Gala Roadmap Contribution
Name of contributors:
SIG/TC/WP/:
Name
Contribution
Michela Mortara
Chiara
Eva
Catalano
Minica
HouryPanchetti
Date
This contribution is the starting point for the input we need for the fourth year. You can hopefully
use what you already have delivered (if you delivered) and what you have produced as GALA work or
other related work.
It is not the idea that you need to develop new texts. What matters is the quality of the content.
A main focus this year will be to connect the input from the SIGs with that of the TC, so that these
are stronger interlinked, and then in a second step cluster this input to the main field of R&D,
Impact (where we have the learning and integration in education and training) and business and
market.
You find the deadlines in the presentation from the Rome meeting. Please keep them
The input should be team work
It is important that all sig members contribute- input from only one person is not so good.
Vision for SG 2020
The vision below is the one we are working with at the moment. It might be slightly changed,
depending on the feedback we will collect from different part of the roadmap, but the main content
will remain.
By 2020, SGs will have become a useful and reliable tool for learning and training. Educators and
trainers will be able to exploit catalogues and databases of SGs in order to select the most suited
games for achieving precise learning objectives, also according to specific user needs. Authoring
tools will be widely in use, and will allow/foster/support customization of contents and learning
procedures.
SG will not only be used to motivate students to study new topics, but also to efficiently do
exercises and practice application of learned theory and to verify acquisition of knowledge and skills.
More complex and accurate gamified simulations will be available in order to allow free
experimentation with different degrees of guidance, according to the actual user profile and learning
goals. Teacher supervision and guidance and peer competition and collaboration will be targeted
and integrated in games through appropriate mechanics.
In 2020, SGs will feature intelligent user interaction (UI), supporting natural means such as voice and
gestures, in order to facilitate access to information and services, reduce sensorial overload and
realistically simulate the actual conditions of use (e.g., haptic forces for manual works). Several SGs
will support interactions in the physical-world. Real world interactions - that are key to support
knowledge transferability and field practice, training and verification - will take particular advantage
of mobile computing and communication technologies, with ever thinner, more ergonomic and
lightweight tools, such as tablets and real-world, sensor-enriched Internet-enabled objects.
Advanced neuro-physiological sensors will allow a better monitoring of the user and understanding
of his status and behaviour. Exploiting continuous information from user monitoring and stealth
assessment, the UI will be able to adapt in real-time contents and presentation modalities to the
different user needs and preferences. Adaptivity will be enabled also by an extensive use of tools
dedicated to the design, configuration and adaptation of SGs, so that teachers and trainers will be
able to specify the adaptation rules and modalities, also according to their different educational
strategies.
Learner assessment will be accurate along several dimensions and in real time, enabling immediate
(actually depending on the player’s needs and the educator’s goals) and formative feedback.
SGs will be built as dynamic sets of mesh services. A comprehensive framework of services (including
learning analytics, dialogue management, virtual characters’ emotion management, etc.) will be
available in a cloud, for efficient and effective development of SGs, featuring extensive and finegrain interoperability. Semantics will play an important role in this regard. All the services will expose
an easy-to-use authoring tool, so that pedagogy and domain experts will be able to easily include
their knowledge into new instances of various SG formats that will be defined in order to make
development of SGs much more efficient. In general, methodologies (and related supporting tools)
will be available for supporting design, in particular by suggesting and supporting a proper mapping
among game mechanics, learning goals, user profiles, content typologies and information sources.
Thanks to these new development support tools, the new generation serious games will be set in
highly realistic and information-rich environments, also interfacing databases and real-time
information repositories, where quests/investigations can be spurred and experiments performed
safely and accurately. This will lead to new learning scenarios, featuring collaboration and
competition.
Currently, good strategy SGs typically target problem solving, planning and hypotheses verification.
However, better support is needed for higher-order thinking (e.g., strategic thinking, evaluation of
alternatives, analysis and interpretation of events, preparation research question), also including
creativity. We expect that this will be achieved through very accurate simulation environments (with
properly designed gamified upper layers), combining several detailed system models from
heterogeneous sources. Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), in particular concerning simulation of
(single) human behaviour are needed, in order to allow creation of living worlds, populated with
realistic or at least credible non-player characters that are particularly necessary for complex
environments, in particular related to human sciences and the impact of technologies. The
difference between a fiction digital environment and the actual reality will need to be addressed in
the whole actual educational process, in order to avoid mis-understandings and misuse of tools and
knowledge.
We expect that good SGs will feature mechanics that favour real-world interactions with other
people, in particular the teacher and other students, since human relationships are key in a balanced
education process. It is important that SGs for education are able to support the growth of a person
under the guidance and with the help of an adult, which is a critical aspect of current education. SGs
for training, for which the overall formative aspect (personal growth) is limited, will not need this
additional layer of complexity and could simply target a transfer/verification of knowledge.
Given their appeal, we expect that SGs will be used in particular in the leisure time, thus allowing
people to learn or become aware of topics that they would have otherwise ignored.
Achieving all the above requires the exploitation and development of advanced technologies in
fields such as Artificial Intelligence, Human-Computer Interaction, modelling and simulation,
neurosciences, virtual reality, etc. The needs and requirements from users and stakeholders in the
various target application domains (e.g., education, business, manufacturing, healthcare, etc.) will
need to be carefully elicited and addressed. Also, accurate and detailed studies are needed on the
design of game formats, mechanics and dynamics, that are able to effectively join educational and
entertainment goals (a very difficult balance to achieve) in meaningful and compelling wholes (i.e.,
the actual SGs).
This vision represents a significant complement to the current educational offer, which will anyway
need to be preserved, both because games typically tend to privilege procedural knowledge and
because gamification has drawbacks (e.g., related to extrinsic motivation, development of a
utilitarian/edonistic/competitive mentality) that must be addressed in a balanced educational
environment.
1) Identify the state of the art (SoA) for your SIG- please take a look at what you delivered last
time and update that for those – if it is complete you do not need to complete it again
List the main topics in your SG area and describe the SoA/ current status of SGs (giving sound
explanations, backed by appropriate literature references) in the Table. You can optionally identify
any gaps in the SoA – these may form the basis for research needs/challenges. The information can
be prepared by updating and properly structuring the text in your annual reports.
Topic 1
Relevance/priorit
y (on a 1-5 scale)
SoA/ SG Current
Status description
(with references)
High quality and faithful reproduction of culturally significant artefacts in
games
3
Many of the recent adventure games are set in 3D. One motivation for this
point is to support situated cognition by offering a proper
environment/context where the learning process can take place [VE06].
The player has to interact with objects in the environment to advance in
the game and this mechanism triggers motivation and active construction
of knowledge [FAGM11]. 3D Virtual Worlds make the experience more
interesting and compelling.
When a game is set in 3D, the polygon count of each model is typically very
low in order not to slow down the rendering of the scene at real time. The
corresponding shape of the object is indeed very coarse. Some techniques
are used to improve the look of the object, such as bump maps, light maps
and textures. However, these are just evident tricks when an object is
