POLITECNICO DI TORINO Repository ISTITUZIONALE Virtual Heritage: new technologies for edutainment Original Virtual Heritage: new technologies for edutainment / Martina, Andrea. - (2014). Availability: This version is available at: 11583/2541502 since: Publisher: Politecnico di Torino Published DOI:10.6092/polito/porto/2541502 Terms of use: openAccess This article is made available under terms and conditions as specified in the corresponding bibliographic description in the repository Publisher copyright (Article begins on next page) 10 October 2021 Dottorato in Ingegneria Informatica e dei Sistemi XXV ciclo Tesi di Dottorato Virtual Heritage: new technologies for edutainment Andrea Martina Tutore Prof. Andrea Bottino February 2014 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Acknowledgements are like a small cake at a party. If the cake is too small many guests will not eat it, if it is too large it may nauseate. So why not to just make a cake based on the exact number of guests? Mmmm... have you ever tried to make a cake of an exact size? Especially in Italy? Impossible: some invites could be not come or bring other friends with them, someone might want a second slice, or could be in excess for others. Impossible! And then? Well, luckily I do not have to make a cake right now, but I have to thank. And I will try to thank people who really helped me and supported me during these years of PhD, so that each of them could have a generous slice of cake, without be nauseated! To understand why PhD students - as also undergraduates - thank people in their thesis, you must first understand what is the entire process that leads to the end of an academic term. To explain this, I'm going to use another metaphor: no, not that of the mountain path, too overused, but I invite you to think about a sand castle. You have a great project in mind: a castle, 4 towers plus the main one in the middle, a moat, water and some plastic fishes that simulate crocodiles. Leveled the sand you can start digging. Make a hole, add sand and start modelling. Take the bucket: it's too small! You do not want small towers for your sumptuous castle. Looking around you find a bigger bucket. Make a tower: done. You do others, but some are ruined. You remake them, and then again. At the end you get 4 towers and the central one. Then the walls, raising the sand you annoy the lady on the right: please, apologize. Redo the walls, the last one makes a tower collapse. You remake the tower. Then dig the moat but the north wall slides. You redo the wall, containing the moat. At the end you add the water, hoping that it does not erode the walls. When you get to put the plastic fishes, the thesis is completed. At this point it is better not to turn around: your neighbour has just finished a castle with 6 towers! The first acknowledge definitely goes to my supervisor and tutor, Prof. Andrea Bottino. He guided me during all these years, patiently giving me ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS suggestions and advices. His patience, his phone calls and his words have allowed me to reach this point! Really thank you! I want also to thank Victoria primarily for making me closer to a field of study and research which hardly I would have taken in consideration if I had not met her. Her encouragements and advices have allowed me to watch the whole PhD under a different prospective. A huge acknowledge goes to my family! It is not an ordinary and trivial thanks, but deeply felt. Without them, without their advices and their ability to listen to me, I'd hardly arrived at this goal! A huge hug! To Nino, Vale, De' and Ari... Well, what to say... thanks because you have always been present! To Giuseppe and Fabio thanks for helping me in some particular moments, listening to me. Thanks for the dinners, movie and billiard nights, but mostly because you always have a thought for me! Impossible not to thank all the LAB1! Without the unique LAB1 inside the ‘Autogrill’, how could I go on? Special thanks to Luca, Federico, Matteo, Antonio, Giuseppe, who allowed me to live a unique and fun experience, not so obvious at the Poli! (and sorry for my always present talking XD) [Thanks to the current 22°C in LAB1] I want also to thank the other people who have entered in my life during these years of PhD. Although for various reasons they only have passed and gone, I'd be a hypocrite not to recognize that for some periods they have allowed me to face difficulties with a better mood. Last... thanks to my evil cat! Impossible to handle, a little bit like me! Meow meow Edgar! 4 ABSTRACT ABSTRACT Cultural heritage represents an enormous amount of information and knowledge. Accessing this treasure chest allows not only to discover the legacy of physical and intangible attributes of the past but also to provide a better understanding of the present. Museums and cultural institutions have to face the problem of providing access to and communicating these cultural contents to a wide and assorted audience, meeting the expectations and interests of the reference end-users and relying on the most appropriate tools available. Given the large amount of existing tangible and intangible heritage, artistic, historical and cultural contents, what can be done to preserve and properly disseminate their heritage significance? How can these items be disseminated in the proper way to the public, taking into account their enormous heterogeneity? Answering this question requires to deal as well with another aspect of the problem: the evolution of culture, literacy and society during the last decades of 20th century. To reflect such transformations, this period witnessed a shift in the museum’s focus from the aesthetic value of museum artifacts to the historical and artistic information they encompass, and a change into the museums’ role from a mere "container" of cultural objects to a "narrative space" able to explain, describe, and revive the historical material in order to attract and entertain visitors. These developments require creating novel exhibits, able to tell stories about the objects and enabling visitors to construct semantic meanings around them. The objective that museums presently pursue is reflected by the concept of Edutainment, Education + Entertainment. Nowadays, visitors are not satisfied with ‘learning something’, but would rather engage in an ‘experience of learning’, or ‘learning for fun’, being active actors and players in their own cultural experience. As a result, institutions are faced with several new problems, like the need to communicate with people from different age groups and different cultural backgrounds, the change in people attitude due to the massive and unexpected diffusion of technology into everyday life, the need to design the visit by a personal ABSTRACT point of view, leading to a high level of customization that allows visitors to shape their path according to their characteristics and interests. In order to cope with these issues, I investigated several approaches. In particular, I focused on Virtual Learning Environments (VLE): real-time interactive virtual environments where visitors can experience a journey through time and space, being immersed into the original historical, cultural and artistic context of the work of arts on display. VLE can strongly help archivists and exhibit designers, allowing to create new interesting and captivating ways to present cultural materials. In this dissertation I will tackle many of the different dimensions related to the creation of a cultural virtual experience. During my research project, the entire pipeline involved into the development and deployment of VLE has been investigated. The approach followed was to analyze in details the main sub- problems to face, in order to better focus on specific issues. Therefore, I first analyzed different approaches to an effective recreation of the historical and cultural context of heritage contents, which is ultimately aimed at an effective transfer of knowledge to the end-users. In particular, I identified the enhancement of the users’ sense of presence in VLE as one of the main tools to reach this objective. Presence is generally expressed as the perception of 'being there', i.e. the subjective belief of users that they are in a certain place, even if they know that the experience is mediated by the computer. Presence is related to the number of senses involved by the VLE and to the quality of the sensorial stimuli. But in a cultural scenario, this is not sufficient as the cultural presence plays a relevant role. Cultural presence is not just a feeling of 'being there' but of being - not only physically, but also socially, culturally - 'there and then'. In other words, the VLE must be able to transfer not only the appearance, but also all the significance and characteristics of the context that makes it a place and both the environment and the context become tools capable of transferring the cultural significance of a historic place. The attention that users pay to the mediated environment is another aspect that contributes to presence. Attention is related to users’ focalization and concentration and to their interests. Thus, in order to improve the involvement and capture the attention of users, I investigated in my work the adoption of narratives and storytelling experiences, which can help people making sense of history and culture, and of gamification approaches, which explore the use of game thinking and game mechanics in cultural contexts, thus engaging users while disseminating cultural contents and, why not?, letting them have fun during this process. Another dimension related to the effectiveness of any VLE is also the quality of the user experience (UX).