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

A Data-driven Approach Towards Human-robot Collaborative Problem Solving in a Shared Space

We are developing a system for human-robot communication that enables people to communicate with robots in a natural way and is focused on solving problems in a shared space. Our strategy for developing this system is fundamentally data-driven: we use data from multiple input sources and train key components with various machine learning techniques. We developed a web application that is collecting data on how two humans communicate to accomplish a task, as well as a mobile laboratory that is instrumented to collect data on how two humans communicate to accomplish a task in a physically shared space. The data from these systems will be used to train and fine-tune the second stage of our system, in which the robot will be simulated through software. A physical robot will be used in the final stage of our project. We describe these instruments, a test-suite and performance metrics designed to evaluate and automate the data gathering process as well as evaluate an initial data set.Comment: 2017 AAAI Fall Symposium on Natural Communication for Human-Robot Collaboratio

An Integrated Framework for AI Assisted Level Design in 2D Platformers

The design of video game levels is a complex and critical task. Levels need to elicit fun and challenge while avoiding frustration at all costs. In this paper, we present a framework to assist designers in the creation of levels for 2D platformers. Our framework provides designers with a toolbox (i) to create 2D platformer levels, (ii) to estimate the difficulty and probability of success of single jump actions (the main mechanics of platformer games), and (iii) a set of metrics to evaluate the difficulty and probability of completion of entire levels. At the end, we present the results of a set of experiments we carried out with human players to validate the metrics included in our framework.Comment: Submitted to the IEEE Game Entertainment and Media Conference 201

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