MediaEvo project: A serious game for the edutainment

Until recently, the “historic vision” was limited to only a few professionals, scholars and researchers, who share the interpretation codes for extracting the ancient landscape from the actual one. Using this knowledge to reconstruct a virtual interactive town increases dramatically the possibilities of information exchange and diffusion. On this way, the MediaEvo Project aims to develop a multi-channel and multi-sensory platform for edutainment in cultural heritage for the realization of a digital didactic game oriented towards the knowledge of medieval history and society by means of the integration of human sciences and new data processing technologies. It deals with historical findings, geomorphological inquiries, data management systems and the definition of a virtual immersive platform for playing and educating. This paper introduces the theoretical questions related to the educative use of Virtual Reality technology and describes the steps of the reconstruction of the town of Otranto in the Middle Ages: data collection and integration, organization of work, peripherals and software applications. The platform is intended to be useful for educational purposes, for touristic information, for gaming and also for testing the hypothesis coming from researchers about the ancient town and its everyday life.