It has been shown that digital games can help people, especially young people, get the most from cultural heritage. Successful usage of these games includes teaching and learning, as well as virtual reality tools used to simulate historical sites and events. They have also been shown to be a powerful and effective tool to make cultural heritage more attractive, especially for those sites that are less

Labanotation is one of the most used systems for notating, analysing, and preserving movement and dance, an important part of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Labanotation consists of a powerful expressive symbolic language for documenting movement with a long history in dance research, history, and anthropology since its introduction by Rudolf von Laban in the beginning of the 20th century. A number

This article brings together two distinct, but related perspectives on playful museum experiences: Critical play and hybrid design. The article explores the challenges involved in combining these two perspectives, through the design of two hybrid museum experiences that aimed to facilitate critical play with/in the collections of the Museum of Yugoslavia and the highly contested heritage they represent

We present and explore the fruitfulness of “first-person cinematographic videogames,” a game model we have devised for the promotion of cultural, environmental, and territorial heritage. To support and foster the development of these type of games, we have developed a Web-based user-friendly authoring environment, extensively presented in the article. While employing standard first-person point-and-click

Cross-reality technologies are quickly establishing themselves as commonplace platforms for presenting objects of historical, scientific, artistic, and cultural interest to the public. In this space, augmented reality (AR) is notably successful in delivering cultural heritage applications, including architectural and environmental heritage reconstruction, exhibition data management and representation

In this article, we propose Agonistic Games (AGs) as a serious games subcategory that can stimulate critical reflection on topics of dark heritage through multiperspectivity and unsettling play. We first discuss the emerging topic of agonism in memory studies, and then how games can be used to support its objectives. We then discuss the development of two original AGs: Endless Blitz and Umschlagplatz

This article presents FakeMuse, a serious game about forgery and authentication in archaeological museums that aims at letting users playfully approach this issue. The player takes on the role of a museum curator who is presented with several artifacts that s/he must decide whether they are authentic or not. As the player progresses in the game, s/he can gather additional information by reading magazine

The industry has a relevant spatial and socioeconomic importance in most of the Spanish cities and nowadays is one of the main urban economic activities. However, in many situations, and despite recent advances in the past two decades, industrial heritage is a value that is still not sufficiently widespread in society. The factories, their activity, and their historical evolution are often disconnected

The cultural heritage sector has traditionally been concerned with sharing resources and furthering human knowledge, with particular interest to the issues associated with metadata and interoperability, especially when it comes to the use of technology. These goals and interests in the cultural heritage sector are natural alignments with those of linked data; hence. there has been an increasing interest

This article presents a case of collaborative pedagogy of digital humanities involving a virtual version of historic Salem, North Carolina. “Hidden Town in 3D” is a partnership between Middle Tennessee State University’s Public History, Animation, and Aerospace programs, and Old Salem Museums and Gardens. The object of Hidden Town in 3D is to use digital technologies to recover and represent the stories

We introduce a novel approach for exploring image-based shape and material models registered with structured descriptive information fused in multi-scale overlays. We represent the objects of interest as a series of registered layers of image-based shape and material data. These layers are represented at different scales and can come out of a variety of pipelines. These layers can include both Reflectance

This article presents a multimodal dataset comprising various representations and annotations of Franz Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise. Schubert’s seminal work constitutes an outstanding example of the Romantic song cycle—a central genre within Western classical music. Our dataset unifies several public sources and annotations carefully created by music experts, compiled in a comprehensive and consistent

This article reports on the experience of co-designing an educational video game aimed at promoting good dietary habits in youngsters and fostering Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), such as SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-Being), SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities), and SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals). To ensure the quality of the results, we developed a methodology under a social innovation paradigm

This article explores the technical and interpretative issues surrounding the creation of a Minecraft Education Edition world for use by primary age school children (5–11 years). The project team undertook to create a Minecraft version of the prehistoric landscape surrounding the Neolithic passage tomb of Bryn Celli Ddu, Anglesey, Wales, United Kingdom. The workflow described here details the process

Some historical paintings are realistic enough to provide information for the study of ancient civil buildings and their corresponding living environment. This article uses architectural iconology, computer modeling, and quantitative analysis methods to interpret ancient images for contemporary research. This work selects Qingming Shanghe Tu, painted by Ying Qiu in the Ming Dynasty, and Gusu Fanhua

The progressive digitization of historical archives provides new, often domain-specific, textual resources that report on facts and events that have happened in the past; among these, memoirs are a very common type of primary source. In this article, we present an approach for extracting information from Italian historical war memoirs and turning it into structured knowledge. This is based on the semantic

Masses of fragile cultural relics are dug out in fragments due to long-standing burying and their fragility, which must be reassembled to play a role in cultural heritage study. However, it is very challenging to automatically reassemble a large collection of fragments of unknown geometric shapes. In this article, a novel probabilistic method for fractured cultural relics automatic reassembly is proposed

