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

Authoring virtual crowds: a survey

Recent advancements in crowd simulation unravel a wide range of functionalities for virtual agents, delivering highly-realistic,natural virtual crowds. Such systems are of particular importance to a variety of applications in fields such as: entertainment(e.g., movies, computer games); architectural and urban planning; and simulations for sports and training. However, providingtheir capabilities to untrained users necessitates the development of authoring frameworks. Authoring virtual crowds is acomplex and multi-level task, varying from assuming control and assisting users to realise their creative intents, to deliveringintuitive and easy to use interfaces, facilitating such control. In this paper, we present a categorisation of the authorable crowdsimulation components, ranging from high-level behaviours and path-planning to local movements, as well as animation andvisualisation. We provide a review of the most relevant methods in each area, emphasising the amount and nature of influencethat the users have over the final result. Moreover, we discuss the currently available authoring tools (e.g., graphical userinterfaces, drag-and-drop), identifying the trends of early and recent work. Finally, we suggest promising directions for futureresearch that mainly stem from the rise of learning-based methods, and the need for a unified authoring framework.This work has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska Curie grant agreement No 860768 (CLIPE project). This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No 739578 and the Government of the Republic of Cyprus through the Deputy Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digital PolicyPeer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

La recreación de una escena urbana medieval con personajes inteligentes: pasos para crear el escenario completo

[EN] From historical advice to 3D modeling and programming, the process of reconstructing cultural heritage sites populated with virtual inhabitants is lengthy and expensive, and it requires a large set of skills and tools. These constraints make it increasingly difficult, however not unattainable, for small archaeological sites to build their own simulations. In this article, we describe our attempt to minimize this scenario. We describe a framework that makes use of free tools or campus licenses and integrates the curricular work of students in academia. We present the details of methods and tools used in the pipeline of the construction of the virtual simulation of the medieval village of Mértola in the south of Portugal. We report on: a) the development of a lightweight model of the village, including houses and terrain, and b) its integration in a game engine in order to c) include a virtual population of autonomous inhabitants in a simulation running in real-time.[ES] El proceso de reconstrucción en 3D de lugareshistóricospoblados con habitantes virtuales es complejo, y requiere de un gran conjunto de habilidades y herramientas. Estos procesos incluyen elasesoramiento histórico, el modelado 3D, ola programación y estas limitaciones hacen que sea muy difícil construir sus propias simulacionesenpequeños equipos arqueológicos. En este artículo, describimos nuestro intento de minimizar este escenario. Se describe cómo integramos el trabajo curricular de los estudiantes en la academia, haciendouso de herramientas libres olicencias de campus. Se presentan los detalles de los métodos y de las herramientas utilizadas en el processo de construcción de la simulación virtual del pueblo medieval de Mértola, en el sur de Portugal. Se presenta: a)el desarrollo de los modelos ligeros 3D en el pueblo, incluyendo las habitaciones y el terreno, yb) su integración en unmotor de juego con el fin de c)incluir la población virtual de habitantes autónomos, en una simulación que pueda ser ejecutadaen tiempo real.This project was funded by the Horizon 2020: EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation under Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 655226 (fellowship to Dr. Rui Filipe Antunes). We knowledge the support of BioISI R&D unit (UID/MULTI/04046/2013), Portugal, the information provided by the team of Campo Arqueológico de Mértola and the students that produced the models and scenarios. Proofreading by Piki Productions.Cláudio, AP.; Carmo, MB.; De Carvalho, AA.; Xavier, W.; Antunes, RF. (2017). Recreating a medieval urban scene with virtual intelligent characters: steps to create the complete scenario. Virtual Archaeology Review. 8(17):31-41. https://doi.org/10.4995/var.2017.6557SWORD314181