inspected in detail (e.g. zoomed and/or rotated). As an example here we
show a model of a bed from www.turbosquid.com, a repository selling 3D
models in various format, used also by professional game designers. This
one in particular is certified on the site as “game-ready”. The model
consists of 898 polygons and 478 vertices.
We believe that there is much potential in integrating digital cultural heritage
data with serious games. However, especially in archaeological, artistic and
historical applications, at least some some artefacts, buildings or sites must be
faithfully represented in the game environment. To this aim the real data of
the subject have to be acquired (3D scanning) to reconstruct its digital
counterpart, rather than manually design a model which only resembles the
appearance of the real one (details can be found in [CS08]).
Models coming from 3D scanning can reach very high resolutions. To make a
comparison, a full definition model of an archaeological artefact, the Tavola di
Polcevera, consists of over 1 million vertices. A high definition model used for a
multimedia application consists of 135.000 vertices; this size has been judged a
good compromise between interactive response and level of detail.
Managing multiple high definition models in a real-time application is not
feasible at the moment; on the other hand, a substantial amount of high
resolution cultural models are already available through many initiatives in the
digitisation of cultural heritage, at local, national and EU level. Coupling such
rich content with games would valorise repositories of digitalised cultural
heritage data, of which it is likely that the numbers will increase in the future,
as more and more individual museums are working to open up their collections
digitally.
Topic 2
Relevance/priority
(on a 1-5 scale)
SoA/ SG Current
Status description
(with references)
Smart management of digital cultural content
4
Multimedia applications have become popular in the presentation of CH. Many
museums offer some simple applications, e.g. videos, which involve digital
media and little or no interaction. Such tools do not really integrate different
media together and certainly do not adapt dynamically the specific pieces of
content, for example adapting the models within a virtual tour according to the
type of audience.
This challenge is related to the documentation of different media, which
suggests interdisciplinary issues in connection with the semantic web
community. In fact, efficiently sharing, searching, and reusing in particular 3D
data, also in networked environments, has been proven to be fundamental,
together with the preservation of the annotation according to the specific
application.
The annotation of a 3D object is central to the documentation. By 3D
annotation we mean the process by which a text-based piece of information is
linked/ associated to the object and its parts and stored for subsequent uses.
The annotation is semantic because (or when) the text associated is
meaningful in some context, and used for understanding and storing
information about the object, which is not explicit or not contained in the
geometric data.
A first attempt in cataloguing 3D cultural artefacts has been done by
Europeana1, the European Digital Library, where the 3D content initially lacked
of a specific management. But the importance of such an issue became clear
soon and specific actions such as 3D-COFORM and CARARE2 have been started
to establish 3D documentation as an affordable, practical and effective
mechanism for long term documentation of tangible cultural heritage and
enable access to 3D and virtual reality content through Europeana,
respectively.
Virtual presentation of the Cultural Heritage is envisioned as one of the
emerging applications to largely benefit from the Web 2.0 paradigm of the
Internet use. As proved by the MOSAICA(www.mosaica-project.eu) project,
coupling cultural content with semantic web technologies not only allows users
to collaboratively collect, annotate and organize the content of interest, but
also to use this knowledge and apply their creativity for the benefit of all, thus
1
www.europeana.eu
2
www.carare.eu
empowering communities to continue the Cultural Heritage into the digital
age.
Topic 3
Relevance/priority
(on a 1-5 scale)
SoA/ SG Current
Status description
(with references)
HCI for personalized CH experience
5
In-museum games have to cope with the waiting time of players not to create
queues along the visit. For this reason, a game to be deployed in that context
must balance the length and complexity of the game with the number of
players who can be involved at the same time. Detailed historical
reconstructions and mechanics beyond simple puzzle usually address a large
number of people contemporarily; but then, how to manage interaction
between the application and such a large number of players, or adaptation?
The sensitive issue here is to move from a current mass-oriented access to
museums, art galleries, historic places, and so on, to an approach centred at
the individual. This can come true with NUI (Natural User Interfaces), based on
a paradigm where the player is taken into account according to its specificity
(interests, physiological, behavioural and social features), and with which he
will be the leader of his explorations and initiatives.
The use of Natural User Interfaces has widely spread for the last decade (see
the GALA Workpackage 2 Deliverable D2.1 T2.4 Human-Computer Interaction,
Research Field Report, for a very detailed state of the art). Two main
technologies are relevant and efficient for cultural heritage Serious Games: the
Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality (mostly adopted in museum or
archaeological environments, respectively) and HCI/NUI solutions have been
developed correspondingly.
Concerning VR, The Oculus Rift3 is a next-generation virtual reality headset
designed for immersive gaming The Oculus Rift allows users to step into the
game, providing an immersive, stereoscopic 3D experience with a huge field of
view—110 degrees diagonally—and overcomes the latency problems that have
plagued previous VR gaming headsets, where movement in the game lags
behind movement of the player’s head. Development kits for the Oculus Rift,
which game developers can use to create Oculus-ready VR applications and
interactive content is available since March 2013 and the producers have also
partnered with Unity Technologies. Since 2013, the list of planned, confirmed
and available (entertainment) games with Oculus Rift support is already rich4.
Concerning AR, a non-expensive system named MARVINS (Mobile Augmented
Reality Visible Navigation System) is a mobile interactive interface between the
user and the Internet or other information access points. Head-mounted
displays (e.g. Sony Glasstron) interfaced with MARVINS provide the user with
an AR experience where he/she can selectively display any desired information
allocated at some remote server (e.g. a museum server). A tracking system is
used to provide orientation and navigation possibilities. The system renders
the eye-screen opaque for viewing displayed information, as well as
transparent for viewing with the naked eye, which can be adjusted accordingly.
3
http://www.oculusvr.com/
4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_Oculus_Rift_support
Specific display techniques, like stereographic and multiscreen displays are
required in planetariums, art centres and domes, which enable an immersive
360 degree-vision of 3D worlds. The dome of the Society of Art of Montréal is
an example of such complex systems (http://www.sat.qc.ca/). Three different
set-ups are employed there: the Panoscope 360°, the Panodome and the
Cyclorama (see figure below). The advantage of these systems is that they
considerably simplify the production and presentation of panoramic and
immersive content.
The real-time VR Dome Theatre of the Foundation of Hellenic World located in
Athens is operated by 6 pairs of seamlessly blended projectors, each pair
providing a stereo image for one of the six tiles in which an hemispherical
surface of 13 Mt. in diameter is ideally subdivided [CAO09]. Each projector is
powered by one dedicated PC in a cluster providing parallel execution.
Interaction with the audience is possible through 2-axis joystick with analogue
values and 4 buttons with discrete values for each of the 132 seats of the
theatre.
Tangible User Interfaces (TUI) like touchscreen tablets and tables, have
become ubiquitous and therefore have also reached the gaming world and
provide RV and AR applications. Thanks to the touchscreen technologies which
are more intuitive, gameplay style has improved and enables players to live
experiences that would never be possible to create with former game input
devices like joysticks and buttons. For instance, the “Dessine-moi un
Mammouth” (Let’s draw a Mammoth!) game designed for the Gargas caves in
the French Pyrénées (http://www.numerigrottes-pyrenees.fr/p-parcoursnestploria_fr.htm) is an interactive AR application developed by [DCC07] and
studied in [DAR09]. It provides the gamer a funny experience of line drawings,
depicting prehistoric animals, directly onto a tracking board where real high
resolution photographs of the prehistoric engravements are displayed. The
same task made with a single mouse would have been far much painful.
Topic
Relevance/priority
(on a 1-5 scale)
