While video games are very popular and widespread among a younger audience, it is a new medium for elderly people. The decreasing physical and mental abilities of senior citizens pose additional requirements to video games. That is why only few of them are suitable for fostering conversations among elderly people and their relatives, which may visit them. The goal of this bachelor thesis is to test and gain experience with concepts not yet tested with this target audience. Future endeavours will benefit from gained insights by enabling them to create game concepts catering towards the needs of elderly people.

The performed research activities of this thesis display, what navigation support techniques from architecture, signage and game design help elderly people finding their way through the virtual space of a video game to their desired destination.

Senior citizens from different settlements were invited to test a video game that features aforementioned navigational support techniques. While the test persons were playing, we observed their behavior as well as recorded it using custom made analytics tools. This way, we were able to replay their game sessions and visualize and analise them at a later point in time.

Research Documentation

Download the complete documentation with all research findings here (German).

Bachelorthesis Presentation

Watch conveniently what insights we gathered (30 mins, German). Activate subtitles.

Museum Nostrum - The Game

The concept: A video game where elderly people can go and find pictures from their own life in a virtual museum by moving from one room to another using touch gestures. When finding such a picture, they remember stories from their life which they share in a conversation with other elderly people and/or their relatives visiting them.

Gameplay - Video

How to collect images and navigate in space.

Analytics Tools in Action

Watch how our analytics tools replay a test person's play session. Our visualization tools help to see...

• Where has the player been the most often? (black spheres)
• Through which door did he pass through the most often? (connection lines)
• In what direction did he look the most per room? (colored triangle)

Development

Find the source code on this Github Repository.

 Technologies

• Unity (2018.2.14f) and C#.