Populating Ancient Pompeii with Crowds of Virtual Romans

Pompeii was a Roman city, destroyed and completely buried during an eruption of the volcano Mount Vesuvius. We have revived its past by creating a 3D model of its previous appearance and populated it with crowds of Virtual Romans. In this paper, we detail the process, based on archaeological data, to simulate ancient Pompeii life in real time. In a first step, an annotated city model is generated using procedural modelling. These annotations contain semantic data, such as land usage, building age, and window/door labels. In a second phase, the semantics are automatically interpreted to populate the scene and trigger special behaviors in the crowd, depending on the location of the characters. Finally, we describe the system pipeline, which allows for the simulation of thousands of Virtual Romans in real time

Protecting critical infrastructure with games technology

It is widely recognised that there is a considerable gap in the protection of the national infrastructure. Trying to identify what is in fact ‘critical’ is proving to be very difficult as threats constantly evolve. An interactive prototyping tool is useful in playing out scenarios and simulating the effect of change, however existing simulators in the critical infrastructure area are typically limited in the visual representation and interactivity. To remedy this we propose the use of games technology. Through its use, critical infrastructure scenarios can be rapidly constructed, tested, and refined. In this paper, we highlight the features of games technology and associated tools to creating immersive simulations of critical infrastructure and present our implementation

Protecting Critical Infrastructure with Games Technology

It is widely recognised that there is a considerable gap in the protection of the national infrastructure. Trying to identify what is in fact ‘critical’ is proving to be very difficult as threats constantly evolve. An interactive prototyping tool is useful in playing out scenarios and simulating the effect of change, however existing simulators in the critical infrastructure area are typically limited in the visual representation and interactivity. To remedy this we propose the use of games technology. Through its use, critical infrastructure scenarios can be rapidly constructed, tested, and refined. In this paper, we highlight the features of games technology and associated tools to creating immersive simulations of critical infrastructure and present our implementation

Real-time motion planning, navigation, and behavior for large crowds of virtual humans

Simulating crowds in real time is a challenging problem that touches many different aspects of Computer Graphics: rendering, animation, path planning, behavior, etc. Our work has mainly focused on two particular aspects of real-time crowds: motion planning and behavior. Real-time crowd motion planning requires fast, realistic methods for path planning as well as obstacle avoidance. The difficulty to find a satisfying trade-off between efficiency and believability is particularly challenging, and prior techniques tend to focus on a single approach. We have developed two approaches to completely solve crowd motion planning in real time. The first one is a hybrid architecture able to handle the path planning of thousands of pedestrians in real time, while ensuring dynamic collision avoidance. The scalability of this architecture allows to interactively create and distribute regions of varied interest, where motion planning is ruled by different algorithms. Practically, regions of high interest are governed by a long-term potential field-based approach, while other zones exploit a graph of the environment and short-term avoidance techniques. Our architecture also ensures pedestrian motion continuity when switching between motion planning algorithms. Tests and comparisons show that our architecture is able to realistically plan motion for thousands of characters in real time, and in varied environments. Our second approach is based on the concept of motion patches [Lee et al., 2006], that we extend to densely populate large environments. We build a population from a set of blocks containing a pre-computed local crowd simulation. Each block is called a crowd patch. We address the problem of computing patches, assembling them to create virtual environments (VEs), and controlling their content to answer designers' needs. Our major contribution is to provide a drastic lowering of computation needs for simulating a virtual crowd at runtime. We can thus handle dense populations in large-scale environments with performances never reached so far. Our results illustrate the real-time population of a potentially infinite city with realistic and varied crowds interacting with each other and their environment. Enforcing intelligent autonomous behaviors in crowds is a difficult problem, for most algorithms are too computationally expensive to be exploited on large crowds. Our work has been focused on finding solutions that can simulate intelligent behaviors of characters, while remaining computationally inexpensive. We contribute to crowd behaviors by developing situation-based behaviors, i.e., behaviors triggered depending on the position of a pedestrian. We have also extended our crowd motion planning architecture with an algorithm able to simulate group behaviors, which much enhances the user perception of the watched scene