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The National Videogame Arcade

The National Videogame Arcade

2 Projects, page 1 of 1
  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: AH/R004641/1
    Funder Contribution: 80,353 GBP

    The VisitorBox project will produce a toolkit that combines physical ideation cards with a mobile app and web-based idea repository to enable heritage organisations to rapidly generate and share ideas for new visitor experiences. This Follow-on Fund project addresses the 'Digital Transformations in the Arts and Humanities' theme and will forge impact through commercialization and knowledge exchange. It builds on research undertaken by the project team as well as research and impact collaborations with our external partners. These partners are chosen from different segments of the regional and national heritage economy; they represent curators and collection managers with differing training backgrounds, all keen to harness digital technologies to enhance access to and engagement with their collection assets. VisitorBox presents an unanticipated pathway to impact that has emerged from the AHRC international network Data - Asset - Method (DAM network: AH/J006963/1). This network identified the barriers that prevent our stakeholders operating in the culture economy from accessing digital technologies. The main barrier is the stakeholders' lack of an overview of available technologies, and their low confidence and expertise to experiment with such technologies, especially at the early stages of design and prototyping. The network findings align in particular with our experience of collaborating with partners in the heritage sector, including in the context of three EU-funded projects. We want to bring to bear our knowledge and the expertise gained through the network to overcome the barriers of harnessing digital technologies in this specific sector. Our aim is to respond to one explicit demand of our heritage partners in the domain of visitor engagement, which is their key means of intellectual and commercial exploitation: to have access to their own design and prototyping exploration tools and so scale up the impact of our research and consultancy. Researchers and partners (including the Nottingham Castle and Galleries, the National Videogame Arcade, the D.H. Lawrence Birthplace Museum, Nottingham's UNESCO City of Literature, and the National Trust) will work together as co-producers of VisitorBox. The tool-set will consist of a set of ideation cards. These physical playing cards represent individual design concepts, technologies, user types, and visiting activities; the cards encapsulate comprehensive engagement design and humanities thinking, reflected in the rules for playing them. The cards will allow players (e.g. curators) to produce new ideas quickly but without compromising on methodological depth. Alongside the card deck VisitorBox will include a mobile app, allowing players to scan individual cards or card combinations to capture ideas and curatorial trajectories in digital form. Players will be able to upload these digital ideas to an interactive website, the VisitorBox repository, and share them with their colleagues, or with trusted partners. Users will also be able to gain access to a rich set of digital resources that will support project refinement and execution. The project will evidence the value of the toolkit through co-production with our partners in six design workshops and additional piloting with twenty national and international heritage organisations. Feedback from these activities will inform the development of a sustainable business model for VisitorBox. We will promote VisitorBox along with our business plan at high-profile sectoral events in Europe and the US, and within the teaching programme of a leading US HE organisation. The project will be led by an early-career researcher - Dr Ben Bedwell - to establish him as a research leader at the interface of Computer Science and the Humanities. The project team has a strong track record of developing challenge-driven technologies for arts and humanities practitioners; it involves the lead investigators of the DAM network, Lorenz and Benford.

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  • Funder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: EP/S022325/1
    Funder Contribution: 6,402,890 GBP

    Digital games have extraordinary economic, social and cultural impact. The industry is one of the fastest-growing in the world, larger than film or music, with revenues expected to increase from $138 billion in 2018 to $180 billion by 2021. 2.6 billion people worldwide play digital games (21 million in the UK), with an average age of 35 and equal numbers of females and males. The Wellcome Trust-sponsored game Senua's Sacrifice, made in the UK, won 5 Baftas for its interactive and educational portrayal of psychosis. The UK games industry is a global leader - UK game sales are valued at £4.3bn with 12,000 people directly employed. The games industry is innovative and hungry for innovation - recent research breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have arisen through games research undertaken at Google DeepMind in the UK. Rolls Royce makes better jet engines using 3D technology pioneered in games. Games are leading the "data and AI revolution" of HM Government's 2017 Industrial Strategy. Games have become a massive lever for social good through applied games for health, education, and science. The mobile game Pokémon Go added 144 billion steps to physical activity in the US alone. The Alzheimer's Research-funded Sea Hero Quest game collected data equivalent to 9,400 years of dementia lab data within 6 months. The EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Intelligent Games and Game Intelligence (IGGI) first received funding in 2014, and has since been a huge success: raising the level of research innovation in games, with the highest-possible ratings in our EPSRC mid-term review. The next phase of IGGI will inject 60+ PhD-qualified research leaders and state of the art research advances into the UK games industry. The two core themes of IGGI are: (1) Intelligent Games: increasing the flow of research into games. IGGI PhD research in topics such as AI, data science, and design will empower the UK games industry to create more innovative and entertaining games. IGGI research has already enhanced the experience for millions of game players. IGGI will create engaging AI agents that are enjoyable to interact with, tackling fundamental challenges for the future of work and society that go beyond games. IGGI will spearhead new AI techniques that augment human creativity by automatically 'filling in the details' of human sketches. (2) Game Intelligence: increasing the use of intelligence from games to achieve scientific and social goals. Every action in a digital game can be logged, creating huge data sets for behavioural science. For example, current IGGI students have assessed traits such as IQ, agreeableness, or attention from large game datasets. IGGI students will investigate more intelligent, adaptive games for education and to improve mental health. IGGI will maximize the enormous opportunity for scientific and social impact from games by laying the research groundwork for further data-driven applied games for health, science, and education. IGGI will massively advance these research themes, and train 60+ PhD students to be future research leaders. To accomplish this, our updated training programme and 60+ research supervisors will provide students with rigorous training and hands-on experience in AI, programming, game design, research methods, and data science, with end user and industry engagement from day one. Recruiting and empowering a diverse student cohort to promote equality, diversity, and inclusion through games, IGGI will drive positive culture change in industry and academia. Students will work with leading UK experts to co-create and disseminate standards for responsible games innovation. Directly working with the UK games industry through placements, workshops, game development challenges, and an annual conference, they will advance research knowledge and translate it into social, cultural and economic impact.

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