Activator: An Immersive Virtual Reality Serious Game Platform for Highlighting Ancient Greek Civilization

Virtual reality (VR) became, in the last few years, an important pillar for promoting cultural heritage (CH) through serious games or virtual guided tours. A lot of museums, institutes, and galleries tend to integrate new technologies like VR for promotion purposes. The major objective of this research is to analyze the Activator project through three immersive scenarios, developed in collaboration with the Center for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH) and the “Noesis” Science Center and Technology Museum, and deal with three different regions of Ancient Greece. This study introduces the serious games VR platform Activator, whose purpose is to provide a realistic Query ID="Q2" Text="Article title: Kindly provide German article." VR experience coupled with a motion platform, to highlight a few significant moments of the ancient Greek civilization and let the user interact with key objects through a set of serious games in virtual environments. In particular, three immersive educational scenarios are implemented in the form of serious games, including the Siege of Rhodes, the Antikythera Wreck, and the First Settlement of Europe, which represents the volcanic eruption at Thera (Santorini). In addition to the implementation details and technologies utilized, the paper presents some preliminary evaluation results with real users, during its initial pilot phase that is currently carried out at the premises of the Noesis Science Center & Technology Museum, in Thessaloniki, Greece. The Activator platform, which has been developed in the context of a collaborative Greek national research project, will be available for public use after the end of the project.