SoA/ SG Current
Status description
(with references)
Maximize the engagement in cultural visits
3
Many applications in the H&H sector deal with visits to cultural spaces, like
archaeological sites, museums, exhibitions, historical cities, and so on. Games
can either involve the player in a completely virtual visit, or offer an
augmented experience during a real visit, or simply motivate the user to reach
physical places of interest through a reward mechanism.
In such applications, mostly used in the informal setting by a wide range of
user profiles, the main goal is that of engaging the public into the cultural
content. While in the case of virtual visit engaging with the game and with the
cultural content nearly coincide, in the other cases the game should drive and
keep the attention to the real setting.
Engagement can be determined by various factors, such as the realism of the
environment, the storytelling, the reward mechanisms, the social dimension
and the characteristics of the device for user interface.
In virtual visits the realism of the environment is very important for
engagement, as it lets the player feels the simulated world is perceptually
convincing. The player feels that he or she is really "there" (see topic 3) and
that a simulated world looks and feels "real" (see topic 1). At present, the
realism of the environment is partial ( topic 1) and games achieve “credibility”
rather than full realism. As concerns geographic adherence to reality, only few
SGs use geolocalization (one is TiE). There are games based on the geographic
power that Google Earth brings to browsers and desktops, geography quizzes
(e.g. Geoguessr), flight and ship simulators, races, and commercial games like
Grand Theft Auto, but no real serious games.
Concerning augmented real visits, mobile devices and multimodal interfaces
can be used to access shared spaces populated by digital artefacts, while
remaining grounded in the real world; players are able to reference cultural
artefacts in situ, allowing for the superimposing of design elements onto
images or objects in real world locations. An example is the game A la
recherche de l'empreinte perdu (seeking the lost footprint): equipped with a
logbook and a smartphone, players visit the Landes Lanvaux in Saint-JeanBrévelay et Locminé looking for clues with the help of residents. The journey is
punctuated by 26 steps puzzles leading the visitor to learn history and past
events of the location, architectural elements, anecdotes, recipes, and more.
As an AR application, the player can augment the experience superimposing
ancient buildings over the real current location.
The Google Ingress android sci-fi game (see figure below) couples augmented
reality with MMORPG techniques resulting in a pervasive tourism application.
It enables the player to use his/her phone to interact with the game and at the
same time with the real world around him/her. To win, the player has also to
collaborate with his/her real fellow neighbours and fight against real enemy
players.
Ingress can almost be regarded like a AR serious game for CH because it forces
the player to go to museums and stand in front of sculptures or historical
buildings in order to improve his/her score.
Even without the need of augmenting the experience, games on mobile
devices have a great potential to engage visitors with the mechanics of
“location-gaming”, where players go to places, do fast, simple tasks (like
typing something into their phone, or uploading a photo of something), and
win a reward (the reward can virtual “points,” or something tangible, like a
free postcard or sandwich). The leading platform for location-gaming is
SCVNGR, which recently reached over 1 million users and has been funded
with $15 million from Google and other venture funds. SCVNGR is a free
application for iPhone and Android that uses the GPS in the smart phone to
verify a user's location in the real world.
Topic
Adoption of SGs in formal education
Relevance/priority 5
(on a 1-5 scale)
SoA/ SG Current We found very few SGs in H&H that are used in formal education. One
Status description example is Playing History by Serious Games Interactive which represents a
(with references)
best practice from this point of view, because it is based on pedagogically
sound principles, follows the national curricula and provides support material
for teachers and students.
Especially in games for formal education, e.g. to be played at school the
adaptation of the difficulty level to the specific student is crucial to support
the teacher using learning games in the classroom. None of the reviewed
games in the SIG has so far any adaptation mechanism, except for a prototype
developed by the 80DAYs project. At maximum, SGs designed for use in school
provide support material in the form of game walkthrough, insights about the
educational contents, suggestions for the teachers about how to structure the
game sessions, test sheets, and a teacher portal to manage the pupils’ work.
2) Trends seen in analysis of SOTA
Topic
Related to SOA
High quality and faithful reproduction of culturally significant artefacts in
games
Description
of
trend
(with
references)
Level-of-detail representations or progressive representations: the data
structure for a 3D model is actually composed of several representations at
different level of details for each region of the shape and are rendered
according to the point of view and the distance from the object. This is not a
new trend however and it is still not adequate to handle high resolution
models in real time. Possibly it is just a matter of hardware and next
generation PC will be able to manage large models efficiently.
Implications
Topic
Related to SOA
Description
of
trend
(with
references)
3D segmentation and Annotation
Smart management of digital cultural content
The annotation of parts of 3D models has become a trend in the CG research.
In the last
five years this has become
a hot
topic
[MPS06][ARSF07][SSC08][GF09][KHS10][BLMS14]. Particularly, the proposed
solutions are divided into automatic methods, support to manual annotation,
and supervised methods, using machine learning techniques.
The use of Ontologies to store meaning and relations among parts of a 3D
object is also a trend in this context. Moreover, the ontology gives the
possibility to reason about the object and part properties and perform
semantic search over a database of annotated models.
Implications
annotated multimodal and multidimensional is machine-readable; it makes
possible to reason about content, e.g. to automatically sarch & retrieve the
suitable content to be used in a certain application depending on several
factors, e.g. the type of audience.
Topic
Related to SOA
Google Glass
HCI for personalized CH experience
Description
of Currently, apps for personal mobile devices are very popular for engaging
trend
(with visitors into cultural exhibitions. In this regard, we expect a big impact of
references)
Google Glass, as a lightweight wearable computer with an optical headmounted display (OHMD) that is being developed by Google with the mission
of producing a mass-market ubiquitous computer. Google Glass is expected to
augment the real experience in a non-invasive fashion and with natural
interaction.
Implications
Topic
Related to SOA
Description
of
trend
(with
references)
A lightweight device that allows interacting with the data sphere in a natural
way (simply looking at things and speaking a command) without the need to be
hand-held would open up lots of new possibilities, including personalised
experiences.
Maximize the engagement in cultural visits
Given that cultural visits more and more rely on smartphone apps, the current
trend to engage people in those apps is going social, that is introducing social
mechanism where the visitor can share his experience with other visitors or
with friends (see for instance the Tate Trumps5 game).
Another trend is towards new paradigms of deployment that ensure the
fidelity of visitors, the engagement in the real visit and the maximization of the
cultural gain: one example is the online - on site - online deployment proposed
by RevQuest – the Black Chambers6, a serious game by the Colonial
Williamsbourg Foundation. The three stages are devoted to: i. raise interest
(on-line, pre-visit) ii. engage in the visit (maximise the on site experience) iii.
discover more information (online post-visit).
Implications
The above trends go towards increasing intrinsic motivation into cultural
experiences in informal context (personal learning)
Topic
5
http://hideandseek.net/projects/tate-trumps/
6
http://research.history.org/DHC/Chambers.cfm
Related to SOA
Adoption of SGs in formal education
Description
of
trend
(with
references)
Implications
3) Vision and Gap
For each identified topic in your SIG, please explain how this contribute to the GALA vision for the
year 2020.
Topic
High quality and faithful reproduction of culturally significant artefacts in
games
Sub vision from your With reference to the GALA Vision for SGs in 2020, we expect on the one
sig to the GALA Vision hand more and more technological solutions to cope with high resolution
2020
models in games; on the other hand, we envision large-scale access and
fruition of digital cultural artefacts from online shared repositories and
serious games to engage people with the vast amount of digitized
resources available.
Gap: SoA - Vision


