Living the Past: The use of VR to provide a historical experience Pedro Rossa, Nicolas Hoffman, Jo˜ ao Ricardo Bittencourt, Fernando Marson and Vinicius J. Cassol * Undergraduate Course in Digital Games Development Atomic Rocket Entertainment † University of Vale do Rio dos Sinos - UNISINOS - Brazil Figure 1: Flow of the system Abstract In this work we explore the use of games and VR in order to collab- orate with History teaching in Brazil. We develop a game and a VR experience based on local technology. In or approach the player is considered as an Indian who lived in the Jesuitical Reductions in the South of Brazil and was requested to practice bow and arrow shooting. Keywords: Virtual Reality, History, Experience, Beenoculus. Concepts: •Human-centered computing → Interaction devices; Displays and imagers; Interactive systems and tools; 1 Introduction Despite the traditional use of Virtual Reality (VR) in applications as simulations and games, it is possible to verify a huge set of oppor- tunities for its application. We can talk specifically about medicine, where VR is applied in order to contribute, i.e. to the treatment of different phobias. On the other hand, current applications of VR can also be observed in business, i.e for training people. Thinking specifically about education, we can observe the use of games [Andrade 2007], and also VR as a powerful tool in order to approximate students to subjects that can be usually considered as non-interesting according to the students view. Such VR power is the motivation of our work. Our goal is to match the entertain- ment provided by digital games and VR with important historical information. In order to achieve this goal we have considered an important mem- ber from Brazilian Colonization History: the Indians. In 16th cen- * e-mail:{prossa,vjcassol}@unisinos.br † atomicrocket.com.br Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third- party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). c  2016 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). SIGGRAPH 2016 Posters, July 24-28, 2016, Anaheim, CA ISBN: 978-1-4503-4371-8/16/07 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2945078.2945169 tury, the biggest part of Brazilian population was composed by In- dians. In this way we developed a game able to simulate bow and arrow shooting into an immerse VR environment. The player is an Indian into a quest where he or she is requested to practice arrow shooting. At this point we reproduce a historical situation where the Indians were trained to be part of the army of the reduction (reduction was like villages coordinated by Jesuits during the Brazilian Coloniza- tion process). In the game design process, we worked with history teachers in order to define the player capabilities. Despite the historical knowledge developed in the student which is experiencing the history we aim also develop other correlated aspects. The student can also learn about geography, historical ar- chitecture. In addition we increase the experience by the use of en- vironmental sounds developed specifically to contribute to the user immersion. It is important to mention that we have used only low cost technol- ogy, which makes very easy to reproduce the approach in different schools in the south of Brazil (where the Jesuit Reductions taken place). Such technology includes sensors, arduino and a wood made bow. The immersion is provided by an HMD (head mounted display) which is composed by a Beenoculos 1 (a Brazilian technol- ogy for VR). 2 Jesuitical Reductions Jesuitical Reductions can be defined as old Indians Villages which were managed by Jesuits during the 16th century. This villages were located in South America, more specifically in Brazil and Ar- gentina [Neto 2012]. The main goal of the Jesuit priests at the re- ductions, also called jesuitical missions, was to evangelize the Indi- ans (the native American people on that time). In such villages, the priests have created different institutions i.e. schools. The goal was to create a Christian society as in Europe, but composed by people without any bad thinking (the Indians). 1 http://www.beenoculus.com