Tagungsband des 12. Forschungsforum der österreichischen Fachhochschulen (FFH) 2018 The Virtual House of Medusa: Playful Co-located Virtual Archaeology Jürgen Hagler 1 , Michael Lankes 2 and Andrea Aschauer 3 1 UAS Upper Austria, Softwarepark 11, 4232 Hagenberg, Austria juergen.hagler@fh-hagenberg.at 2 UAS Upper Austria, Softwarepark 11, 4232 Hagenberg, Austria michael.lankes@fh-hagenberg.at 3 UAS Upper Austria, Softwarepark 11, 4232 Hagenberg, Austria andrea.aschauer@fh-hagenberg.at Abstract. In our submission we introduce a co-located virtual archaeology in- stallation for a museum context, called Virtual House of Medusa. It was devel- oped in collaboration with the Federal Monuments Authority Austria. The Vir- tual House of the Medusa illustrates several fragments of Roman wall paintings, which are archaeological artefacts that were found at Lorch near Enns in Upper Austria. The installation is conceptualized as a playful installation with multiple virtual workstations, including one VR player and up to four fellow co-players that are equipped with mobile devices. The players slip into the roles of archae- ologists and experience the fascination of their work through interacting with the virtual workstations. Furthermore, co-players and the VR player have the possibility to get in contact with each other via the devices provided by the in- stallation. Our work deals with the issue that existing research projects and in- stallations in virtual archaeology are mainly designed as a single user VR expe- rience. We argue that the interaction between the VR player, the co-players and the spectators has the potential to foster the feeling of being together in the game world, and adequately addresses the museum design space. Keywords: Virtual Archaeology, Co-located Play, Asymmetric Player Roles. 1 Introduction The fields of applications for Virtual Reality (VR) are manifold and widespread, rang- ing from entertainment computing to architecture and health. Virtual archaeology [1, 2] forms one of these application areas, including digital archives, scientific visualiza- tions, and knowledge transfer. Relevant use cases for virtual archaeology are installa- tions embedded in the museum context, like computer animations, visualizing addi- tional information, or novel forms of experiencing scientific data. VR-based installa- tions grant many advantages in comparison to analog techniques and methods to communicate scientific information, as they may feature playful elements, feature diverse forms of user interactions, and provide an immersive experience for the visi- tors. Although there are many beneficial aspects of VR-based solutions in the context