Josef Froschauer

Design and evaluation of a Serious Game for immersive cultural training

3D Virtual Worlds have the potential to expand the knowledge of a foreign culture by presenting the information in a visual context. In this paper we describe the design and evaluation of ICURA, a Serious Game that provides an opportunity to learn more about Japanese culture and etiquette. ICURA incorporates different game design and learning principles to effectively communicate knowledge. The main goal is to combine aspects of learning and fun in an immersive 3D Environment to make the communication of knowledge an entertaining experience. We evaluated the game through a user study with 20 participants. The comparison of pre- and post-test results highlights the positive learning effect of ICURA.

A serious heritage game for art history: Design and evaluation of ThIATRO

New methods of presenting the artifacts of our cultural heritage are developing in a changing world, and professionals need to adapt to these changes. This also calls for new ways of raising the interest of children and young adults in their cultural heritage because they are next in line to carry out high-quality preservation efforts. Serious games have been proven to be a source of enjoyment and, if well-made, are a powerful tool to communicate knowledge. We can see that the use of serious games to support cultural heritage purposes has received less attention in research. To fill this gap our paper investigates the usage of serious games for cultural issues. We developed the online serious game ThIATRO that immerses the player into an exhibition and helps students learn about art history. Its playful approach not only increases motivation to learn but also raises interest in art history and cultural heritage in general. We provide an overview of our design ideas and summarize the results of evaluations conducted with a group of 14-year-old pupils in classroom environment.

Towards an Online Multiplayer Serious Game Providing a Joyful Experience in Learning Art History

Using prevalent teaching methods, such as classroom teaching, art historical facts can be tedious to communicate. Especially when it concentrates on teaching artists names, artworks and their corresponding era of art. Knowing about the cultural-historical background of art history can play an important role in raising a students interest in contemporary culture and cultural heritage. We propose the online multiplayer Serious Game ThIATRO that helps students learn art history. This playful approach is intended to not only increases the motivation to learn but also compel the player to think about, organize and use information in ways that encourage active construction of knowledge.

Learning about Art History by Exploratory Search, Contextual View and Social Tags

In order to develop a learning environment for art history, we adopted concepts from art education and information technology. In contrast to other user-interfaces for art-databases, we created the explorARTorium1 to compare artworks along different dimensions without having to rely on textual information that excludes people without sophisticated knowledge of art history. Instead, artworks are presented in context among different categories like the oeuvre of the artist, the topic and theme of an artwork as well as the geographical region and time period the artwork was created in. Additional concepts of the explorARTorium are social tagging and tag- clouds. By evaluating the main concepts of the explorARTorium we provide proof that users follow and apply these concepts.

ARTournament: A Mobile Casual Game to Explore Art History

Playing is an essential part of human culture, even more so nowadays with computer-based games. Gaming is also regarded as an effective means to transfer knowledge and spark interest in a particular topic. This family of games is referred to as educational games and serious games. In this paper we describe the design and evaluation of a mobile casual, level-based game called ARTournament conveying basic concepts of art history. Analyzing player performance on various levels we are able to demonstrate that ARTournament successfully transfers knowledge about art history to the players.

Analysing user generated content related to art history

For the canon of important works of art, lots of information is available on the Internet. Different Web platforms exist that show artworks with additional information and an Art historical description. While this information is suitable for experts in Art history, users without this expert knowledge may find this information hard to access because of a vocabulary mismatch between experts and laypersons. In order to allow users with different expertise to communicate and comprehend Art in their own vocabulary we have created the explorARTorium (www.explorARTorium.info), which visualises artworks in context and allows users to browse along different narratives. The explorARTorium also offers the possibility to annotate artworks. We have therefore collected a Folksonomy about artworks. Applying Data Mining algorithms on this Folksonomy, we show that the reproduction of Art historical facts is possible. Moreover, we are able to analyse the extent of Art historical knowledge among people of the 21st century.

Analysing user motivation in an art folksonomy

The perception of art is a subjective affair - being influenced by our feelings, education and cultural background. Contrary, the study of art history uses formal methods to classify artworks. This discrepancy often poses a risk of being insurmountable -- especially for users without prior knowledge of art history. The concept of social tagging provides the possibility to merge art historical information with the subjective perception of users. For our art Web platform explorARTorium, social tags augment exiting art historical information. In order to better understand how social tagging is best applied, it is necessary to examine the users motivation to assign tags. We adopt the differentiation between users who are motivated by categorizing, and users who are motivated by describing resources. By evaluating our folksonomy according to this paradigm, we show that the preference for certain artworks has an effect on the users tagging motivation, whereas the presentation of an artwork does not. While measures exist that are able to identify the users motivation for annotating artworks, we propose an heuristic that aims to classify categorizing, respectively descriptive, tags. After evaluating this proposed heuristic, we show that it is indeed possible to identify categorizing and descriptive tags, even though the results are somewhat biased by the content of the resources and the individual tagging behaviour of the users.

Revisiting 3D information landscapes for the display of art historical web content

As of today, a lot of different approaches have been dealing with the presentation of art history resources on the Web. While the majority of these focused on traditional 2D methods of display, some did introduce the application of 3D visualization metaphors. Such environments were, however, usually tailored to a specific collection or topic, such as a featured artist or epoch. Meanwhile, the increasing availability of valuable metadata resources has opened up the perspective for the automatic creation of such 3D environments by integrating semantic data sources through the Web. In this work we therefore present a prototype that automatically constructs a 3D environment from semantic art history related Web resources, offering users the opportunity to explore art history following the visualized structure of relations between historical actors of the field. Traversing this historical social network enables users to encounter previously unknown artists and their work in a serendipitous way.

Collectivizing the Barr Model

The authors use data from Wikipedia to build a graph visualization of the evolution of artistic styles inspired by Alfred H. Barrs poster for the 1936 Cubism & Abstract Art exhibition. Drawing from Wikipedia articles about persons and art styles, the authors construct a bi-partite network based on their mutual hyperlinks and assume relationships between styles if their respective articles are bridged by hyperlinks to and from person articles. The resulting visualization extends its model with respect to the number of covered styles, thus embedding it within a larger art-historical perspective as seen through the lens of Wikipedia.

Comparing Art Historical Networks

This work provides a comparison of link structures present in a common subset of art history related biographic person records/articles from the Getty Union List of Artist Names and English Wikipedia.