Interacting With History Using Virtual

Environments

Erik Championerik.champion@curtin.edu.au

Curtin UniversityPerth Australia

Brief bioBackground in architecture, (art history) and philosophy

PhD with Lonely Planet in VEs for travel and tourismTaught interaction design and game design

Project Manager for a Digital Humanities Network (Denmark)Professor of Cultural Visualisation, Curtin University, Perth, Western

Australia

3D Cultural Visualisation?

FeatureScience

Art Culture

Reusable data Yes No Important

Standard tools YesSeldom

Thematic & communal

Clear research question

YesSeldom

Depends

Null hypothesis Yes No Not often

Extensible MostlySeldom

Important

Falsifiable YesSeldom

Difficult

StoredTypically

Unlikely

Vital

Abstract

Where historians wish to develop digital environments to teach and disseminate, I suggest that the crucial issue is interaction and the learning that results from that interaction (Mosaker, 2001).

In order to improve interaction, designers and historians could examine games and why they are so successful; a considerable amount of literature has argued that interactive engagement in a computer medium is best demonstrated by games (Champion, 2008).

Central point

1. Games are great learning environments

2. Except for Cultural Significance, history and heritage

Good and bad examples

3. Conclusion: problems and solutions

Technology=barrier but not the issue: learning is the problem.

What historical principles are used, learnt and applied?

Inhabitants’ points of view (heritage) missing

Scholarly cycle incomplete, community cycle inextensible

Games as tools

Creatorverse

LBP1+2http://www.mediamolecule.com/blog/article/kareems_talk_from_learning_without_frontiers_2011/

Games for history1. Play and and answer questions

2. Play and classroom discuss authenticity

3. Role-play with games, puppets, or narrators

4. Mod cities, empires events based on theories

5. Film events etc. using machinima tools

6. Combine images or panoramas with other media

7. Design past artefacts, events, rituals or customs

8. Create VEs using games and game mods or using VR

1. Playing HistoryPlague – Slave trade - Vikings

Challenge: ..the belief that it is exciting to learn about history. The game integrates learning and playing in a way that engages pupils and gives them a concrete feel for the historical time and settingSolution: The game can be compared to a journey through time and spacePlatform: Mac/PC, single player, browser Technology: 3D Unity game enginePlaytime: Per game 60 minutesTarget group: 9-14 years old

2. Discuss and debate

http://proteus.brown.edu/romanarchaeology08/4986Watch the movie, ‘Gladiator’ ..Identify an item of material culture (building, object, ‘thing’) that is important to the plot and structure of the movie, and..

NOTE http://www.playthepast.org/

3. Role-play

http://publicVR.org OR video at http://vimeo.com/25901467

4. Mod cities empires

Kurt Squire:“We are interested in: the processes by which players develop an interest in history, what historical understandings develop, and if participation has consequences for activities such as school.”

5. Film Events (Machinima)

http://www.sourcefilmmaker.com/

http://moviesandbox.com http://www.thesims.com/de-de

6. Combine images, panos

http://www.petermorse.com.au/vrar/vr/ Iphone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9sBtuCuju0 Technical description http://paulbourke.net/dome/UnityiDome/ Other pano examples http://paulbourke.net/transient/Beacon/beacontour.html

7. Design past artefacts

8. Create VEs via game mods

http://cryve.id.tue.nl

8b. OR VEs from VR systems

http://www.ntnu.no/ub/omubit/bibliotekene/gunnerus-1/mubil

Games: Pros and consFactors Weaknesses Strengths

Interaction Agency destroys historic causality. Simplistic interaction, may be difficult for older audiences.

Helps teach interaction design.

Engagement Educational games: worst of both worlds? Well-known & popular.

Learning How to promote heritage & knowledge transfer.

Learn by trial and error. Leveling allow for skills learnt

Technical issues

Often contains many bugs. Often platform specific.

Speed, lighting, avatar design, peripheries, networking

Support Support by the actual company can be slow, and they may avoid listing intended future features.

Community support (internet forums).

Game development

Non proprietary formats, changing game engine code may require extremely good levels of programming.

Education discounts available, some games are easily “modded”.

Access/ cost Expensive software development kits and commercial licenses. Expensive as classroom set.

Take them home, personalize modify and share them.

Institutional value

Not taken seriously. Employability for students.

Games and learning

Today, electronic games are an important vehicle for learning (Anderson, 2010; Dondlinger, 2007).

A game is an activity that

(1) ..has some goal in mind, .. the player works to achieve (2) has systematic or emergent rules, and (3) is considered a form of play or competition (Oxford, 2010).

While this encompasses “skill and drill” types of games, many of today’s digital games are much more complex, providing an interactive narrative in which the player must test hypotheses, synthesize knowledge, and respond to the unexpected (Dondlinger, 2007).

Rule-finding interactive challenges, requiring judgment, priority selection + direction towards goal completion (Champion, 2011).

Games are culturally significant?

For evoking +communicating historical situations or heritage values we must deeper understandings rather than simply memorizing facts (Bloom, 1956).

