REENACT: Learning about Historical Battles and Wars through

Augmented Reality and Role Playing

An EXPERIMEDIA Experiment

Mart

ın L

opez-Nores

, Yolanda Blanco-Fern

andez

, Jos

e J. Pazos-Arias

, Alberto Gil-Solla

Jorge Garc

ıa-Duque

, Manuel Ramos-Cabrer

and Manolis Wallace

AtlantTIC Research Center for Information and Communication Technologies

Department of Telematics Engineering, University of Vigo, Vigo, Spain

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

 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

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:

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.

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