Topic
Sub vision from your
sig to the GALA Vision
2020
Technical feasibility of managing high resolution models, possibly
enriched with further complex and heterogeneous data (see next
point) in real-time
IPR issues for the use of 3D models digitally acquired by specific
institutions like museums, agencies, departments, etc.
Smart management of digital cultural content
It will be possible to manage in a smart and automatic way the digital
cultural content, for instance for using artefacts from a digital museum
repository in a game (see previous topic), or for increasing the level of
natural interactions between characters and objects inside a game, or for
accessing related multimedia information while remaining inside the game
environment.
As an example, we can consider a virtual tourism game where the player
faces the 3D model of the main statue of the ‘‘Fontana del Nettuno’’in
Bologna. A proper documentation of the geometric model would associate
the object with related multimedia sources, such as photos and videos of
the fountain, images of similar statues. At component level it would allow
the user to appraise other images, videos or 3D models sharing the same
decoration: the trident. See figure below:
Even more challenging, we can imagine that future visitors can access to
digital replicas of archaeological through special devices such glasses which
enable visitors to experience an enhanced environment consisting of
Gap: SoA - Vision
Topic
Sub vision from your
sig to the GALA Vision
2020
Gap: SoA - Vision
TC: neuroscience
Topic
Sub vision from your
sig to the GALA Vision
2020
projected 3D media and the real world. Through such glasses visitors see a
lot of cultural information on this piece of heritage, and get really affected
by experiencing the past in such an immersive environment.
While the problem of documenting images can be considered as state-ofthe-art, there are a number of open issues that should be addressed to
realise an ideal cataloguing and documentation of the lifecycle of 3D
objects, among which coding of the data provenance and version control,
effective metadata structures, interoperability, and object and part-based
annotation [Catalano et al. 2011].
In the general framework of multimedia, these themes are on the research
agenda of many initiatives (e.g., the recent [W3CIG] on data provenance). In
the cultural heritage field, we may mention digital rights management,
updating and long-term preservation of 3D models among the technical
research challenges that should be addressed to realise an ideal operational
3D digital archive [KFH09]. However, a big effort has still to be made on the
documentation process itself: currently available metadata for cultural
artefacts are general (e.g., ownership and copyright) and not referred to the
geometry.
HCI for personalized CH experience
In 2020 it will be possible to offer a personalized and unique experience to
each one of the many museum visitors contemporarily. The museum
environment has space and time limitations, and we can think of
overcoming such constraints by finding new ways of personalizing a CH
experience provided to a group of people contemporarily.
Up to know we are facing a trade-off between the level of interaction and
personalization and the number of visitors which can be involved at the
same time, varying from a massive experience which allows little
interaction and no personalization (e.g. in a dome) to a single-user
application.
A challenge here is to move from a mass-oriented approach towards a
personalized experience even within an application targeting a wide
audience contemporarily.
What will the future hold for the NUI? The answer will surely be found in
the field of Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI). Other new interaction devices
could include virtual retinal displays and active contact lens [BT05].
Maximize the engagement in cultural visits
In 2020 serious games will be interconnected with shared real geographic
data and accessible everywhere in a pervasive fashion, during the daily
activities. We can foresee new game mechanics and immersive storytelling
to engage users in serious gaming while browsing a location on
GoogleEarth to learn about foreign cultures and places of interest; it will
be possible to virtually walk inside a museum and interact with high
resolution digital artefacts; players will be able to create new custom
adventures and upload and share them with other users. It will be possible
to continue virtual challenges in the real world thanks to geo-referenced
locations (in the game) and geo-localization of the player, and to the
scalability of the content according to different devices. The majority of
municipalities, museums and places of interest will offer games to engage
with the cultural content: it will be possible everywhere, anytime to join
other players in a pervasive MMORPG experience, also through more
natural user interfaces rather than the mobile (e.g. the Google glasses).
Municipalities, museums, places of interest, and service providers like
Google could sponsor this vision, provided there is a return of investment.
Gap: SoA - Vision






