Serious Gaming - Virtual Reality's Saviour?
Prof. Robert J. Stone
Director, Human Interface Technologies Team,
Department of Electronic, Electrical & Computer Engineering
Univ. of Birmingham, UK
R.J.Stone@bham.ac.uk

“Serious Games” – a global revolution in interactive 3D technology that promises to develop intuitive, affordable, accessible and familiar training environments for a wide range of educational and training applications, from medicine and healthcare to defence training for urban and special operations combat; from national heritage to multi-cultural interaction. But haven’t we been here before? Didn’t we see an almost identical scenario played out in the 1990s? Then it was called Virtual Reality, or VR – once described as “the most significant technological breakthrough since the invention of television”. VR was popularised by a myriad of technologies – head-mounted displays, instrumented gloves and motion capture suits, multi-screen rooms or “CAVEs”. By the end of the 20th Century, VR would help us to abandon the keyboard, mouse, joystick and computer monitor in favour of interfaces exploiting the skills we were born with. We would all interact naturally with virtual objects and people whilst “immersed” within a multi-sensory, 3D computer-generated world.

As we now know, this brave new world simply did not happen. Despite sizeable early investment, national initiatives, expensive (and unexploited) international collaborative projects and the widespread launch of centres of academic excellence, VR delivered very little of use to the global IT community. A handful of organisations actually adopted VR, but most were simply scared off by its complexity and cost. The VR supply companies have either passed away or are hanging on by a thread and academic centres have closed or are fast becoming expensive technology museums. And the biggest mistake made by the VR community was that it completely forgot the human factor - the needs, capabilities and limitations of its end users. We are, today, still using keyboards, mice and conventional computer displays.

There is absolutely no doubt that serious gaming can deliver much more than the promises and hype of its VR predecessor – affordability and accessibility, in particular. However, to do this, lessons must be learned. Technology of this nature has to be designed in conjunction with the end user, identifying what skills need to be trained and how best to exploit gaming technologies – delivering appropriate content, fidelity and interactive technologies, as opposed to impressive special effects that may look impressive to avid gamers, but may well distract the serious application user from the task at hand. “Don’t deliver it because you can – deliver it because it’s needed”! The training solution must be packaged in a form the end user can understand and use immediately, supporting their own modifications through simple-to-use shape, texture and behavioural editors. This is where yesterday’s VR failed; this is where the serious gaming community has a second chance.

Ecology of the Virtual : New Scenarios of Virtual Heritage
Dr. Maurizio Forte
CNR-ITABC (Institute of Technologies Applied to Cultural Heritage)
Vice-President Virtual Heritage Network
maurizio.forte@itabc.cnr.it

The virtual is, first of all, an environment and an ecosystem: in fact there are important relations between cybernetics, system theories and cognitive sciences. According to certain instances of ecological thought, the living being must be comprehended in terms of relations: the living being is an autopoietic system because it is self-produced and self-organised. In short one can define virtual reality as an autopoietic system reflecting processes of mutual interaction. In this contribution we want to discuss the concepts of virtual reality and cultural heritage according to an ecosystemic perspective: the Virtual represents a complex of relations, the virtual translation of heritage is explainable according to a connectivity of information able to create a system. An environment can be recognized in relation with an organism of which it is an environment; the VR is ontology by virtue on the relations that are created with the actor/observer of the system. Cultural landscapes, museums, artifacts, exhibitions, objects, have to be re-contextualized in terms of relations, connections, perceptions, activities: without context there is no communication (Bateson, 1972). The digital cultural transmission is a crucial issue of this millennium and a hard challenge for the future. In this scenario a comparison between epistemological and technological instances of the Virtual is needed, so communicating the Virtual is a key argument for the world of the cultural heritage. In the ecological cybernetics the map is not the territory, therefore we could consider the Virtual as Map, the Real as territory, according to an ecological interpretation.
The revolution of the digital technologies in the past has focused attention mainly on the technical power and not on the semantic level of the informative and communicational aspects. In particular a distinction between a generic Digital and the Virtual is necessary, because involvement and actions of users in a virtual immersive scenario is completely different, in terms of feedback, learning and perception, in comparison with other kinds of digital interactions. It is important to emphasize that Virtual Reality embraces these features: 3D, immersive, inclusive, interactive, and interactive in real time; in short this Virtual communicates in a different cybernetic way, creating a sort of informative echo, from the environment to the user and vice versa.
In the field of the virtual heritage there is a risk to enhance the amazing aesthetic technological features despite the informative/narrative feedback and cognition within the virtual worlds. How much information can I get from a virtual system? How does it communicate? What is the socio-economical impact? How can we process this kind of interactive information? The importance of the virtual reality systems in the applications of cultural heritage should be oriented towards the capacity to change ways and approaches of learning and cultural transmission. Finally, this contribution will try to discuss next possible scenarios of the virtual heritage environments: artificial worlds populated of artificial intelligences and of complex behaviours will involve the users to be part of the environment itself.