Collaborative XR Serious Games for Cultural Heritage Interpretation and Learning

Serious Games combine entertainment with learning. Their content must be accurate and coherent, while also forming part of a meaningful game concept. When applied to cultural heritage, serious games can help users explore, understand, and discuss tangible and intangible heritage through interactive experiences.XR allows several users to share a virtual or physical space, interact with the same cultural content, and work towards a common goal. This creates opportunities for collaborative learning and shared interpretation. Users may explore a historical site, investigate an artefact, learn about a cultural practice, solve a heritage-related problem, or exchange knowledge through a serious game.This Research Topic invites research on collaborative and multi-user XR serious games specifically designed for the interpretation and learning of cultural heritage. Cultural heritage may include historical sites, buildings, objects, exhibitions, languages, traditions, rituals, crafts, music, and other tangible or intangible forms. Contributions should examine how shared game-based experiences communicate cultural content and support collaboration, participation, communication, learning, or cultural understanding.Papers should describe the cultural heritage context, serious game concept, collaborative structure, and use of XR. They should explain how the heritage content was integrated into the game and how users were expected to work or learn together. Studies may evaluate learning, communication, cooperation, participation, presence, co-presence, usability, accessibility, or cultural understanding. Interaction methods such as embodied interaction, haptic feedback, multisensory interaction, and custom XR controllers are welcome when they support the collaborative heritage experience.This Research Topic does not focus on general XR games, entertainment games, individual serious games without a collaborative element, or technical conservation and restoration workflows. It also excludes Digital Twins, Heritage Building Information Modelling, architectural surveying, and the processing or analysis of heritage data. The focus is on shared, game-based XR experiences that help users interpret and learn about cultural heritage together.Topics in this Special Issue include, but are not limited to: - Collaborative XR serious games for tangible cultural heritage, including sites, buildings, objects, and exhibitions - Collaborative XR serious games for intangible cultural heritage, including languages, traditions, rituals, crafts, and music - Multi-user XR experiences for inaccessible, endangered, or almost lost cultural heritage - Communication, cooperation, coordination, and shared decision-making in heritage serious games - Collaborative immersive storytelling and game-based learning for cultural heritage - Embodied, haptic, multisensory, and cross-device interaction that supports collaboration - Evaluation of learning, communication, cooperation, participation, presence, co-presence, usability, accessibility, and cultural understanding - Ethical, cultural, and practical challenges in collaborative XR serious games for cultural heritage. Topic editors: David Plecher, Stephan Lukosch, Christian Eichhorn Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/83734/collaborative-xr-serious-games-for-cultural-heritage-interpretation-and-learning