HeGo, a social game as a tool for cultural heritage valorization: the case study of the Atina historical center

Digital games have shown they can help people, and especially the younger one, to get the most from cultural heritage. Successful usage of these games includes teaching and learning, as well as virtual reality tools used to simulate historical sites and events. They have also shown to be a powerful and effctive tools to make cultural heritage more attractive, especially for those sites that are less known and visited. In this paper, we present HeGO, a digital platform for cultural heritage. It allows photos from cultural sites taken by simple users to be sent and stored on a web server. The photos collected can then be used for an accurate 3D reconstruction of the site of interest. The HeGO platform can be used to implement a social media game, where players get a score for each photo they take and send to the HeGO webserver. We also present the case study of the Atina historical center, where we simulated the usage of the HeGO platform for the 3D reconstruction of portions of the urban fabric of its historical interest. The results obtained showed that the HeGO platform allows obtaining good 3D reconstructions, whose quality is comparable with those of the more expensive laser scanner technique.