Topic
Sub vision from your
sig to the GALA Vision
2020
Gap: SoA - Vision
The barrier to this vision is mostly related to a wider adoption of
educational games in public institutions.
Realism of the environment, not just a few building/objects (see
point 1); geo-reference of the game entities.
New compelling game mechanics and storytelling, not just quizzes
and treasure hunts
Catalogue of serious games built on Google Earth (or another
future system) which will act as the central hub for different
applications based on the geo-referenced geometric/ geographic
model, possibly enriched with hyperlinks among additional
multimedia (see point 2)
Interoperability issues
business model: different teams should share their own apps
without charge for the player.
Adoption of SGs in formal education?
We can envision SGs perfectly integrated in the national curricula to
complete student education by traditional means, such as books and
videos.
SGs in formal disciplines will be a real and interactive support to the
teacher, able to personalise his/her lesson according to the interests and
the levels of the different students. Social mechanisms to help students to
cooperate and enhance their learning will be fully implemented.
New pedagogical strategies will be formalised to update the educational
contents and their presentation to the students in such a way they are
beneficial in a modern and digitalised learning environment.
What is still missing is a formal evaluation of the impact on the learning
impact of SGs with respect to (or coupled with) traditional means. In this
way, it will be easy to introduce SGs in the national curricula.
Some steps are needed to makes serious games a really useful teaching
tool:
 Adaptation mechanisms to adapt the difficulty level to the learner
capabilities;
 Evaluation of the learner performance both for tuning adaptation and
for assessing student performance;

