Edutainment & Engagement at Exhibitions: A Case Study of Gamification in the Historic Hammaburg Model

Abstract

Gamification in the context of interactive exhibitions has enormous potential to attract visitors and improve their engagement, flow, and learning. This paper describes a case study in which we use game-design elements for an interactive and collaborative exploration of a virtual exhibition. The goal is to collaboratively explore the possibilities of a multiplayer game using different user interfaces and input devices in the same environment. The case study was conducted using a virtual 3D model of the “Hammaburg”, which is a medieval castle of the 9th century. The idea of the multiplayer exhibition consists of a two-player game. One player is using a touch-table or other touch input devices, whereas the other player is using an immersive head-mounted display (HMD), combined with a game controller to navigate through the virtual environment (VE). Both players can interactively explore the VE while playing a mini-game together. We performed a user study to evaluate the game concepts. The results suggest that communication between the players—both spoken and technologically supported—is a challenging task, and seems especially difficult for the HMD player. Furthermore, this paper proposes a more specific exploration of other possible settings focusing on the communication of the players.