REENACT: Learning about Historical Battles and Wars through
Augmented Reality and Role Playing
An EXPERIMEDIA Experiment
Mart
´
ın L
´
opez-Nores
1
, Yolanda Blanco-Fern
´
andez
1
, Jos
´
e J. Pazos-Arias
1
, Alberto Gil-Solla
1
,
Jorge Garc
´
ıa-Duque
1
, Manuel Ramos-Cabrer
1
and Manolis Wallace
2
1
AtlantTIC Research Center for Information and Communication Technologies
Department of Telematics Engineering, University of Vigo, Vigo, Spain
2
Foundation of the Hellenic World, Athens, Greece
Keywords:
Future Internet Research and Experimentation, Technology-enhanced Learning, Augmented Reality.
Abstract:
This paper presents one proposal to engage groups of people into immersive collective experiences to learn
about a certain historical battle or war, from the point of view of reenactors and historians. The participants
will be equipped with tactile mobile devices that interact with an augmented reality platform and an online
environment for the orchestration of distributed live games, provided by the technological facility that is being
developed within the EXPERIMEDIA FP7 project. We describe the implementation and experimentation
plans, including a discussion of the indicators we will be measuring to assess Quality of Service, Quality of
Experience and Quality of Community.
1 INTRODUCTION
Human History has been shaped by the outcomes of
countless battles and wars. Unfortunately, the classi-
cal pedagogy of these events puts them down as occa-
sional events that just happen, that involve two sides
(often appearing as the good and the evil forces) and
that apparently end fortuitously, as by tossing a coin.
This approach neglects many facts about the reasons
for the battles, alliances and supporters, why things
went on the way they did, what were the winning
or losing choices, what were the consequences in the
short, medium and long terms, etc. As a result, the
general awareness of History in our society is rather
partial and deficient, and the students end up with lit-
tle more that a collection of dates and a vague idea of
who defeated who.
Novel technologies provide powerful means to
make things better and more interesting. Smart-
phones and tablets have already been around for some
time (Moon et al., 2010; Akkerman et al., 2009; Sala
et al., 2011; Lohr, 2011), just like social network-
ing (Arends et al., 2012; Agarwala et al., 2012; D
´
ıaz
et al., 2012), videogames for learning (Charsky and
Ressler, 2011; Watson et al., 2011; Froschauer et al.,
2012) and even location-based and virtual reality ed-
ucational tools (Tosatto and Gribaudo, 2009; Jacob-
son et al., 2009). Combining these elements and go-
ing one step further, we present in this paper a new
approach (called REENACT) that brings augmented
reality (AR) technologies into History learning. The
aim is to engage groups of people into immersive col-
lective experiences that will make them learn about
the prelude, the course and the aftermath of battles
and wars with the aid of tactile mobile devices, reposi-
tories of multimedia contents, an advanced technolog-
ical facility and remote experts. We present the details
of the proposal in Section 2, followed by a description
of the implementation plan in Section 3. The experi-
mentation plan is presented in Section 4, including a
discussion of the indicators we will be measuring to
evaluate Quality of Service (QoS), Quality of Experi-
ence (QoE) and Quality of Community (QoC). Con-
clusions about the potential value of the proposal for
different stakeholders are given in Section 5.
2 THE REENACT APPROACH
The REENACT experiences will be organised in three
stages, that give the participants the possibilities of
learning about one event from inside, as reenactors,
and from outside, as historians. Next, we will briefly
160
López-Nores M., Blanco-Fernández Y., Pazos-Arias J., Gil-Solla A., García-Duque J., Ramos-Cabrer M. and Wallace M..
REENACT: Learning about Historical Battles and Wars through Augmented Reality and Role Playing - An EXPERIMEDIA Experiment.
DOI: 10.5220/0004396201600165
In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2013), pages 160-165
ISBN: 978-989-8565-53-2
Copyright
c
2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
explain these stages with examples borrowed from the
scenario of the Battle of Thermopylae, which is the
first event we will experiment with. This event is quite
popular as a symbol of courage against overwhelming
odds, but it is not really well understood due to non-
rigorous treatment in movies and comics. Fortunately,
the details reported by Herodotus and other historians
provide sufficient scenes to yield both a didactic and
enlightening experience to explain such facts as the
advantages of training, equipment, and good use of
terrain as force multipliers.
