A Serious Game Based on Hidden Objects for Art History in Fully Immersive Virtual Reality

Fully immersive virtual reality has been recently used for the creation of virtual museums, art galleries, and other applications related to cultural heritage. While the content of these applications typically has an educational value, it remains difficult to engage users into art and the humanities by only presenting the artworks and their descriptions through an immersive experience. We propose in this paper to better engage users in the analysis of paintings through a serious game based on the principle of wimmelbooks and hidden picture books, e.g., “Where is Waldo”. This serious game provides the user with different art galleries in which the player is asked to search for a piece of painting inside a collection of paintings, engaging the players in the visual analysis of paintings. The pieces of paintings are selected manually, and we also assess the extent to which machine learning may help in defining regions of interest such as faces as potential targets. The evaluation of the approach is a practical example of how serious games can be used for better engaging users into art history in immersive learning.