Engaging the Virtual Landscape: Serious gaming environments as tools in historical landscape reconstruction and interpretation

This poster discusses the development of a virtual reconstruction of a historical landscape enhanced with embedded multimedia data, utilizing Microsoft's XNA Game Studio 2.0 development environment to create a serious game application, the Spatial Experience Engine (SEE). SEE utilizes the advanced graphics power and functionality of state-of-the-art videogame technology to provide realistic rendering of terrain and vegetation, structures, water movement, weather, and other physics-based systems. Moving beyond representing increasingly realistic virtual landscapes, gaming environments such as XNA now allow researchers and scholars to build interactive, immersive virtual worlds. Ebedded within the virtual reconstruction, multimedia resources provide contextual information that can be accessed through interaction with features in the digital landscape.