Games on multitouch screens to learn park history

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This page presents two games to be played by young students interacting with a multitouch screen, that are designed to reinforce knowledge learned during game. The scenario is that the multitouch system is in the museum by an archaeological park and students play the games after their visit to the park and/or museum.

History-Puzzle
Time-Voyager

The first game is called History-Puzzle because it asks participants to complete puzzles of historical monuments.
History-Puzzle shows nine incomplete messages (a) that the player needs to complete in order to visualize the 3D reconstruction of the original building (b).

History-Puzzle

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Time-Voyager invites players to organize photos according to a chronological scheme corresponding to the different historical eras of the park history; the photos depict scenes, buildings or objects related to specific Ages.

Time-Voyager

With Time-Voyager, two players can also play against each other to see who can assign the photos faster.

Time-Voyager: Challenge between two players

The applications described in this page are designed for large multitouch screens.
The hardware system provided by MultiTouch Ltd relies on the so-called “diffused illumination” technology, like what is used in the Perceptive Pixel display; it requires:

an infrared emitter and an industrial cine-camera to detect the user's movements/li>
one or more projectors and a screen on which images are projected

The screen consists of a safety glass behind which a rear-projection canvas is attached.
The present system screen size is 2 x 1.2 meters but it is possible to use screens of up to 16 meters.

This technology is less costly than a format consisting of several combined LCD panels and, above all, less delicate. In fact, the screen is made of a normal safety window like the ones used for shop windows, so in case of damage, by vandalism for instance, it is only necessary to replace the glass and not costly LCD panels. However, the screen needs to be completely disassembled for transport and, each time this happens, the projection system and touch sensors will then have to be re-calibrated. Developing software applications for multitouch screens is still not easy.
Multitouch hardware manufacturers provide Software Development Kits (SDKs), but customers need to have specific skills to be able to use them properly to program their own software applications. For example, MultiTouch Ltd provides an SDK, called “Cornerstone”, that requires C++ and OpenGL programming. The games here presented have been developed in Java, thanks to the open source MT4J (Multitouch for Java) development platform. The TUIO protocol has been adopted to allow communication between the touch-capture system and the software application.

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