1.What is the cultural significance of what is represented and interacted with?

2.Cultural presence, a feeling in a virtual environment that people with a different cultural perspective occupy or have occupied that virtual environment as a ‘place’.

Problem:

Narrative/Interaction

How do we interact with history over time?

How does the GOD view interact with inhabitants?

(Glory of Rome)

Problem: Interaction /History

1. Ritual knowledge: Match artefacts with events to progress through time

2. Memetic Cause &effect (Guess results or memes to progress history)

3. Extrapolate from clues in NPC dialogue

4. Role-play minor characters, “History” not affected

5. Counterfactual histories (create many possible worlds)

6. Augment virtual world with historical or current media

7. Sentiment analysis (observe the emotional impact of events on NPCs)

8. Separate lies from truth to progress

9. Mimic NPCs (as a kind of reverse Cultural Turing Test)

Problem: Inhabitants’ point of view

Can users learn via interaction the meanings and values of others, do we need to interact as the original inhabitants did?

How can we find out how they interacted?

Can the limited and constraining nature of current technology help interaction become more meaningful, educational and enjoyable (Handron & Jacobson, 2010)?

How do we even know when meaningful learning is reached?

Problem: Avatars

Realistic depiction

Social behaviour

Interface issues

How to advance story

http://www.interactivestory.net/

Eric Fassbender: Macquarie Lighthouse

Problem:

RitualsLacking •Social judgement•Perceived social hierarchies•Sense of being watched•Territoriality•Social Proxemics•Nuanced behaviour•Intimacy and ceremony•Changes in physiology•Symbolic effects

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqMXIRwQniA

Image: http://www.virtualtripping.com/google-earths-rome-reborn/

2008

Problem: Sensory Immersion

Affective Process

Biofeedback middleware

Kinect 1/2: voice + skeleton

http://uwnews.washington.edu/ni/article.asp?articleID=37134

Vocal Joystick surfs the Web

Listen in as someone uses Vocal Joystick to browse the Web.

Eight vowel sounds move the cursor in different directions.

Louder noises move the cursor more quickly.

The sounds “k” and “ch” simulate clicking and releasing the mouse buttons.

Problem: Integrate Text+Model

http://gap.alexandriaarchive.org/gapvis/index.html#index

Problem: Violence

No realistic humans

No social judgement

No time to think

Gun based genres are commonplace

Weaponry skill can be easily leveled up

Typical single player

Demographics

Alternatives to Violence

Reflexivity: A reflective space, where players are encouraged to relax and consider the consequences of their actions

Performativity: The player, if in a class situation, could be asked to perform or orate and present their experience of the VE

Role-playing Virtue Ethics: Take on characters in role playing games and see how their characters change in relation to perceived development of virtue ethics..

Consequentialism: Players could be allowed to be violent, but the consequences of their actions could affect their future gameplay. through the game.

Alternative Strategies: Violence could be offered as a strategy, but it could be offered as a long-term destructive strategy.

Creative Uses For Weapons: used as tools to construct. NPC distaste and disparagement: they discourage violence. Biofeedback: Performance based on calmness Expressive and embodied modes of interaction Emphasis on non-violent competition Players become morally accountable for their actions

Alternative game modes

Turkey Maiden Educational Computer Game The Journey

http://www.thenightjourney.com/statement.htmhttp://digitalethnography.dm.ucf.edu/

Gaming through touchShown at Vsmm2012 conferenceChinese Taoism Touch Screen by Neil Wang and Erik Champion

Opening - http://youtu.be/gFYG4zTn4Js

Game Hua - http://youtu.be/DiGDezTM8hY

Game Qi1 - http://youtu.be/jP9nfdUFDTU

Game Qi2 - http://youtu.be/orCga2CQBjs

Game Qin - http://youtu.be/iC2BGT5IbDE

Game Shu - http://youtu.be/dv_TOnl_sbc

Touch Screen Taoism

Problem: Scholarly knowledge

Scholarly knowledge does not easily translate to audience knowledge; nor does it always best engage the public.

IF we can use digital worlds for teaching +learning about heritage &history, is it preferable to learn about a collection of culturally situated past experiences, or an academic procession of historical events?

Smith: history as meaning the past, OR history as being something produced by historians.

Given that even philosophers such as Goldstein (1964) and Gale (1962) disagreed on what constitutes history and what constitutes recollection of the past; how can students or the general public reliably distinguish between the two?

How it can be or should be accessed?

Problem: Book-based?

Technology or evaluation is the not the fundamental problem.Skeates (2000) warned that archaeologists need to reconsider their field as a communication medium, and not just as a closed scientific discipline. For while these books presuppose a vast domain of knowledge, a certain learnt yet creative technique of extrapolationthey typically do not cover the experiential detective work of experts that visit the real site (Gillings, 2002).Academic disciplines are typically book-based and do not see that an academic publication is also a simplification and metaphorical extension of the remains and ruins it describes.

