Dig in Aveiro with AVARUM Lands: An Immersive Game to Promote Cultural Heritage

The substantial growth of the video game industry in the last decades has turned video games a common medium in a myriad of contexts, from education to health, sports, cultural activities, and tourism, covering all ages, gender, and social status. Current immersive technologies and apps aim to link the real world to the virtual world, especially at a time when people rely on technology and on digital communication to almost everything. Making a journey around storytelling in videogames, this paper introduces AVARUM Lands, a digital immersive game that makes use of the local culture as the basis of the game storyline, and its physical space as the game's exploration spatial area, involving visitors and inhabitants in the same plot.