ELIOS Lab
Serious Games in Cultural Heritage Field
Riccardo Berta
ELIOS Lab, DIBE, University of Genoa
berta@elios.unige.it
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Travel in Europe (TiE) project
Travel in Europe (TiE): European project co-funded by
Culture 2000 programme
Implement an innovative mean to promote and divulgate
the European heritage
The main target audience: high-school students aged 14 to 18
An easy-to-access online environment
Users play challenging and compelling game experiences by
interacting with virtual representations of European heritage
The project exploits the concept of travel
Engaging by itself
Supports geographic contextualization of the heritage
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Vision
A player of TiE moves in a 2D space
representing the map of Europe
The player visits some cities and regions that are
reconstructed in 3D
He faces 2D trials (microGames: mGs)
embedded in the 3D reconstructions to obtain
scores
mGs concerns the local artistic heritage and are
contextualized
 E.g. an art game concerning the Van Cleve’s “Adoration of
the Magi” picture is played in the 3D reconstruction of the San
Donato church in Genoa’s historical center, where the picture
is conserved
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Reconstructing 3D cities for cultural tourism purposes
Trade-off:
Photorealism
Highly impressive
Culturally correct and meaningful experience
Models’ weight and complexity
Allow interactive real-time online exploration
Modeling work very expensive
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TiE 3D worlds
Point of Interests (PoI)
High-detail, rigorous reconstructions of a building
 Cathedral, theather, Renaissance palace
Style Areas (SA)
Dynamically created using a statistical
description of architectonic parameters
 Use a limited set of textures that are instances of
architectonic features representative of that area (e.g
windows, portals, etc.)
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PoIs
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SA
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Likelihood principle
Architectonic-style likelihood principle
Like in a real visit: a tourist perceives the
feeling of being in a place (e.g. Genova)
but usually does not perceive/remember
the particulars of each distinct building
Allows users to live experiences similar to
a real visit of a city limiting the effort in 3D
modeling
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Conclusions and Future Works
Project started in Nov 2006
User needs analysis performed
Students, teachers, art experts from 8 countries
System Design
Game engine, cultural environment mechanisms,
MMORG architecture, trial games
Content Collection (semi-automatic)
maps and pictures from 15 cities
Contents for the trial-games
Implementation is in a final stage, and we
have a demo that include some cities
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Thank you!
http://www.tieproject.eu/
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