A challenging aspect of visibility studies is visual acuity, which concerns the clarity of vision within a given space in relation to variables such as spatial geometry, lighting conditions, the physical properties of the viewed object, or the familiarity of viewers with the target. Our research proposes a novel approach to visibility studies, based on visual acuity and its related pipeline, which

It has become almost standard practice that archaeological research on cemeteries is published in a similar fashion, specifically when primary sources supplement the data presented. Aside from the interpretative part, a catalog of all graves, buried individuals, and finds is published along with a map of the site and graphical depictions of the various entities. This is mostly structured within a four-level

The preservation of architectural heritage represents a major asset for economic development in several countries. Nevertheless, its protection remains a complex task due to its high vulnerability, especially in seismic zones. The intervention on the historical buildings requires the creation of a numerical and digital support shared by the different building specialists (architects, conservators,

Fusion of data mining and computational mechanics is a modern approach for the exploitation of available data within rigorous modeling. First steps in this direction have been focused on the usage of neural networks and other soft computing tools as metamodeling tools. This framework seems suitable for numerical homogenization techniques realized within the so-called FE2 environment, where the lower-level

The dataflow in any scientific research laboratory is continuous and considerable even in analytical niches such as heritage science laboratories. This article discusses advantages of using a Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) for organising and systematising research in an interdisciplinary analytical laboratory. LIMS solutions are proven to be effective in managing laboratories, organising

The development of information technology (IT) now allows for rapid, semi-automatic digitization of cultural heritage objects, both typical museum exhibits and architectural monuments. However, the same IT development makes it possible to disseminate the results of digitization, i.e., to reach a wide audience. This article presents the methodology of 3D scanning and processing of the acquired data

Personalising museum mobile guides is widely acknowledged as being important for enhancing the visitor experience. Due to the lack of information about an individual visitor and the relatively limited time of his or her visit, adapting the user interface based on a museum visitor's type is a promising approach to personalisation. This approach first requires a mechanism to identify the visitor type

The presence of artificial intelligence in our lives is increasing and being applied to fields such as medicine, engineering, telecommunications, remote sensing and 3D visualization. Nevertheless, it has never been used for the stratigraphic study of historical buildings. Thus far, archaeologists and architects, the experts in archaeology of architecture, have led this research. The method consisted

This article reports on a heritage engagement project called Skullduggery at Old Government House. It offers an approach to augmented reality design based on adventure games as a solution to the problem of “empty rooms” encountered by casual visitors to cultural heritage sites such as historic buildings. Many cultural heritage sites depend on didactic panels and perhaps a few tangible items to communicate

Games are used in various learning situations and domains, among which is cultural heritage. Storytelling is used in games regarding cultural places, but it often takes a simple form. Thus, the authors’ aim is to investigate the possibility to communicate cultural content through a narrative-based game that can function with multiple narratives. Another core element of our design is the less exploited

This article discusses an augmented reality game as a way of subjectivizing visitor experience at cultural heritage locations. The text describes the starting point, development aims, and some initial user data of the Lights On! game while contextualizing the game's development with relevant discussion concerning the use of ludic and narrative augmented reality elements in enhancing the experience

Cultural presence is a term used to explain and evaluate cultural learning in virtual heritage projects but is less frequently used for video games. Given the increasing importance of video games to cultural heritage, this article investigates explanations of cultural presence that could be communicated by games, especially concerning UNESCO and ICOMOS definitions of cultural significance. The aim

Serious Games use immersive and interactive virtual learning worlds to support and enhance the transfer of knowledge, raising interest in cultural heritage across various subjects. We present a Serious Game designed to enhance the language acquisition of the Middle Egyptian language. Therefore, using an immersive background of cultural heritage, we bring life to one of the oldest stories recorded,

In May 2019, A Night in the Forum videogame was published in the Sony PlayStation store, for PS VR. It was the final result of the REVEAL EU project, whose goal was to identify strategies, features, and tools to develop educational titles in a more efficient, cost-effective, and valuable way, exploiting their educational, cognitive, and engaging potential for schools and cultural tourism. Environmental

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

War video games recreate war situations with great realism, favoring the immersion of users and making them participants of the sufferings derived from war. While some of them help the players to understand the war, appealing to the hyper-realistic simulation, others are entertainment artifacts that banalize it. This research seeks to determine the edu-communicative potential of war video games, understood

Historical heritage is demanding robust pipelines for obtaining Heritage Building Information Modeling models that are fully interoperable and rich in their informative content. The definition of efficient Scan-to-BIM workflows represent a very important step toward a more efficient management of the historical real estate, as creating structured three-dimensional (3D) models from point clouds is complex

There is a long history of research exploring how augmented and mixed reality systems can be used to support visitors to cultural heritage locations, but the technological or application specific focus of much of this research means that our understanding of how these experiences work is more of a collection of insights, rather than a coherent theory about how the elements of the experience come together

For archaeologists, it is often desirable to present statues in their original material and coloration. With projection mapping, real-world surfaces are augmented by digital content to create compelling alterations of the scene’s visual appearance without actually altering or even damaging the object. While there are frequent advances in projection quality, content creation is still a challenging and