2.1 The Reenactment Stage
Stage 1 is about involving groups of people in the
reenactment of battles. They will be moving around
in a room with a number of QR codes on the floor
or on the walls, where they will spend 15–20 minutes
immersed in a multiplayer role-playing game with an
AR vision provided by tactile mobile devices. The
QR codes serve to identify zones in the reenactment
space, as needed to enable different actions at dif-
ferent places over time. Figure 1 depicts the zones
defined for the Battle of Thermopylae over a dis-
torted map of Greece, including Asia Minor (where
the Persians came from to conquer the Greek city-
states), Sparta and Thessaly (home of some of the
main characters), the settlements of the Persian and
Greek armies at Thermopylae, the sky of Elysium (for
the Greeks who die and do not get new roles), the Tar-
tarus (the Greek underworld) and the Garothman (the
heaven of Zoroastrianism).
Figure 1: Zones for the reenactment room of the Battle of
Thermopylae.
After watching a brief projection explaining the
historical context of the conflict, the participants will
be lent one tablet, take up one role in the battle and
start playing. Using the tablet, each participant will
be able to visualise his/her position in the scenery,
mapping the zones to real locations on a satellite view
that may be overlaid with historical maps as in Fig-
ure 2. Additionally, the tablet will be offering the ac-
tions each participant may make at any given moment:
to advance on a certain stand, to retreat, to fight one
way or another, to surrender or not, etc. The choice
of possible actions will be a function of each individ-
ual’s choices, choices made by other characters in the
past or decisions made collectively by voting, as de-
termined by a script of the event.
At certain points, the participants will enjoy 360
views of the scenery and 3D contents linked to the
markers laid on the floor or on the walls. Likewise,
to enhance the feeling of a collective experience, one
laptop can be put to use any big screens or projection
boards available in the reenactment room to display
the visualisation of the scenario of the battle, along
with video footage that may serve to illustrate what is
going on, and even pictures or textual comments com-
ing from the reenactors’ devices. If available, loud-
speakers will play accompaniment music and sound
effects for further immersion. These features may en-
hance the educational aspect too, as proved in (Fass-
bender et al., 2012). We will also exploit the tablets to
make the reenactment a playful experience, for exam-
ple, to play sounds when the device becomes a sword
or to allow shooting arrows by dragging a slingshot.
2.2 The Replay Stage
Once the recreation of the battle has finished, the par-
ticipants will be taken to a projection room to analyse
what has been happening. They have already lived the
battle from inside, with a very partial vision, and now
it is turn to learn more by watching things from out-
side, and to see how their recreation compares to the
real historic events. This second stage of the REEN-
ACT experiences will be driven by one expert, who
may be physically present at the projection room or
appearing on the screen from a remote location. The
expert will rely on a record of the movements and
actions of each participant during the reenactment.
Combining this record with the script of the battle, the
expert will be able to identify specific situations lived
by the reenactors that could serve to explain important
facts about the course of the fights (e.g. to illustrate
the technological superiority of one of the opponents,
the war tactics employed, etc).
The important point of the replay stage is to re-
late the reenactors’ experiences with the historical
REENACT:LearningaboutHistoricalBattlesandWarsthroughAugmentedRealityandRolePlaying-An
EXPERIMEDIAExperiment
161
Figure 2: A view of the Thermopylae area with a historical map overlaid.
facts, which should help them to realise and memo-
rise facts that usually go unnoticed in traditional His-
tory teaching. Therefore, the expert must devote some
time to explaining what aspects of the reenactment di-
verge from the real facts, either because the scripts
make some allowances or because the participants
have made the opposite of the real characters’ deci-
sions. Also, the expert may choose to run a collec-
tive quiz game with multiple-choice questions about
the prelude and the course of the event. This may be
a qualifying game (the one who misses an answer is
eliminated) or a cumulative one (the one who gets the
greatest number of correct answers, wins). Typically,
there will be only one correct answer, while at least
one other option could make sense and at least one
would be ridiculous, like in the following example:
What type of bridge did the Persians build to cross
the Hellespont?
1. Two 1.3 km pontoon bridges. (TRUE)
2. A Roman stone bridge. (FALSE)
3. A double-decked cast iron bridge. (FALSE)
4. A suspension bridge. (FALSE)
There will also be questions in which all the an-
swers are correct, just seeing one fact from different
perspectives, like:
What was the year of the Battle of Thermopylae?
1. The 4th year of the 74th Olympiad by the Attic
calendar. (TRUE)
2. Year 274 ab urbe condita. (TRUE)
3. Year 2157 by the Chinese calendar. (TRUE)
4. Year 23 by the Achaemenid calendar. (TRUE)
Finally, there may be features for pure entertain-
ment like awards to the best soldiers, rankings of par-
ticipants ordered by how long they have survived, gal-
leries of user-generated pictures, etc.