Personalization of scenarios by the teacher;
Policy to update national curricula with new technologies.
3) Challenges
Which challenges do you identify in order to achieve the vision by 2020
Note A challenge can comprise different perspectives
Topic
Classif. Of Relation/int Priority
challenge
erdep
to
( 1a-c, 2a-b, other chal.
3, 4a-e)
5) Action/Desiderata/Requirements
What do you need in order to achieve the sub vision? It is also important to set a timeline for this, as
well as the priority. Please indicate dependencies between topics.
Please indicate the relevant TC for each of your topics. This will be matched with the contribution
from the TC and their research questions
Topic/action High
quality
and
faithful R&D
(please
reproduction
of
culturally until
refer
to significant artefacts in games
when
challenge)
1.1
reach efficient management of 5y
large-scale models, complex and
heterogeneous data in real-time
games
(e.g.
with
new
multiresolution, simplification or
streaming techniques, hybrid
modelling or thanks to increased
computational power/bandwidth)
1.2
definition of shared IPR to access 5y
and use models digitised by
cultural institutions, museums,
initiatives, etc
adopt serious games to engage the 3y
large public with the huge amount
of digitised cultural heritage
available
1.3
Link with
Large
scale
testing
Until
when
7y
Innovati
on
uptake
Until
when
10y
Prior
ity
3
Interdep
end/
Relation
to other
topics
none
7y
10y
5
none
5y
10y
5
Specific
projects
can use
their
own
rules,
but for
general
uptake
this
needs
the
definitio
n
of
share d
IPRs
(previous
point,
1.2)
Large
scale
testing
Until
Innovati
on
uptake
Until
Prior
ity
Interdep
end/
Relation
to other
TC on game engine
TC on interoperability&semantics
Topic/action Smart management
(please
cultural content
refer
to
challenge)
of
digital R&D
until
when
when
5y
when
7y
4
topics
none
2.1
For a complete documentation of 3y
the 3D data and their acquisition
and processing workflow, nongeometrical features, such as
material, colour, and preservation
conditions, and environmental
information (e.g., the exact
location of a fountain in a square,
the specific device and the
methodology with whom it has
been acquired) should be encoded
into the models in order to enrich
the cultural and scientific value of
the
digital
content,
while
guaranteeing the data traceability
and provenance.
2.2
the annotation process should be 3y
supported by smart tools that
automatically
compute
and
encode geometrical properties
(e.g., the size, the kind of shape,
the average diameter of a column)
and structural properties (e.g., the
number of handles of an amphora;
the number of columns of the
façade of a temple).
5y
7y
4
none
2.3
Another aspect to take into 3y
consideration is that annotation
should be able to integrate
different resources related to the
same artefacts, i.e., text, 2D and
3D, and support both a semanticbased
and
geometry-based
classification according to the
given application.
5y
7y
5
Previous
2 points
(2.1 and
2.2)
2.4
In parallel, a standardisation and 5y
interoperability issue on how to
create and manage very large
digital repositories arises. The
approach should involve the
different countries, build upon
existing resources and advance
sustainable strategies and solutions
that preserve and enhance
heterogeneous digital resources.
Web browsers are getting ready to 3y
bring the interactive 3D content
7y
10y
5
Relation
with 1.2
5y
7y
5
Depende
ncy with
2.5
Link with
from the internet to our PCs.
WebGL
(http://www.khronos.org/webgl/)
is a web standard which does not
need additional plug-ins and is
currently starting to be supported
natively by web browsers. Based on
WebGL,
X3DOM
(http://www.x3dom.org)
and
XML3D
(http://www.xml3d.org)
aim to support fully interactive 3D
content as an integral part of mixed
2D/3D documents, instead of
adapting
existing
graphics
technologies to the web. The
declarative approach they adopt
allows 3D content to be easily
processed by other applications
using common XML-based tools
including
web
indexing,
transformations, and annotations.
This strategy appears the most
promising one to seamlessly
integrate 3D into the Semantic
Web.
Interoperability and semantics
Topic/action HCI
for
(please
experience
refer
to
challenge)
3.1
3.2
3.3
personalized
CH R&D
until
when
No
idea!!!

