Fostering Engagement with Cultural Heritage Through Immersive VR and Gamification

Research on the I-Ulysses project was undertaken as part of the Digital Arts Humanities program between 2011 and 2015. An industrial/academic placement also took place in the third year, with the Computer Graphics Department (GV-2) at Trinity College Dublin, with Professor John Dingliana. During this placement, the author was given access to assets in Ogre from the Inside Joycean Dublin Project, a sister-project, and was tasked with gamifying them. The project was involved in a commercialisation spinout fast track (CFTD-1), with Enterprise Ireland’s Kevin Burke, in the third year, and the involvement of the Inagh Valley Trust.Digital games provide a recognised means of engagement and education when addressing challenges in educating and immersing individuals in their own heritages, and those of other cultures. Similarly, gamification techniques, commonly expressed as the addition of game elements to an existing process, have been successfully applied to augment existing resources and programmes. The many examples of gamification or serious games focusing on cultural heritage also highlight the potential benefits of using these principles for the purposes of supporting preservation and learning. In this chapter, we present I-Ulysses, a virtual-reality game designed to engage based around the notable work Ulysses by Irish author James Joyce. The rationale for the selection of Ulysses as a basis for the game’s content and design was two-fold; firstly because of its cultural impact within Ireland, and secondly as its content appeared well-suited to exploration as a virtual reality experience. Facets of gamification are explored in I-Ulysses through key mechanics, including a focus towards virtual worlds and crowd intelligence based on real-world data, to highlight how these principles can be employed for cultural heritage preservation and knowledge transfer. Through feedback obtained from focus groups interacting with I-Ulysses, it can be seen that the gamified mechanics presented through the lens of virtual reality provide an informative and educational guide to Ulysses that would engage and appeal to a wide audience

Understanding the Impact of the New Aesthetics and New Media Works on Future Curatorial Resource Responsibilities for Research Collections

The author examines the emerging impact of the works of the “New Aesthetic,” along with other works that have their genesis in the rapid technological changes of the last fifty-plus years. Consideration is given to the history of digital audio/visual works that will eventually be held by repositories of cultural heritage and how this history has, or has not, been documented. These creations have developed out of an environment of networked, shared, re-usable and re-purposed data. The article briefly examines how these works are utilized while looking at the future impact of the growing creation and use of complex, compound multimedia digital re- search and cultural collections as evidenced by augmented and virtual reality environments such as smartphone apps and Second Life.Ye

Proceedings of the International Workshop on EuroPLOT Persuasive Technology for Learning, Education and Teaching (IWEPLET 2013)

"This book contains the proceedings of the International Workshop on EuroPLOT Persuasive Technology for Learning, Education and Teaching (IWEPLET) 2013 which was held on 16.-17.September 2013 in Paphos (Cyprus) in conjunction with the EC-TEL conference. The workshop and hence the proceedings are divided in two parts: on Day 1 the EuroPLOT project and its results are introduced, with papers about the specific case studies and their evaluation. On Day 2, peer-reviewed papers are presented which address specific topics and issues going beyond the EuroPLOT scope. This workshop is one of the deliverables (D 2.6) of the EuroPLOT project, which has been funded from November 2010 – October 2013 by the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) of the European Commission through the Lifelong Learning Programme (LLL) by grant #511633. The purpose of this project was to develop and evaluate Persuasive Learning Objects and Technologies (PLOTS), based on ideas of BJ Fogg. The purpose of this workshop is to summarize the findings obtained during this project and disseminate them to an interested audience. Furthermore, it shall foster discussions about the future of persuasive technology and design in the context of learning, education and teaching. The international community working in this area of research is relatively small. Nevertheless, we have received a number of high-quality submissions which went through a peer-review process before being selected for presentation and publication. We hope that the information found in this book is useful to the reader and that more interest in this novel approach of persuasive design for teaching/education/learning is stimulated. We are very grateful to the organisers of EC-TEL 2013 for allowing to host IWEPLET 2013 within their organisational facilities which helped us a lot in preparing this event. I am also very grateful to everyone in the EuroPLOT team for collaborating so effectively in these three years towards creating excellent outputs, and for being such a nice group with a very positive spirit also beyond work. And finally I would like to thank the EACEA for providing the financial resources for the EuroPLOT project and for being very helpful when needed. This funding made it possible to organise the IWEPLET workshop without charging a fee from the participants.

Marketing in Online Businesses:The Case of Migrant Entrepreneurial Businesses in the UK

The study presents an empirical investigation of the marketing activities undertaken by online businesses owned by migrant entrepreneurs and is framed by the theoretical lens of entrepreneurial marketing. Key informant interviews are undertaken with 22 entrepreneurs operating online businesses in the UK and augmented by other sources of data. The study finds that the resources available to the entrepreneurs are shaped by their migrant heritage and that they draw on these resources to market their online businesses. The study also finds that, consistent with notions from entrepreneurial marketing, the online nature of their businesses allow the entrepreneurs to meet their own needs and preferences, which are also shaped by their migrant heritage. The study is important since it provides empirical evidence and a theoretically grounded understanding of how online businesses offer migrant entrepreneurs the opportunity to break out of the low growth, low margin, vacancy chain openings and enter high growth, high margin, post-industrial sectors

PRESERVATION FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS: DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES, DIGITALIZATION, AND EXPERIMENTS WITH CONSUMERS AS PRODUCERS OF INDUSTRIAL HERITAGE DOCUMENTATION

As digital documentation and recording technologies have evolved, so has the perception that they are segregated and intended primarily for use in either engineering/scientific or amateur/consumer applications. In contrast to this notion, the three-dimensionality afforded by these technologies differs only when considering them in the order of priorities; laser scanners and related image acquisition technologies document and visualize while inversely, consumer cameras visualize and document. This broad field of digital acquisition technologies has evolved into a heterogeneity of tools that all capture aspects of the physical world with a line drawn between them becoming blurred. Within this evolution, these tools are becoming less expensive, easier to use, and depending upon the application, can be operated successfully by individuals having modest or semi-professional skills. The proliferation of digital documentation technologies, the ease of their use, and the ability to share visual data on the internet allow us to examine the inclusion of digital documentation into the preservation management of historic industrial resource, pushing heritage to the digitalized culture

From Immersion’s Bleeding Edge to the Augmented Telegrapher: A Method for Creating Mixed Reality Games for Museum and Heritage Contexts

Immersive technologies can be used to broaden the possibilities of storytelling in heritage contexts, to enrich the ways in which museum collections are interpreted, and to facilitate more active engagement with history. To this end, as part of the United Kingdom's Industrial Strategy, new models, methods, and workflows are being developed to help realise the value of such technologies across the country. However, prior art shows that immersive technologies present particular challenges with respect to usability, uptake, on-boarding, sustainability, and authenticity. Towards addressing these challenges, a programme of action research has been established across a series of museums in Cornwall. Focusing upon the Augmented Telegrapher at Porthcurno Telegraph Museum, a co-designed social escape room experience that utilises the Microsoft HoloLens to simulate a telegraphy training exercise from World War 2, this article addresses what partnerships with smaller, rural establishments need to effectively realise the value of immersive technologies. Using the work of Erik Champion as a critical lens, the article shows how an iterative constructivist approach leveraging game design principles can underpin success. This is distilled into a set of recommended interaction blueprints and transdisciplinary working practices that will be of interest to curators, researchers, and serious game developers