2.3 The Debate Stage
Finally, in stage 3 (debate), the expert will drive a col-
lective brainstorming about the consequences of the
conflict in the short, medium and long terms, won-
dering what might have been different in History if
things had happened differently. For example, con-
sidering the Battle of Thermopylae (which was not
really decisive in the broader context of the Greco-
Persian wars), the topics for debate will include the
following:
Would there be fewer ruins in Athens today if King
Leonidas had stopped the Persians’ advance?
Would the Parthenon ever have been built?
Would the Persians have conquered the whole of
Europe? And what else? Who would have stopped
them: the Macedons led by Alexander the Great
the next century, the Carthaginians a little bit
later, the Celts, the Vikings, ...?
Would science have developed better or worse?
Would the Middle Ages still occur? And the in-
dustrial revolution?
Would the Europeans have discovered America,
or someone from America have crossed the At-
lantic Ocean the other way before? If so, who?
What would our languages sound like? What
about sports and music?
Would Zoroastrianism get to be the predominant
religion in the world? Would we ever have heard
of Christianism or Islam?
During the debate stage, the projection screen will
become a dynamic big board to display comments
posted by the visitors, which can be rearranged by the
expert. At any time, the expert will be able to choose
CSEDU2013-5thInternationalConferenceonComputerSupportedEducation
162
multimedia contents to illustrate the different points
that are raised. Participants will type their comments
using the tactile mobile devices, and, if chosen by the
expert, they will have the possibility to explain their
ideas or viewpoints to the whole audience in an audio-
or video-call. Some arguments can be voted upon, or
socially rated as possible or impossible”, likely
or “not likely”, “interesting”, absurd”, “original”, so
that the most active visitors get some kind of recog-
nition. Again, there may be quiz games to appraise
the participants’ understanding of the importance and
impact of the battle.
3 IMPLEMENTATION PLAN
The REENACT proposal is being developed on top
of the Future Media Internet (FMI) technological fa-
cility provided by the EXPERIMEDIA FP7 project
1
.
As explained in (Salama et al., 2012), the technolo-
gies that reside in the EXPERIMEDIA facility have
been encapsulated into four components under com-
mon type of content:
The Experiment Content Component (ECC) mon-
itors, derives experimental data from, and man-
ages the other components, taking control of
installation, deployment at the experimentation
venues, running and termination.
The Social Content Component (SCC) gathers
and manages data that is generated on social net-
working sites during the course of an experiment.
Internally, it provides access to different social
networks (giving read access and publishing ca-
pabilities) and also communicates social network
monitoring metrics to the ECC.
The AudioVisual Content Component (AVCC)
provides services related to the management and
delivery of audiovisual contents, including acqui-
sition from a media producer, adaptation and dis-
tribution to different platforms, live edition and re-
alisation, and data and metadata synchronization.
The Pervasive Content Component (PCC) pro-
vides means to track the users’ locations as a
means by which AR content can be selected for
delivery and user-generated data can be mapped
to a spatial location. It also hosts an augmented
reality platform and an online environment for the
orchestration of distributed live games.
The REENACT experiences will be delivered by
a software system comprising one server and three
main interfaces:
1
http://www.experimedia.eu/
The REENACT server will centralise access to
pre-recorded contents and live streaming through
the AVCC, to store the records of events raised
during the reenactments and to control what is
displayed on the different areas of the projection
screen during the replay and debate stages. Be-
sides, it will provide a repository to store the static
images and the text documents that may be used
for illustration purposes at any time.
The reenactors’ front-end will be provided by an
Android application that delivers the interactions
envisaged for the participants during the reenact-
ment, replay and debate stages. This application
relies on the PCC to render the AR vision of the
reenactments on the participants’ devices, and on
the SCC to support messaging, ratings and so on
during the replay and debate. It also interacts with
the AVCC to control the flows of text, images and
audio entering and leaving each device.
The expert’s front-end will be a web application
providing the controls needed to conduct the re-
play and debate stages. The application will in-
teract with the AVCC to allow the expert to join
from a remote location and to browse multime-
dia contents. His/her participation will be realised
through the SCC as for the other participants,
though including means to manage the arguments
raised during the debate, including features of
real-time parsing (e.g. to highlight key words) and
filtering of text messages in cases of foul language
or disrespectful/offending comments.
Finally, the administrator’s front-end will provide
the interfaces needed to supervise the operation
of the rest of the elements during the REENACT
experiences, including manual control over the or-
chestration of events during the reenactment stage
and the gathering of information for later evalua-
tion in cooperation with the ECC.
