Underwater Search and Discovery: From Serious Games to Virtual Reality

There are different ways of discovering underwater archaeological sites. This paper presents search techniques for discovering artefacts in the form of two different educational games. The first one is a classical serious game that assesses two maritime archaeological methods for search and discovering artefacts including circular and compass search. Evaluation results with 30 participants indicated that the circular search method is the most appropriate one. Based on these results, an immersive virtual reality search and discovery simulation was implemented. To educate the users about underwater site formation process digital storytelling videos were used when an artefact is discovered.This work has been partly supported by the project that has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 739578 (RISE – Call: H2020-WIDESPREAD-01-2016-2017-TeamingPhase2) and the Government of the Republic of Cyprus through the Directorate General for European Programmes, Coordination and Development