Gamified Automation in Immersive Media for Education and Research

TL;DR

This paper explores the use of gamified, immersive media development environments like Unreal Engine 4 to enhance educational and research activities through collaboration and accessible prototyping.

Contribution

It introduces ideas for extending game engines to support collaborative, gamified scientific research and education, with case studies demonstrating their potential.

Findings

Unreal Engine 4 can be effectively used for collaborative research.

Gamified development environments increase accessibility for researchers and students.

Proposed extensions facilitate easy creation of scientific prototypes.

Abstract

The potential of using video games as well as gaming engines for educational and research purposes is promising, especially with the current progress of Industry 4.0 technologies such as augmented and virtual reality devices. However, it is important to be aware of the barriers of these technologies. Integrating additional software libraries into current developer environments would not only increase accessibility for the general public, but would gamify the development process through multiplayer functionality. In this paper we will briefly discuss a couple case studies demonstrating the usefulness of using Unreal Engine 4 for collaborative research purposes. In addition, we present several ideas on how to extend such development environments to further assist researchers and students to easily create prototypes for the purpose of gamified scientific creativity and inquiry.