The Mixed realities (Virtual and 3y
Augmented) can be a compromise
between
mass
oriented
exhibitions
and
personalized
experience such as the web 2.0
paradigm.
2.2 and
2.3
to
fully
employ
the
potential
of
the
semantic
web
Large
scale
testing
Until
when
Innovati
on
uptake
Until
when
Prior
ity
Interdep
end/
Relation
to other
topics
5y
7y
4
5y
7y
3
None in
principle,
but
depends
on 2.2,
2.3 and
2.5
to
fully
exploit
the
potential
none
User modelling, psychology
AR future Serious Games will have 3y
to be designed, taking into
account human factors and
ergonomics criteria: for instance, it
could deal with efficiency related
3.4
Link with
to the weight of smartphones or
tablets and what occurs after an
extended use of such devices.
Furthermore, AR SG design will 3y
have to focus on technological
multi-modal displays which can
lead to the extra issue about
getting the player attention so
that it can learn during his/her
augmented visit and distracting
him/her from the physical visit.
TC on HCI
TC on psychology
Topic/action Maximizing the engagement in R&D
(please
cultural visits
until
refer
to
when
challenge)
5y
7y
5
none
Large
scale
testing
Until
when
3y
Innovati
on
uptake
Until
when
5y
Prior
ity
4
Interdep
end/
Relation
to other
topics
none
4.1
Catalogue of SGs integrated with 2y
Google Earth, already the playing
arena for lots of games
4.2
Development and wide adoption of 2y
natural user interfaces for AR (like
Google Glass)
Demonstrate the educational and 3y
engagement power of SGs
New business models for tourism 3y
games / pervasive games
4y
6y
4
none
5y
7y
5
none
5y
7y
4
4.5
Large scale adoption of SGs by 5y
public institutions, municipalities,
places of interest, etc.
7y
10y
5
4.6
Interoperability achieved among 5y
shared virtual visit / augmented
visit / pervasive applications
 HCI
 Interoperability
and
semantics
 WP4
7y
10y
4
None?
(maybe
in WP4,
WP7?)
Dep on
4.3, 2.4
(Others
maybe
from
WP6?)
2.5
Large
scale
Innovati
on
Prior
ity
Interdep
end/
4.3
4.4
Link with
Topic/action Adoption of
(please
education
SGs
in
formal R&D
until
refer
to
challenge)
5.1
5.2
5.3
5.4
5.5
5.6
5.7
5.8
Link with
when
 Compliance with established
curricula,
 Updating national curricula to
include new digital technologies
supporting education;
 New
pedagogical
methodologies able to update the
learning content to the capabilities
of the new didactical technologies;
 Adaptation of the content to
the student profile, so that the
teacher is able to create
personalised scenarios for each
student;
3y
 Flexibility of the game with
respect to the topic and the
learning style;
 Evaluation of learning in order
to assess student performance
and to adapt automatically the
content to the student level;
 Feedback mechanisms to
support the student during the
game, that is during the learning
phase, and improve his/her
performance;
 Multiplayer facilities either to
learn collaboratively or to create
engaging competitions among
students.
3y
Pedagogy
3y
5y
testing
Until
when
5y
uptake
Until
when
7y
5
Relation
to other
topics
none
5y
7y
4
none
7y
10y
4
none
5y
3y
7y
5
10y
on 2 for
semantic
search
and
automati
c
adaptati
on and
re-use of
content
5y
7y
4
5y
7y
5
same as
5.4
none
3y
5y
7y
5
Depends
on 5.6
1y
2y
3y
3
none
6) open Issuses
Please add any open issue you have
Topic
References

