1. Interacting With History
Using Virtual
Environments
Erik Champion
erik.champion@curtin.edu.au
Curtin University
Perth Australia

2. Brief bio
Background in architecture, (art history) and philosophy
PhD with Lonely Planet in VEs for travel and tourism
Taught interaction design and game design
Project Manager for a Digital Humanities Network (Denmark)
Professor of Cultural Visualisation, Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia

3. 3D Cultural Visualisation?
Feature
Science Art
Culture
Reusable data
Yes
No
Important
Standard tools
Yes
Seldom Thematic & communal
Clear research
question
Yes
Seldom Depends
Null hypothesis
Yes
No
Extensible
Mostly
Seldom Important
Falsifiable
Yes
Seldom Difficult
Stored
Typically Unlikely Vital
Not often

4. 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).

5. Central point
1. Games are great learning environments
2. Except for Cultural Significance, history and heritage

Good and bad examples
1. 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

6. Games as tools
Creatorverse

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

8. Games for history
1. 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

9. 1. Playing History
Plague – 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 setting
Solution: The game can be
compared to a journey through
time and space
Platform: Mac/PC, single player,
browser
Technology: 3D Unity game
engine
Playtime: Per game 60 minutes
Target group: 9-14 years old

10. 2. Discuss and debate
http://proteus.brown.edu/romana
Watch 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

11. 3. Role-play
http://publicVR.org OR video at http://vimeo.com/25901467

12. 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.”

13. 5. Film Events (Machinima)
http://www.sourcefilmmaker.com/
http://www.thesims.com/de-de
http://moviesandbox.com

14. 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

15. 7. Design past artefacts

18. 8. Create VEs via game mods
http://cryve.id.tue.nl

20. 8b. OR VEs from VR systems
http://www.ntnu.no/ub/omubit/bibliotekene/gunnerus-1/mubil

21. Games: Pros and cons
Factors
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.

22. 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).

23. 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’.

24. Problem: Narrative/Interaction
How do we interact with
history over time?
How does the GOD view
interact with inhabitants?
(Glory of Rome)

25. 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)

26. 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?

27. Problem: Avatars
Eric Fassbender: Macquarie Lighthouse

Realistic depiction

Social behaviour

Interface issues

How to advance story
http://www.interactivestory.net/

28. Problem:
Rituals
Lacking
•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=MqMXIR
Image:
http://www.virtualtripping.com/google-earths
2008

29. Problem: Sensory
Immersion

30. Affective Process

31. Biofeedback middleware

32. Kinect 1/2: voice + skeleton

33. 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.
http://uwnews.washington.edu/ni/article.asp?articleID=37134

34. Problem: Integrate
Text+Model
http://gap.alexandriaarchive.org/gapvis/index.html#index

35. 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

36. 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

37. Alternative game modes
Turkey Maiden Educational
Computer Game
http://digitalethnography.dm.ucf.edu/
The Journey
http://www.thenightjourney.com/statement.htm

38. Gaming through touch
Shown at Vsmm2012 conference
Chinese 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

39. 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?

40. 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 extrapolation
they 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.

41. Problem: Augmenting
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.
script

42. 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).

44. 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

45. 
Collaborative learning: HACK4LT, VILNIUS LITHUANIA

46. Mixed Reality
http://ael.gatech.edu/lab/research/arsecondlife
/using-the-ar-second-life-client/
http://virtual.vtt.fi/virtual/proj2/multimedi
a/projects/mrconference.html

47. 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

48. Warping

49. The HIVE@CURTIN

50. The cost of Stereo VR

51. 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.

52. References

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BBC Ancient History Section. (Undated). Death in
Sakkara: An Egyptian Adventure,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/interactive/animations/ir
onage_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:
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Champion, E. (2008). ‘Otherness of place: Game-based
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Dondlinger, M. J. (2007). ‘Educational Video Game
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Handron, K., & Jacobson, J. (2010). Extending Physical
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Hight, J. (2006). ‘TEXT: Narrative Archaeology: reading
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Gillings, M. (2002). Virtual archaeologies and the hyperreal, in P. Fisher, D. Unwin, (eds.), Virtual Reality in
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
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Goldstein, L. (1964). ‘The "Alleged" Futurity of
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http://blip.tv/learning-without-frontiers/game-basedlearning-2009-terry-deary-author-horrible-histories1916837
http://archaeogaming.wordpress.com/