This work illustrates the use of three different digitization techniques to study and valorize a 15th-century engraved tablet discovered during a preventive archaeological excavation in the area of a former convent. The tablet is covered with engraved inscriptions on both sides and includes a musical score. Digitization allowed for an advanced analysis of the inscriptions, and to generate a complete

Many historical monuments were originally vividly painted (polychromatic), and researchers have been able to reach consensus on this even for monument classes in which only indirect evidence of painting survives. However, academic caution has led to an understandable reluctance to pass this knowledge to the public through use of reconstructions showing the colour schemes of these monuments. As a result

The introduction of digital technologies into documentation methods for cultural heritage and archeology made it possible to develop new tools for the acquisition and management of information collected for multidisciplinary studies. These tools are beginning to assert themselves as supports privileged for the description, analysis and comprehension of the objects of study. SIAT is a first step toward

Ceramic sherds are the most common finds in archaeology. They are complex to analyze and onerous to process. A large number of indistinct sherds coming from excavations must be preliminarily grouped in some categories. This clusterization helps the next phase, in which archaeologists classify the ceramics. Due to the difficulty of these preliminary, repetitive, and routine phases, a great deal of archaeological

Visits to cultural heritage sites are generally social in nature, yet resources to support these sociable experiences are often individualized, catering to the solitary visitor. Digital technologies offer means to disrupt this predicament, encouraging social engagements in cultural contexts. Here we present the results of a user study that systematically investigates the effects of face-to-face group

Cultural Heritage can use ICT and game design to provide compelling experiences of visiting ancient ruins. In fact, archaeological sites benefit from being enriched with additional meanings that help visitors to contextualize what they see. For example, young tourists, when accessing cities of the past, could miss the chance of really appreciating the history and the culture of extinguished civilizations

This article describes a method for early detection of disaster-related damage to cultural heritage. It is based on data from social media, a timely and large-scale data source that is nevertheless quite noisy. First, we collect images posted on social media that may refer to a cultural heritage site. Then, we automatically categorize these images according to two dimensions: whether they are indeed

We investigate the overlapping of the concepts of prestige and success in art. To this end, we invited a group of art experts and a group of artists to select a small number of artworks that they deemed of high quality among those the crypto art gallery SuperRare displays. We then matched the selections with indicators of market success for the same artworks. We find that prestigious artworks selected

Historical archives represent an immense wealth, the potential of which is endangered by the lack of effective management and access tools. We believe that this issue can be faced by providing archive catalogs with a semantic layer, containing rich semantic metadata, representing the content of documents in a full-fledged formal machine-readable format. In this article, we present the contribution

The visualisation of historical information and storytelling in museums is a crucial process for transferring knowledge by directly and simplistically engaging the museum audience. Until recently, technological limitations meant museums were limited to 2D and 3D screen-based information displays. However, advancements in Mixed Reality (MR) devices permit the propagation of a virtual overlay that amalgamates

Digital technology in museum practice provides new means of interaction with artifacts and collections. In particular, we need interactive installations in order to encourage and stimulate visitors to learn and understand archaeological musical instruments through engagement and active participation: these instruments (i.e., interactive artifacts per se) are de facto unplayable and inaccessible to

In this article, a method is proposed to accurately overlap multiple high-quality images with different shooting positions and intervals by combining corresponding point information between images and 3D shape information. In the proposed method, the correct feature matching of images obtained by rendering the 3D model of the subject is used. In this research, the subjects were the pillars of the Angkor

Research on seismic simulations has focused mainly on methodologies specially tailored to civil engineering. However, we have detected a lack in the area of interactive cultural heritage applications, where speed and plausibility are the main requirements to satisfy. We designed a tool that allows setting up and recreating earthquakes in a simple way. We coupled our earthquake simulator with a structural

We examine the experience of Thresholds, a virtual reality (VR) recreation of the world's first photographic exhibition, which has toured to multiple museums. Following the method of performance-led research in the wild, we provide an account of the artist's design rationale and the experiences of visitors as the work toured. We reveal how the overlaying and juxtaposing of virtual and physical spaces

Presentations of virtual cultural heritage artifacts are often communicated via the medium of interactive digital storytelling. The synergy of a storied narrative embedded within a 3D virtual reconstruction context has high consumer appeal and edutainment value. We investigate if 360° videos presented through virtual reality further contribute to user immersion for the application of preserving intangible

Being a world-renowned heritage site, the Ming Great Wall, located in Qinghai Province, China, mainly has existed as the form of earthen sites with high historical, artistic, and scientific values. However, exposed under environmental impacts for about 500 years, these sites have been seriously threatened. The study on their damage assessment using reasonable methods is the key premise for further

The increase of multidisciplinary research in the field of architectural history has led to the need to set up new experiences and solutions for the handling and integration of the information extracted from historical documents. These solutions seek to support diverse users of the research community with the aim of solving challenges directly related with the digitalisation, structuring, standardisation