Underwater Search and Discovery: From Serious Games to Virtual Reality

Abstract

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.