As traditional museums migrate to the virtual world, they offer wider access to the exhibit collections but often fail to present content of those collections in more engaging way. Game-based learning is one of the solutions to mitigate this inevitable transition and support active learning in the process. It is increasingly gaining interest from the cultural heritage scientific community for the purpose of promoting cultural heritage, raising awareness of its importance and motivating users to visit cultural institutions such as museums more often. There are numerous examples of serious games that are based on or contain heritage content. Tangible cultural heritage is more represented in the virtual worlds and mainly based on applications of 3D technology. Recently, intangible cultural heritage is gaining more visibility within cultural heritage scope as a domain in which game-based learning could assist in its preservation. This paper attempts to address pros and cons of game-based learning in general and reflect on the choices of using serious games in the museum environment.

Alzheimer's disease represents the most common age-related neurodegenerative disorder and a leading cause of progressive cognitive impairment. Predicting cognitive decline is challenging but would be invaluable in an increasingly aging population which also experiences a rising cardiovascular risk. In order to examine whether plasma measurements of one of the established biomarkers of heart failure, brain natriuretic peptide (BNP), reflect a decline in cognitive function, associated with Alzheimer's disease neurodegeneration, BNP levels were analysed, by using a novel assay called a SOMAscan, in 1. cognitively healthy, control subjects; 2. subjects with mild cognitive impairment, and 3. subjects with Alzheimer's disease. The results of our study show that the levels of the BNP were significantly different between the three types of diagnoses (p < 0.05), whereby subjects with mild cognitive impairment had the lowest mean BNP value, and healthy subjects had the highest BNP value. Importantly, our results show that the levels of the BNP are influenced by the presence of at least one APOE4 allele in the healthy (p < 0.05) and in the Alzheimer's disease groups of subjects (p < 0.1). As the levels of the BNP appear to be independent of the APOE4 genotype in subjects with mild cognitive impairment, the results of our study support inclusion of measurements of plasma levels of the BNP in the list of the core Alzheimer's disease biomarkers for identification of the mild cognitive impairment group of patients. In addition, the results of our study warrant further investigations into molecular links between Alzheimer's disease-type cognitive decline and cardiovascular disorders.

Smell is a key human sense. In the real world, smell plays a leading role in helping us appreciate an environment, for example the smell of fresh coffee, or the dead body. High-fidelity virtual environments are being increasingly used as an accurate representation of the real world for a wide variety of applications, including training, phobia treatment and virtual archeology. This paper compares the diffusion and perception of smell in real and virtual environments. Although airflow can be computed within a virtual environment using, for example a computational fluid dynamic simulator, the results do not necessarily predict how smell may be perceived in the real-world. Virtual smell needs to take into account the type of smell being considered and how humans may perceive this smell.

Visual perception is becoming increasingly important in computer graphics. Research on human visual perception has led to the development of perception-driven computer graphics techniques, where knowledge of the human visual system (HVS) and, in particular, its weaknesses are exploited when rendering and displaying 3D graphics. Findings on limitations of the HVS have been used to maintain high perceived quality but reduce the computed quality of some of the image without this quality difference being perceived. This article investigates the amount of time for which (if at all) such limitations could be exploited in the presence of smell. The results show that for our experiment, adaptation to smell does indeed affect participants’ ability to determine quality difference in the animations. Having been exposed to a smell before undertaking the experiment, participants were able to determine the quality in a similar fashion to the “no smell” condition, whereas without adaptation, participants were not able to distinguish the quality difference.