Game mechanics and interaction for mixed reality and gamification

Realistic and effective interaction plays a very important role for extended reality scenarios, especially when a full integration between the real and synthetic world is required. Augmented reality (AR) frameworks still provide unsatisfactory performance due to the unreliability of the real-time AR systems and the lack of a systematic study on the user experience in the mixed reality environment. Gaming is a strong potential technique to make AR effective to combine immersion, engagement, and (social) interaction. However, the most of current AR games involve standard interaction mechanics that have been designed for generic games without considering the peculiarity of the augmented reality paradigm. In this work we address how to fill this gap between game and mixed reality. Our contribution is twofold. First, we introduce a practical and reliable mixed reality framework that adopt a model-based and marker-less approach to compute the camera matching procedure. Second, we propose and evaluate several game mechanics properly designed to work on the mixed reality scenarios. We employed our methods for cultural heritage application showing the effectiveness of the proposed mixed reality mechanics in improving the knowledge of archaeological findings in a playful way (i.e., gamification).