This document discusses how augmented reality can be used to communicate cultural heritage through a mobile game set in the city of Vejle, Denmark. It explores challenges of digital media and how a "perpetual beta" approach using mashups of tools like videos, maps, and photos from YouTube, Google Maps, and Flickr can enhance the experience. The game "The 23 Skulls" blends the actual city with a fictional conspiracy plot, challenging players to investigate clues in both the physical city and its online representations. By augmenting real places with stories and narratives, the game creates a mixed reality that communicates the history and meaning of Vejle in an engaging way.

1. Augmented reality: howcanyouuse it? Jacob Knudsen, Vejle Museum Kjetil Sandvik, University of Copenhagen

2. Museums, digital media and a perpetual beta way of communicating Case: “The 23 sculls – a conspiracy tail” communicating cultural heritage in the age of mobile media, experience economy and new learning formats: the history of Vejle (DK) communicated through an augmented reality game using mobile phones, web 2.0 mash-ups, a playable conspiracy plot, and the city as game universe

3. Challenges of digital media Participatory (social) media/web 2.0: radical possibilities for dialogic processes, for collaboration and co-creation Communication as dynamic processes Fixed solutions  changeable, adaptive and user-centered solutions Uses of web 2.0 apps mashups: combinations of cheap, effective and constantly updated and improved media technology Perpetual way of communication

4. Optimizingweb 2.0-strategy: mashup Videos pulleddirectly from YouTube The possibility for integrating the site withtravelblog-services and travel- planning services likee.g. TripIt From stand-alone website to web 2.0 mashupnetwork-site Maps run in GoogleMapswithintegratedinfo Pictures pulleddirectly from YouTube Possible to getRSS-perscribe to each ’story’

5. Augmentation an informational, aesthetical and/or emotional enhancement of our sense and experience of place by use of various digital media technologies.

6. Understandingplaces we understand places through media (e.g. Lonely Planet, Google Earth, travel literature and so on), we use media to construct places (using cameras, mobile phones, GPS, maneuvering through 3D-structures by means of an interface and some kind of avatar in a computer game, and so on), media shapes our experience of places (guided tours, theme parks, computer simulated worlds like the ones found in computer games, and so on). augmentation in this context implies that the actual place is blended with mediated representations and mediatized perceptions of the place.

7. Augmentedplaces Places which has gotten a certainsurplus of meaning, a certain kind of narrative embeddedinto it. Augmentation of actualplacesimpliesthat the characteristics of theseplaces have beenenhanced in that a certain mode, atmosphereor story has beedadded to them as extralayers of meaning.

8. Augmentation of places Augmentation may take place as a process ofstorytellingin which the place constitutes a scene for the performance or staged re-enactment of ‘true’ stories, that is actual events which at some point have taken place at the specific location and which are recognized as objectively authentic.

9. The staging of the Jack the Ripper-story runs through and organizes urban space of today’s London and thus changing it into a specific place with a specific atmosphere and a specific plot: the scene of the crime.

10. Augmentation of places Storytelling Augmentation of places may happen throughfictionalizationin which the actual places are working as settings for fictions, which again influence our perception of these places.

11. When tourists embark on one of this tours, they are taken on a guided walk through parts of the actual towns working as ‘scenes of the crime’ (Milan, Paris…) in Brown’s novel, but following the trails laid out not by some historical person or chain of historical events (like in the case of the Jack the Ripper-tour ) but by fictional characters and their actions and thus the actual places have become augmented as a result of fictionalization.

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14. Augmentation of places Storytelling Fictionalization Augmentation of places may happen as construction of a kind of mixed realityin which the place has a status both as an actual location in the physical world and as a storyspace.

16. Split reality vs Mixed reality Split reality: switching between mediated space (e.g. inside the mobile phone) and physical space Mixed reality: blending between mediated and physical space (e.g. looking at physical space through a ‘agumented reality browser’ on the mobile phone)

17. The 23 sculls The players are put in the role as journalists investigating the disappearance of a museum inspector. He has left behind a lot of notes and disturbing video clips on YouTube about a conspiracy engineered by powerful men throughout the history of Vejle city. And he has left maps of the city on Google Maps containing trails through the city and layers of information about various places, various building, various persons – everything accessible on a variety of web 2.0-services

18. There are real human sculls in there!

19. The 23 sculls For the players the city has been altered, it has been augmented by the interplay between and interweaving of the mediated city and the actual physical city. As such this new, mixed reality version of Vejle, which the players now are to investigate, may be understood as an augmented place as explained.

20. The 23 sculls The game has a traditional level structure with each level being themed in a way so that there is a narrative progression: Level 1’s theme is “the city is filled with clues”, while level 2’s theme is “it is all about power” and finally the theme of level 3 is simply “everything is connected”. There are a lot of clues, hints, story fragments to be found both in the physical city and in its mediated online counterpart – pictures, videos, trails or routes may be found on Flikr, YouTube and Google Maps may be displayed as augmenting information layers over the various physical locations when they are observed through the camera lens and the augmented reality browser Layar.

23. Physicalspace as media The physical space – the city quarters with its streets, alleys, buildings, ornamentations such as statues, gargoyles and so on or the theme park with its narrative architecture including buildings and landscapes known from e.g. the catalog of Disney fairytales – is to some degree is functioning as media communicating specific types of information, specific types of stories. Several parts of the city of Vejle used as location for the 23 sculls game have these qualities of being media in themselves, as carriers of the story of Vejle.

27. Physicalspace as media With the use of mobile phones equipped with navigation tools and augmented reality browsers this information residing in the very architecture and infrastructure of the city may be pulled forth and made visible, accessible and interactive from the perspective of communicating history and cultural heritage and facilitating learning processes.

28. MashupWebpage

29. MashupLayar

30. By integratedwemean…

31. Ourfunctions in Layar…so fare… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5le-b6rsWCg

32. Summing up Augmentation makes us see things in new ways: Buildings are not just buildings, streets are not just streets – the carry stories, they carry cultural meaning which the players through the gameplay and the interplay between the physical space of the city and the mobile media may acquire, discuss, investigate and relate to. By applying a perpetual beta way of communicating and the use of mashups of continuously enhanced, improved and upgraded media application instead of creating prototypical systems, we may easily challenge and develop our way of communicating knowledge, communicating cultural heritage through augmented reality game systems based on participation, collaboration and co-creation.