuzzy logic-based ball-passing algorithm and a fuzzy logic algorithm for path planning. Keywords Artificial Intelligence, Ball Passing, the coaching system, Collaborative, Distributed Multi-Agent, Fuzzy Logic, Role Assignmen