Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MEMENTOES (iMmersive gamEs for Museums as vehicles to Engage visiTOrs in Empathetic reSponses)
Período documentado: 2022-10-01 hasta 2023-09-30
- Combine the design philosophies of museum exhibition spaces with storytelling concepts used in video games to facilitate historical empathy through meaningful play.
- Develop three digital games as evidence of the proposed framework, each thought-fully exploring a different historical tragedy or injustice, and inspired by actual memories, eyewitness accounts and personal items from museum collections.
- Develop evidence on video games as digital tools to expand the responsibility of cultural institutions to spread and preserve memories of historical injustices, and explore the ties between perspectives and actions of people in the past within current modern society.
MEMENTOES initiated the Games for Culture Cluster (GCC), a network of EU projects to provide evidence on the use of games as a vehicle to benefit society and increase games efficiency in promoting learning, business development, social cohesion and creativity.
Emphasis is given to the co-design and co-creation of the games among museum curators, technology providers and game developers, to bring together historical artefacts and their stories, with game storytelling and mechanics. The aim of the games is twofold – entertainment and learning.
With technological advances in the domains of high-quality digitisation, Artificial Intelligence (AI) for game production, Virtual Reality and accessible interaction techniques, MEMENTOES will deliver unique and accessible gaming experiences.
The social science and humanities expertise is integral to the project’s objectives, especially the focus on museum’s processes in memory studies and transitional justice. In addition, ethical activities ensure that the immersive and cutting-edge game experiences adhere to ethical and data protection principles.
The MEMENTOES game pre-production was completed and reported in the Game Design Documents. Based on them, prototypes have been developed for all three games. The first game “The working man” explores the life of the prisoners in the labor camps of the gulag system. The game is a 3D first-person with an environmental narrative, where the narration starts with the player following the route to the camp. The second game “Marcinelle 1956” is being developed for Le Bois Du Cazier is a VR game that explores the migrants’ exploitation for profit and a disaster that took place in a former coal mine in 1956. The third game “Toys” is being developed for the War Childhood Museum and incorporates its collections and themes. This is a narrative-driven game, which depicts the war from the eyes of children who grew up in conflict, addressing both the negative effects of the war and the children’s resilience.
Additionally, the MEMENTOES AI services were designed and developed. Three of them are already available and continuously updated: i) 3D reconstruction; ii) the Image-resolution and iii) the Style-transfer. The additional Game experience adaptation service is in progress. The accessibility features that will be integrated into the games have been defined and are being developed.
Ethical and legal activities of the project were enabled and will run until the end of the project.
MEMENTOES develops AI tools to generate game content with rigorous representations of Cultural Heritage (CH) and museum collections. First, 3D reconstruction combines NeRF and super-resolution techniques to create higher fidelity 3D models for the games. Second, style transfer is being used together with NeRF to incorporate the historical context of the CH object in an alternative 3D model to be used as a game asset, while the game environment is used to create synthetic data to extract even better 3D model. Third, RL is used for game content adaptation to support user’s progress in the game. Finally, the accessibility toolkit makes immersive game experiences accessible with inclusive design and development.
AI tools are available as services to game developers and museums to digitise CH in high-quality with reduced time and cost. SGs framework increases the impact that a game can have in the audience in terms of attitude, engagement and social change, while game content adaptation and accessibility tools widen the audience that a single game can target to.