The Virtual House of Medusa: Playful Co-located Virtual Archaeology

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 Virtual 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 possi-bility to get in contact with each other via the devices provided by the installation. Our work deals with the issue that existing research projects and installations in virtual archaeology are mainly designed as a single user VR experience. We ar-gue 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.