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By Francesca Tinelli - January 2001
How about experiencing the social life of ancient times, learning about history, but having the same amount of fun as playing a “state of the art” video game? Francesca Tinelli introduces the RENAISSANCE Project.
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Virtual Renaissance Court [1] is a research and development project funded by the European Commission as part of the framework of the IST programme. Successfully selected during the first call of the programme in 1999, the project officially started on the 1st of January 2000. The project is being directed by Italian electronic publisher Giunti Multimedia, and involves the German virtual community specialists, Blaxxun Interactive, the Swedish game publishers, Iridon Interactive, and the Italian research institute Istituto Trentino di Cultura (ITC-IRST).
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| Figure 1: The Palazzo Ducale of Urbino |
The aim of the Renaissance project is to develop a new genre of edutainment applications featuring a high quality graphical interface, networked co-operative environments, scientifically validated contents and an innovative pedagogical approach. This enables the reproduction of historically fascinating environments while using the appealing interface of a game in order to teach history.
The project foresees the development of a prototype reproducing life in a Renaissance court, a 3D multi player Internet application where the users can play the role of different courtiers at the same court.
They will be free to fight or ally with each other, but the social outcome of their actions, and their corresponding position in the virtual community, will be checked against historical correctness. Life in a Renaissance court was subject to complex and subtle behaviour rules. A good courtier was expected to have very good diplomatic and military abilities, but also a high cultural level and behave well in order to win the Prince's favour. He had to face many difficulties and enemies to increase his social position. The aim of the game is to accurately reproduce fascinating historic scenarios through a scientifically validated reconstruction. The player has to learn the customs and habits of the time period whilst experimenting with the subtleties a courtier had to master to escape his opponents’ traps and to gain reputation and power in the court.
The game aims to engage interactivity, offering to the user 3D real time action-adventure and a challenging range of puzzles and problems while teaching about daily life during the Renaissance. Possible actions and choices will be based on the cultural parameters of the simulated age. Very simple and clear interfaces will promote decision making and involvement, while a range of characters to interact with and to speak to will allow users to become a part of the historical action. Non-playing characters can assign missions to the avatars: these missions will allow the players to gain points, as well as to learn the different aspects of Renaissance.
The interface will be a 3D reconstructed ancient environment, accurately reproducing the appeal of original historical settings, palaces, costumes and characters. The game will also be a portal to an Internet community. An Internet server will manage the community interactions, tracing users behaviours and allowing information and chats to be exchanged. On the server an intelligent evaluation agent will reside that, processing data according to a scientific “Knowledge Base”, will assess and evaluate users' role-playing, defining the consequences of their actions in the social structure of the reconstructed community.
The project is currently at the end of its pre-production and system definition phase. This phase was devoted to collecting and defining the users and then the system requirements. Requirements for the community server and the game engine have been derived and the system architecture defined. History and pedagogical experts have identified the necessities for a realistic and effective historical reconstruction and defined the final system concept. Sources for multimedia assets and for Renaissance life-style rules have been identified as well. The work generated by this task took advantage of the involvement of experts and authors currently working with the Giunti publishing house.
Now the project is entering its production and system implementation phase, consisting of the real system construction. The community server, with its administration tools and historical behaviour Evaluation Engine will be implemented; at present the Evaluation Engine prototype development is almost complete. The 3D game client will be developed and the multimedia assets produced. Then the complete system will be integrated and functionally tested.
As an end product, VRC (Virtual Renaissance Court) will be of great use to the educational sector as a way of creating student interest in history and social affairs. Whole classes of students could feasibly each have their own online character, guiding them through a rich and accurate historical environment whilst learning valuable lessons about the past.
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| Figure 2: The Duchess of Urbino |
History experts worked on a summation of all relevant Renaissance knowledge in order to correctly define the Renaissance life-style. The work also included a physical description of the geographic environment, architecture, dress, common objects, and all written and non-written rules relevant to evaluate user behaviour in the virtual society. All this relevant information is being transposed into the software in the form of accurate character behaviour, habits, and social hierarchy rules. In this way the system will be able to assess the actions of the players against historical knowledge of the time, and will be able to identify possible consequences for different behaviours.
A “situational” study of the people and events of this particular period provides insight to help players better develop their own definitions and answers, using historical evidence to support their ideas. This approach provides a straightforward way to use the learning environment to build users’ mastery of the historical content and processes depicted in the simulation. A wide variety of situations allow users to choose actions which will suit different types of behaviour. Players are encouraged to develop judgement and to examine their values and the values of other players whilst facing a series of situations designed to get them choosing between a set of possible actions. They can complete the activities related to the simulation, using them to organise their own experience and comprehension of events. Therefore users can make decisions, examine their values, and re-experience the passion of events that formed History.
The development of artificial intelligence for the Renaissance project is being taken to extraordinary depths to ensure accuracy and create a believable world for players to roam freely within. From a technical point of view, the Renaissance project has a two-fold objective: to derive a self-consistent pilot application (Game) as well as a development environment (Author tool).
