Researchers from Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences (Latvia), Pro Progressione (Hungary) and Municipality of Tripolis (Greece) have completed the project ImGame in the framework of Creative Europe’s research program. ImGame is an innovative digital environment that interweaves the fields of serious gaming and immersive aesthetics. It serves as a dissemination tool to interactively demonstrate the research results concerning the phenomenon of immersiveness in contemporary art.
"Globally, it is one of the very few playful and educational media that teaches the history of contemporary art, informs about its antecedents, its conceptual background, and the network of related ideas. ImGame invites the user to dive into the immersive stylistics used in new media art. It helps build a new and currently underrepresented category of serious art games and explains the rich intertextual context of digital artefacts today," says scientific supervisor Ph.D Ieva Gintere.
ImGame uses the concept of immersion that is generally defined as a viewer forgetting the real world outside of the virtual environment for a moment and by a sense of being in a make-believe world. The VR environment offers a digital art gallery and a playground to discover particularities of contemporary artworks and their cultural context.
The newly created VR environment ImGame intends to transfer knowledge about contemporary artistic thought to the public not just to the connoisseurs of art. The project has developed technological knowledge (node-based shader creation workflow for A-Frame) and thus offers the possibility for young creative engineers to create multi-platform interactive experiences without the need to have programming skills. Next to the prototype of ImGame, two research articles have been published to represent the results. The authors have disseminated the results in five international conferences. The project has supported three young digital artists’ creative activities – Alvis Misjuns (Latvia), Kristóf Szabó (Hungary), and Vasilis Georgakopoulos (Greece).
About the project: ImGame – An Innovative Digital Environment Based on Research with Elements of Immersive Aesthetics and Serious Gaming No. 101054570 (2022-2025)
Funded by the European Union (Creative Europe Programme). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Commission. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
Project results:
Q1 article (open access e-journal): Gintere, I., Rovithis, E., Bakk, Á. K., Misjuns, A. (2024). ImGame Project: a Comprehensive Theory of Immersive Aesthetics and Innovation in Serious Gaming. International Journal of Game-Based Learning, W. H. Tan, ed., vol. 14(1), available here.
Gintere, I., Rovithis, E., Bakk, Á. K., Misjuns, A. (2024). ImGame: An Immersive Educational Environment to Teach Contemporary Art. Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computer Supported Education, May 2nd-4th, 2024, Angers (France).
Article representing a synergy of ImGame and CineGame, the MSCA4Ukraine project No. 1233058:
Kovalenko, Y., Gintere, I., Misjuns, A. (2025). Using Serious Art Games to promote the Circulation of Ideas Embodied in Contemporary Aesthetics. Proceedings of the 17th International Conference of Computer Supported Education. Porto, 1st-3rd April 2025.
Reports in international scientific conferences and seminars
1. Gintere, I., Rovithis, E., Bakk, Á. K., Misjuns, A. (2024). ImGame: An Immersive Educational Environment to Teach Contemporary Art. Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computer Supported Education, May 2nd-4th, 2024, Angers (France).
2. Gintere, I. (2024). Projects of Serious Art Gaming: New Concepts and Trends. International Scientific Conference «Society. Technologies. Solutions» (STS), Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences, Valmiera, April 12th, 2024.
3. Gintere, I. (2023). Insights of the ImGame project in the European Science Night at the Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences, Valmiera, September 29th, 2022.
4. Gintere, I., Misjuns, A. (2022). The ImGame project: Refinements to the Theory of Immersive Aesthetics and Innovation in Serious Art Gaming, UNLOCK conference November 28th-29th, 2022. Extended abstracts in the UNLOCK proceedings.
5. Misjuns, A., Cīrulis, A. (2024). Creation of virtual reality experiences for the web: shader programming for artists. The 11th IEEE Workshop on Advances in Information, Electronic and Electrical Engineering (AIEEE), Valmiera, June 14th.
6. Gintere, I. (2024). ImGame results presented at the doctoral school of Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, Paris, October 22nd, 2024.
7. Final seminar at Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences, May 6th, 2025.
ImGame prototype: https://imgame.va.lv/