4 EXPERIMENTATION PLAN
The scenario of the Battle of Thermopylae is be-
ing developed in collaboration with the Foundation
of the Hellenic World (henceforth, FHW), a not-
for-profit cultural institution based in Athens that
boasts a unique technological infrastructure, includ-
ing a dome-shaped room that displays 3D contents
rendered in real time. The FHW is providing support
from expert historians to develop historically rigorous
scripts for the reenactments and sets of questions and
topics for replays and debates. Besides, their virtual
reality department is contributing 3D models for the
REENACT:LearningaboutHistoricalBattlesandWarsthroughAugmentedRealityandRolePlaying-An
EXPERIMEDIAExperiment
163
AR features as well as some pictures and audio/video
footage to put into the content repositories.
The core of our experimentation will be done dur-
ing the summer of 2013 in the Hellenic Cosmos (the
venue provided by the FHW in Athens), but this will
be supplemented with trials in the University of Vigo,
both ex ante (to get early feedback and fix defects in
the software or in the experiment design) and ex post
(to gather further evidence for the evaluation or to as-
sess questions that remain unanswered). Participants
will be recruited from among the communities of stu-
dents, professors, researchers and other staff of the
University of Peloponnese and the University of Vigo.
During the experimentation sessions, the REEN-
ACT software will be feeding data into the ECC, that
will be processed later to evaluate a number of QoS,
QoE and QoC parameters. To begin with, QoS data
will consider aspects like the the responsiveness of the
communication with the different pieces of software
lodged remotely in the EXPERIMEDIA facility, in-
cluding the quality and the latency of the pre-recorded
videos served to the tablets and the projection screen,
the quality, latency and synchronization of the audio
and video feeds from the expert’s webcam, and the la-
tencies in the communication with the Live games
element of the PCC during the reenactment stage.
Regarding QoE, the REENACT system will keep
track of all the movements and actions of the partici-
pants during the reenactments, and also of their inter-
actions during the replay and debate stages (including
stats about how and when the participants use the dif-
ferent features and interfaces). Additionally, the mo-
bile application will provide brief questionnaires to
gather opinions about the REENACT approach and to
rate different features of the experience: educational
value, level of entertainment, convenience of the in-
terfaces, quality and completeness of the contents,
preferences for certain types of contents, etc. Those
ratings will be matched against anonymous informa-
tion about the participants’ educational background
and interest in specific topics.
Halfway between quantitative and qualitative, the
voting and quiz games offered during the replay and
debate stages will be used as sources of information
about the participants’ level of engagement and learn-
ing about the historical events. As a research ques-
tion, it will be checked whether any of the afore-
mentioned parameters depends on the roles played by
the participants during the reenactment stage, since it
might happen that the QoE measurements are better
for someone who has played a main role (say, King
Xerxes in the Battle of Thermopylae) than for some-
one who has played a secondary role (e.g. a Persian
infantryman), or maybe that differences appear be-
tween winning and losing sides.
Finally, QoC measurements will look at quantita-
tive and qualitative aspects of the community of peo-
ple that participate in a REENACT session. To this
aim, we will primarily look at the interactions among
the participants during the replay and debate stages,
e.g. counting the number of ratings and analyzing
the length, mood and depth of the comments they
exchange using their tactile mobile devices. Special
attention will be paid to what happens among peo-
ple who did not know each other before, for which
they will all be asked to tick out the nicknames of
their acquaintances right before starting the reenact-
ment stage. Thus, it will be possible to address ques-
tions like whether strangers keep distances during the
reenactment, whether they comment on the others’ ar-
guments, or whether there is any apparent bias in the
ratings given to acquaintances and strangers.
Some subjective input from the administrators
will also be sought over the different experimentation
sessions, to rate the general mood of the participants
during the reenactment stage: were they engaged?
Were they apparently bored or having fun? Did they
dare to talk aloud when required by their roles?
5 CONCLUSIONS
Our experimentation is intended to appraise the value
impact of the REENACT proposal for museums as
well as primary and secondary schools. The data
gathered about the aforementioned QoS metrics are
mainly relevant to the construction of the EXPERI-
MEDIA facility, but the QoE and QoC data will be
used to assess the truth of the following claims:
Museum visitors or students will enjoy new edu-
tainment experiences aimed at improving the un-
derstanding of historic events, with an opportu-
nity of interacting with one another and with geo-
graphically distributed experts.
Museum guides and educators will be able to par-
ticipate in a new type of collective experience,
supplementing the expertise and knowledge pro-
vided by the experts in replays and debates.
Expert historians will be able to offer their ser-
vices to collaborate in new pedagogical experi-
ences, interacting more closely than ever before
with people interested in knowing more about ma-
jor historical events.