[DCCCS10] Dellepiane M., Callieri M., Corsini M., Cignoni P., Scopigno R.
Improved color acquisition and mapping on 3D models via flash-based
photography. In: ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage, vol. 2
(4) article n. 9. ACM, 2010.

[VE06] VAN ECK R.: Digital game-based learning: It’s not just the digital
natives who are restless. EDUCAUSE Review 41, 2(2006).

[FAGM11] FROSCHAUER J., ARENDS M., GOLDFARB D., MERKL D.: Towards
an online multiplayer serious game providing a joyful experience in learning
art history. In Proceedings of VS-Games 2011 (2011), pp. 160–163.

[CMAK11] CHRISTOPOULOS D., MAVRIDIS P., ANDREADIS A., KARIGIANNIS
J. N.: Using virtual environments to tell the story: The battle of
Thermopylae. In Proceedings of VS-Games 2011 (2011).

BROWN, E., & CAIRNS, P. (2004). A grounded investigation of game
immersion. In CHI ’04 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing
Systems. New York, NY, USA: ACM., , 1297–1300.

[CAO09] Christopoulos, D., Apostolellis, P., Onasiadis, A. Educational Virtual
Environments for Digital Dome Display Systems with Audience
Participation. Proceedings of the 13th Panhellenic Conference in Informatics
- Workshop in Education, pp. 265-275, Corfu, Greece, 2009

[DCC07] DEHAIS C., CHARVILLAT V., CONTER J.: Interactive augmentation of
photographs depicting prehistoric engravings. In Proceedings of EUROSIS
(2007), pp. 74–80.

[DAR09] DJAOUTI D., ALVAREZ J., RAMPNOUX O., CHARVILLAT V., JESSEL J.:
Serious games & cultural heritage: A case study of prehistoric caves. In
Proceedings of the 2009 15th International Conference on Virtual Systems
and Multimedia (VSMM ’09) (2009).

[BT05] British Telecom, 2005 BT Technology Timeline (2006 till 2050), 2005,
www.btplc.com/Innovation/News/timeline/TechnologyTimeline.pdf.

[AMLPPF10] Eike Falk Anderson, Leigh McLoughlin, Fotis Liarokapis,
Christopher Peters, Panagiotis Petridis, Sara de Freitas. Developing serious
games for cultural heritage: a state-of-the-art review. Virtual Reality (2010)
14:255–275, DOI 10.1007/s10055-010-0177-3.

[CS08] Cignoni P., Scopigno R. Sampled 3D models for CH applications: an
enabling medium or a technological exercise?. In: ACM Journal on
Computers and Cultural Heritage, vol. 1 (1) article n. 2. ACM, 2008.

[C2013] Coenen T.,”MuseUs: case study of a pervasive cultural heritage
serious game”, in ACM Journal of Computing and Cultural Heritage, special
issue on serious games for cultural heritage, issue 6, n°2, 2013 (to appear).

[VGP*10] Vasilakis G, Garcia-Rojas A, Papaleo L, Catalano CE, Robbiano F,
Spagnuolo M, et al. Knowledge-based representation of 3D media.
International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering
2010;20(5):739–60.

[KFH09] Koller D, Frischer B, Humphreys G. Research challenges for digital
archives of 3D cultural heritage models. Journal on Computing and Cultural
Heritage 2009;2(3):7:1–17.

[W3CIG]
W3C
Provenance
http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/prov/S
Incubator
Group.




[Catalano et al 2011] C.E. Catalano, M. Mortara, M. Spagnuolo, B.
Falcidieno, Semantics and 3D media: Current issues and perspectives,
Computers &Graphics, vol 35 issue 4, August 2011, pp. 869-877
[SSC08] L. Shapira, A. Shamir, D. Cohen-Or. Consistent mesh partitioning
and skeletonisation using the shape diameter function. Visual Computer
(2008) 24: 249–259
[MPS06] M. Mortara, G. Patanè, M. Spagnuolo “From geometric to
semantic human body models”. Computers&Graphics 30 (2006) 185 – 196,
2006.
[ARSF07] Marco Attene, Francesco Robbiano, Michela Spagnuolo, Bianca
Falcidieno, Semantic Annotation of 3D Surface Meshes based on Feature
Characterization. Proceedings of SAMT 2007.

[GF09] A. Golovinsky, T. Funkhouser “Consistent Segmentation of 3D
models”Proceedings of Shape Modeling International 2009

[KHS10] E. Kalogerakis, A. Hertzmann, K. Singh, “Learning 3D Mesh
Segmentation and Labelling”. TOG 29(3) Siggraph 2010.

[BLMS14] S. Biasotti, H. Laga, M. Mortara, M. Spagnuolo “Geometry
and Context for Semantic Correspondences and Functionality
Recognition in Manmade 3D Shapes” ACM Transactions on Graphics
(Siggraph 2014)