The Use of Live Virtual Guides in Educational Applications

Serious games are becoming increasingly popular in education, science, medicine, religion, engineering, and some other fields. Additionally, serious heritage games, including virtual reconstructions and museums, provide a good environment for a synthesis of serious games and cultural heritage. This may be used for education in the form of edutainment, comprising various techniques, such as storytelling, visual expression of information, interactivity and entertainment. This paper demonstrates a new concept of using live virtual guides in a Flash environment for cultural heritage virtual reconstruction. A pilot user study compares another approach using the X3D environment, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of our concept. The introduced results can be easily adopted for serious games development.