Heritage education through serious games. A web-based proposal for primary schools to cope with distance learning

Abstract

<p dir="ltr"><span>In recent years a growing amount of research has shown interest in studying how virtual reality (VR) could be relevant in many fields. In this respect, VR has gained consideration throughout many applications such as education. Among other aims for its use in education, serious games based on VR were used to promote heritage and make students experience either far or inaccessible scenarios. Until now, VR-based applications have been mainly implemented using head mounted displays (HMD), which actually reduced their circulation. This gap is particularly remarkable in the current Sars-CoV19 pandemic because students, being at home or being at school without sharing equipment, cannot exploit educational programs based on this technology. The current paper proposes a web-based platform on which VR applications could be accessed on any device, either desktop- or mobile-based. The serious game was initially set up on a computer with a specialized software using a HMD, while the process of turning it into a web-based platform is described so that the used methodology could be available to those, who would like to follow it. This project is probably also able to cope with the general aim of making inaccessible objects available to students and, thus, to make the application useful even beyond the current pandemic emergency.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span><br /></span></p>

ATON: An Open-Source Framework for Creating Immersive, Collaborative and Liquid Web-Apps for Cultural Heritage

“…Different components of the ATON framework and their interplay have been already investigated and assessed by previous work during the past few years. More specifically: (A) Framework integration with cloud architectures for publishing multi-resolution 3D landscapes within European infrastructures [50] and its exploitation for cross-device, online virtual museums [77]; (B) Presentation of virtual 3D collections and augmentation of past museum displays on mobile devices (Capitoline Museum in Rome) [59]; (C) Creation of applied CH games as web-applications [78,79]; and (D) Visual/immersive analytics architectures for remote inspection of interactive WebXR sessions [80,81].…”

“…The framework will be soon deployed also on different nodes of the E-RIHS European infrastructure [90] (http://www.e-rihs.it/, accessed on 22 November 2021). In particular, the features offered by the framework and the plug-n-play architecture of web-apps (see Section 3.3) are already allowing a few projects (e.g., "H 2 O" by free University of Bolzano [79]) to switch from game engines like Unity to ATON, to deploy immersive gaming experiences directly on the web, without any installation required.…”

Using Web 3D and WebXR Game to Enhance Engagement in Primary School Learning

“…However, WebXR provides scalable and affordable solutions for XR applications. Many researchers have adopted Web3D and WebXR for education and training in areas such as science [9], engineering [10], history [11] and medical education [12]. It also supports different types of XR technology such as AR [7] and VR [11] interaction.…”

“…Although some research [9][10][11][12][13][14] demonstrates the benefits of using Web3D and WebXR, it is still a challenging task to design and implement such a system especially for primary school children [15][16][17][18][19]. There is very little research about mixed used of XR (for example, by using both AR and VR) interaction with WebXR content and Web3D content within a classroom setting.…”

Optimising 3D interactive exploration of open virtual enviroments on web, using mobile devices

“…02). There are several examples of the use of 3DWeb technologies on urban heritage, such as the research PRIN 2006 'Maps, models and innovative technologies to know and share urban and environmental heritage', conducted by the University of Camerino (2007Camerino ( -2009, defining for this purpose an IT infrastructure that integrated different systems and opensource tools, museum collections augmented using the orientation of the device or gamified 3D experiences [Luigini et al 2020]. The transmission of all these contents would be possible, however, if some problems of non-negligible relevance were solved: the latency before visualization should be minimized; the representation of the model should allow different levels of detail (LoD) to consider the rendering capabilities of the devices, ensuring a reduction in the latency time before the first visualization; finally, the compression would be important to make using large 3D datasets on connections with a medium bandwidth [Boutsi et al 2019;Lee et al 2021;Scopigno et al 2017;Skublewska-Paszkowska et al 2022].…”