As regards the Game side, an Internet server will manage the community interactions, tracing users’ characteristics and behaviours and allowing information and chat to be exchanged. An intelligent Evaluation Engine will reside on the server, founding its decisions on a scientific “Knowledge Base” of Renaissance living habits, it will compare and evaluate users’ actions. The server administration will guarantee that a basic Court structure is always running, in order to avoid the absence of certain users which could be potentially crucial to play. Except for when in tutorial mode, the game will be functional only when connected to the server. After a basic personalisation of their character, the user will go online and enter the Court as a foreigner. From then on it will be their ability in learning Renaissance life style that will drive them to success.
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| Figure 3: Federigo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino |
As regards the Author tool side, the project will offer a number of advanced key components, including a state-of-the-art 3D engine and an unrivalled artificial intelligence component. The AI component will be able to simulate broad social parameters from any period in history or fictitious universe, forming a “software kit” that offers a complete online world-authoring environment. The suite of tools, composed of state of the art market tools and “ad hoc” developed ones, will be characterised by a set of modules fully interoperating and yet fully replaceable by any other module covering the same function and respecting the proper interfacing rules. The various tools within the package will also be available separately, which allows a variety of developers to create state of the art web sites, applications, games, and educational software. The “software kit” includes four major components:
In Renaissance, the community of players will act as a learning group while an intelligent agent and server administrator will be remote teachers. The Internet server will manage the community interactions, tracing users characteristics and behaviour, and allowing peer-to-peer conversations. An intelligent evaluation agent will reside on the server side and, processing data according to the scientific “Knowledge Base”, will assess and evaluate the users' role-playing skills, defining the consequences of their actions in the social structure of the reconstructed community. The Evaluation Engine will assess users' actions, checking them against historic correctness. The intelligent agent, on the basis of the knowledge domain provided by Renaissance experts, will be able to automatically evaluate players behaviour, deciding the consequences of their actions.
Particular attention will be given to the validation phase, whose results could open new future perspectives for the project outcomes. The evaluation essentially will be carried out in two directions: on one side historians and Renaissance experts will validate the scientific nature of the contents, on the other side the system didactic value and effectiveness will be tested with a critical mass of users.
The potential market area is extensive: from young people - the same market sector as video game consumers - to libraries, from families, to primary and secondary schools. In fact, even if "edutainment" is one of the current buss words dealing with multimedia publishing, a real edutainment products (applying to people older than 6-8 years) is not readily available on the market: multimedia titles are amusing OR didactic.
“We felt that there was a strong demand for believable, fully immersed online historical recreations. Games like VRC will not only provide endless hours of play, but also a chance for users to get a real sense of what actually being there was like. As such it will provide an incredibly powerful educational tool”, said David Fuschi, Project Manager at Giunti Multimedia. Marco Caprelli, Games Director of Giunti Multimedia's development studio continued “Also, for the first time, programmers will be able to create realistic environments and characters that react in a true to life way. We can see it drawing in players and users from all ages and walks of life who are eager to have an alternate lifestyle that they can escape into.”
Virtual Renaissance Court will be ready for play in the summer of 2001, with the authoring environment and its components scheduled to be available to publishers and developers by 2002.
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Francesca Tinelli
GIUNTI MULTIMEDIA
Research & Development Dpt.
Ripa di Porta Ticinese, 91
20143 Milan - Italy
Phone : +39 2 83 93 374 / 408
Francesca Tinelli joined the Research & Development Dept. Of Giunti Multimedia in 1997. She has participated in several other research projects, particularly managing the development of pilot applications and monitoring demonstration/evaluation activities by end-users. Her research interests include ergonomic graphic interfaces for pedagogical and edutainment applications .
Giunti Multimedia srl is the digital publishing arm of the Giunti Publishing Group, and is recognized as the Italian leader in the primary and secondary educational publishing sector. Giunti presently accounts for more than 180 million Euros consolidated turnover with shares in 25 Companies covering all publishing issues, from conception to printing and distribution.
Blaxxun Interactive AG is an international company with offices in Munich and San Francisco, and is the world leader in technologies for virtual worlds. Blaxxun provides products and complete solutions for the commerce, community and collaboration markets.
Iridon Interactive AB is a developer and publisher of interactive entertainment products for the PC. We create, direct, and produce computer and video games based on original properties.
Istituto Trentino di Cultura is focused on scientific excellence, innovation, and technology transfer to enterprises and public services. In its areas of competence, ITC collaborates with the main actors in worldwide research and it works in synchrony with the European Union Programs. Research activities are carried out in scientific and technological areas, advanced computer science, microelectronics, physics, mathematical sciences, and in human sciences.
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For citation purposes:
Tinelli, F. "The RENAISSANCE Project: a Virtual Journey in a Renaissance Court", Cultivate Interactive, issue
3, 29 January 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue3/renaissance/>
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