Problem: Augmenting script

Ideally, Ves help the general public to

create, and share and discuss hypothetical or counterfactual places

meet virtually in these places with colleagues to discuss them,

work in these recreations to understand limitations forced on their predecessors,

develop experiential ways to entice a potential new audience to both admire the content and the methods of their area of research.

Problem: Evaluation

Using media such as game engines to represent the past or digital places that represent the future, it is all too easy to be taken in by the lure of technology and forget to concentrate on enhancing the user experience. There is also a school of thought in archaeology that views digital media as purely a shop façade for the serious and scholarly past time of reading and writing books (Parry 2005; Gillings, 2002). Yet if we avoid teaching with digital media, how will the changing attention spans and learning patterns of new generations be best addressed (Mehegan, 2007)?

Even if we decide on what we are evaluating, it is not clear how to evaluate.

The ethnographic techniques used by researchers may be effective in recording activity, but they do not directly indicate the potential mental transformations of perspective that result from being subjectively immersed in a different type of cultural presence (Benford et al, 2002).

Evaluating VES - People

Task performance (quantitative or qualitative)

Likert or statistical evaluation

Extrapolated understanding

Personal ‘sense’ of cultural presence

What do they choose next (exit strategies)

Excitement recorded from biofeedback

‘Teach the teacher’ et al methods

Collaborative learning: HACK4LT, VILNIUS LITHUANIA

Mixed Reality

http://virtual.vtt.fi/virtual/proj2/multimedia/projects/mrconference.html

http://ael.gatech.edu/lab/research/arsecondlife/using-the-ar-second-life-

client/

3D

1. Show design features based on scale and senses

2. Reveal limitations or principles of historical 2D images

3. Provide a heightened sense of difficulty, occasion, ritual, social proxemics (social hierarchies)

4. Afford a sense of place: peripherality, centre directionality

5. Fix locations in the memory iSphere copyright Paul Bourke

Warping

The HIVE@CURTIN

The cost of Stereo VR

Conclusion

1. Game conventions work but do not necessarily lead to meaningful learning.

2. Background research required for public versus scholar needs.

3. We lack interactive and immersive digital history projects that are meaningful and engaging learning experiences.

4. Games as Virtual Environments may connect more people, more thematically without competing with book learning.

5. Mixed reality has many advantages but few exemplars.

References BBC Ancient History Section. (Undated). Death in

Sakkara: An Egyptian Adventure, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/interactive/animations/ironage_roundhouse/index.shtml

Benford, S., Fraser, M., Reynard, G. Koleva, B., and Drozd, A. (2002). Staging and Evaluating Public Performances as an Approach to CVE Research, Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Collaborative virtual environments, ACM New York.

Bloom, B. S. (1956). ‘Taxonomy of Educational Objectives’, Book 1 Cognitive Domain. New York: Longman Inc.

Champion, E. (2008). ‘Otherness of place: Game-based interaction and learning in virtual heritage projects’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 14(3), 210-228.

Dondlinger, M. J. (2007). ‘Educational Video Game Design: A Review of the Literature’, Journal of Applied Educational Technology, 4(1), 21-31.

Handron, K., & Jacobson, J. (2010). Extending Physical Collections Into the Virtual Space of a Digital Dome,. Paper presented at the 11th International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage (VAST), Paris, France.

Hight, J. (2006). ‘TEXT: Narrative Archaeology: reading the landscape’, newmediafix, http://newmediafix.net/daily/?p=638

Leader-Elliott, L. (2003). ‘Community Heritage Interpretation Games: A Case Study from Angaston, South Australia’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 11:2, 161-71.

Gale, R.M. (1962). ‘Dewey and the Problem of the Alleged Futurity of Yesterday’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 22(4), 501-511.

Gillings, M. (2002). Virtual archaeologies and the hyper-real, in P. Fisher, D. Unwin, (eds.), Virtual Reality in Geography (London & New York: Taylor & Francis, 2002), 17-32.

Goldstein, L. (1964). ‘The "Alleged" Futurity of Yesterday’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 24(3), 417-420.

Jacobson, J. (2011). ‘The Effect of Visual Immersion in an Educational Game; Gates of Horus’, International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations, 3(1), 13-32.

Mehegan, D. (2007). Young People Reading a Lot Less: Report Laments the Social Costs. The Boston Globe, 19 November (2007), http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/11/19/young_people_reading_a_lot_less/.

Mosaker, L. (2001). ‘Visualizing Historical Knowledge Using VR Technology’, Digital Creativity S&Z 12(1), 15-25.

Oxford English Dictionary (2010). Retrieved December 17, 2010, from Oxford Dictionaries website: http://oxforddictionaries.com.

Parry. R. (2005). ‘Digital Heritage and the Rise of Theory in Museum Computing’, Museum Management and Curatorship, 20:4, 333-48.

Skeates, R. (2000). Debating the archaeological heritage, (London: Duckworth), 109-111.

Smith, B. G. (1995). ’Whose Truth, Whose History?', Journal of the History of Ideas, 56(4): 661-668.

http://blip.tv/learning-without-frontiers/game-based-learning-2009-terry-deary-author-horrible-histories-1916837

http://archaeogaming.wordpress.com/