We present and explore the fruitfulness of “first-person cinematographic videogames,” a game model we have devised for the promotion of cultural, environmental, and territorial heritage. To support and foster the development of these type of games, we have developed a Web-based user-friendly authoring environment, extensively presented in the article. While employing standard first-person point-and-click game mechanics, the game model's distinctive feature is that the game environment is not based on a digital reconstruction (3D model) of the real-world settings but on cinematographic techniques combining videos and photos of existing places, integrating videoclips of mostly practical effects to obtain the interactivity typical of the first-person point-and-click adventure games. Our goal with such a game model is to mobilise mechanisms of engendering affection for real-world places when they become settings of the game world, arousing in the player forms of affection, attachment, and desire to visit them.

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This paper proposes a solution for supporting end users in configuring Virtual Reality environments by exploiting reusable templates created by experts. We identify the roles participating in the environment development and the means for delegating part of the behaviour definition to the end users. We focus in particular on enabling end users to define the environment behaviour. The solution exploits a taxonomy defining common virtual objects having high-level actions for specifying event-condition-action rules readable as natural language sentences. End users exploit such actions to define the environment behaviour. We report on a proof-of-concept implementation of the proposed approach, on its validation through two different case studies (virtual shop and museum), and on evaluating the approach with expert users.

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Arduino is a famous board, which incorporates serial communication interfaces, including universal serial bus (USB) and an integrated development environment (IDE) based on Processing, a programming language that supports C and C++. It consists of a microcontroller with several other components that provide easy interconnections with other devices. Arduino and its components have been studied during the class of Computer Architecture for the degree in Computer Science at the University of Cagliari in 2016. At the end of the class, seven groups of students have been selected and chosen to carry out a device prototype on top of Arduino and show their methodology, the sensors they embedded on top, how data could be extracted, collected, stored in database for further processing and analytics. The development has been performed following the open source best practices; documentation and codes of these projects have been made online for free downloading and sharing in order to further contribute to the advancement and widespread usage of the Arduino platform.