Over the past years, digital technologies have transformed how cultural heritage is preserved and studied, but also how it is communicated and experienced. One emerging approach involves the use of Virtual Reality (VR) to create immersive, interactive environments for learning about cultural heritage in a fun way. Based on the ongoing work of TRANSMIXR, the scientific publication “Designing The Space Archivists: A Metadata-Driven VR Game Concept for Children to Engage with Cultural Heritage” explores how structured data – specifically metadata – can be integrated into a VR game format aimed at children, with the goal of increasing engagement with cultural heritage collections.
While digital collections of cultural heritage institutions have the potential to support the design of immersive interfaces, there is a gap in existing literature about how to design engaging experiences tailored for children. Through three workshops with cultural heritage professionals and five workshops with children, we asked the following: how may we design a VR experience for children that allows them to meaningfully interact with cultural heritage media and metadata?
While our eventual goal was to build the game, the primary focus of the paper was to understand how to help children connect to cultural heritage archival data. Our research helped us recognise that children can understand metadata concepts and that they enjoy engaging with metadata through categorisation tasks folded into high-level narratives. These insights helped us understand the different roles that metadata can have in a game experience and that it needs to be concretely represented to be meaningful to children.
Further, we found that collaborative rather than solo experiences motivate children to categorise metadata and learned that children categorise using different criteria than adults and want to use metadata to solve larger puzzles and narratives.
While these specific design insights informed our game concept, this research demonstrates the value of working with both professionals and children during the design process; had we only worked with professionals, we may have abandoned the goal of creating a metadata-driven game altogether.
The article was recently published in Heritage – an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal of cultural and natural heritage science published monthly by MDPI.
Scientific publication authored by: Alina Goldman (NISV), Rasa Bocyte (NISV),Elana B. Blinder (School of Information, University of Maryland), Arno Verhofstadt (VUB), Elizabeth Bonsignore (School of Information, University of Maryland) and Pablo Cesar (CWI)
