Mobile graphics: SIGGRAPH Asia 2017 course

Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

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

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

An Empirical Evaluation of the Performance of Real-Time Illumination Approaches: Realistic Scenes in Augmented Reality

Augmented, Virtual, and Mixed Reality (AR/VR/MR) systems have been developed in general, with many of these applications having accomplished significant results, rendering a virtual object in the appropriate illumination model of the real environment is still under investigation. The entertainment industry has presented an astounding outcome in several media form, albeit the rendering process has mostly been done offline. The physical scene contains the illumination information which can be sampled and then used to render the virtual objects in real-time for realistic scene. In this paper, we evaluate the accuracy of our previous and current developed systems that provide real-time dynamic illumination for coherent interactive augmented reality based on the virtual object’s appearance in association with the real world and related criteria. The system achieves that through three simultaneous aspects. (1) The first is to estimate the incident light angle in the real environment using a live-feed 360∘ camera instrumented on an AR device. (2) The second is to simulate the reflected light using two routes: (a) global cube map construction and (b) local sampling. (3) The third is to define the shading properties for the virtual object to depict the correct lighting assets and suitable shadowing imitation. Finally, the performance efficiency is examined in both routes of the system to reduce the general cost. Also, The results are evaluated through shadow observation and user study