Content creators/providers will find an additional
outlet for the multimedia contents they produce,
which will be usable to provide historically-
meaningful explanations to the situations arisen
CSEDU2013-5thInternationalConferenceonComputerSupportedEducation
164
during the reenactments and to the arguments
raised during the debates.
Last but not least, the experimenters (ourselves)
will draw useful conclusions about the ease of use
of the game-like interfaces provided for the reen-
actment, the didactic value of the different stages,
the interest of engaging in social discussions, etc.
This valuable insight will serve to enhance our on-
going research activities in the area of informa-
tion services, which deal with various flavours of
technology-enhanced distance learning.
Commercial exploitation of the REENACT solu-
tion could happen through the selling of the technol-
ogy, its implantation in the venues, training courses
for educators, implementation of reenactment scripts
and production of multimedia contents.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The research leading to these results has re-
ceived funding from the European Union Seventh
Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant
agreement no. 287966 and from the Conseller
´
ıa
de Educaci
´
on e Ordenaci
´
on Universitaria (Xunta de
Galicia) incentives file CN 2011/023 (partly sup-
ported by FEDER funds).
REFERENCES
Agarwala, M., Hsiao, I.-H., Chae, H., and Natriello, G.
(2012). Vialogues: Videos and dialogues based so-
cial learning environment. In Proceedings of the 12th
IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learn-
ing Technologies (ICALT), Rome, Italy.
Akkerman, S., Admiraal, W., and Huizenga, J. (2009).
Storification in History education: A mobile game in
and about medieval Amsterdam. Computers & Edu-
cation, 52(2):449–459.
Arends, M., Weingartner, M., Froschauer, J., Goldfarb, D.,
and Merkl, D. (2012). Learning about Art History by
exploratory search, contextual view and social tags.
In Proceedings of the 12th IEEE International Con-
ference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT),
Rome, Italy.
Charsky, D. and Ressler, W. (2011). “games are made for
fun”: Lessons on the effects of concept maps in the
classroom use of computer games. Computers & Ed-
ucation, 56(3):604–615.
D
´
ıaz, P., Paredes, P., Alvarado, D., and Giaccardi, E. (2012).
Co-designing social games with children to support
non formal learning. In Proceedings of the 12th
IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learn-
ing Technologies (ICALT), Rome, Italy.
Fassbender, E., Richards, D., Bilgin, A., Thompson, W.,
and Heiden, W. (2012). VirSchool: The effect of
background music and immersive display systems on
memory for facts learned in an educational virtual en-
vironment. Computers & Education, 58(1):490–500.
Froschauer, J., Zweng, J., Merkl, D., Arends, M., Goldfarb,
D., and Weingartner, M. (2012). ARTournament: A
mobile casual game to explore art history. In Pro-
ceedings of the 12th IEEE International Conference
on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT), Rome,
Italy.
Jacobson, A., Militello, R., and Baveye, P. (2009). Develop-
ment of computer-assisted virtual field trips to support
multidisciplinary learning. Computers & Education,
52(3):571–580.
Lohr, M. (2011). e-learning using iPads - an e-learning
scenario using mobile devices and sensors for mea-
surements. In Proceedings of the 11th IEEE Inter-
national Conference on Advanced Learning Technolo-
gies (ICALT), Athens (GA), USA.
Moon, W., Lee, J.-H., and Park, J.-H. (2010). Utiliz-
ing interactive tabletops for educational games. In
Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on
Computer-Supported Education (CSEDU), Valencia,
Spain.
Sala, L., Vannini, S., and Rubegni, E. (2011). Mobile learn-
ing in cultural institutions through the use of an Ap-
ple iPad application prototype. a case study at Monte
Verit
`
a. In Proceedings of Red-conference - Rethinking
education in the knowledge society, Ascona, Switzer-
land.
Salama, D., Garrido Ostermann, E., Ljungstrand, P.,
Softic, S., Prettenhofer, S., Boniface, M., Crowle, S.,
Phillips, S., Halb, W., and Konstanteli, K. (2012).
First blueprint architecture. EXPERIMEDIA project
deliverable D2.1.3, http://www.experimedia.eu/
publications.
Tosatto, C. and Gribaudo, M. (2009). A 3D History class:
A new perspective for the use of computer based tech-
nology in History classes. In Proceedings of the
4th European Conference on Technology Enhanced
Learning (EC-TEL), Nice, France.
Watson, W., Mong, C., and Harris, C. (2011). A case study
of the in-class use of a video game for teaching high
school History. Computers & Education, 56(2):466–
474.
REENACT:LearningaboutHistoricalBattlesandWarsthroughAugmentedRealityandRolePlaying-An
EXPERIMEDIAExperiment
165