Using augmented reality, gaming technologies, and transmedial storytelling to develop and co-design local cultural heritage experiences

Abstract

As technologies are integrated in museum and cultural heritage contexts, digital heritage design increasingly depends on innovative, embodied and experimental storytelling features focused on users. These developments create opportunities to incorporate gaming technologies that may include immersive, affective mixed reality (MR) systems with narrative innovation at the core. To support such engagements, researchers in the Division of Game Development at the University of Skövde have developed a number of projects, educational programs, interdisciplinary research practices and collaborations. In our chapter we will foreground the KLUB project, a sub-project in the KASTiS project (in English, the “Cultural Heritage and Game Technologies in Skaraborg” project), a funded regional development initiative in western Sweden focused on engaging citizens in local cultural heritage at a number of municipalities. KLUB uses transmedial storytelling techniques and gaming elements within an Augmented Reality enhanced children’s book series and related media (board games, locative experiences) that have been co-designed with a number of stakeholders to tell and play the local micro-histories of the Skaraborg region in Sweden. We contextualize our research in humanistic interventions and practices for co-designing transmedial game/stories and outline some of our related intra-disciplinary activities and impacts in research.