Paracosm - mindful maps

Our project was inspired by the affection of scavenger hunt mobile games and deep love for beautiful maps. Among others, we used the dataset provided by the National Archive in Krakow: maps from the 1493 manuscript Liber Chronicarum-one of the oldest chronicle of the world written by Hermann Schedel.

Our challenge was: how cultural heritage can help us in our well-being? how can we help people to discover the amazing details hidden in the medieval maps? We came up with the idea for an interactive mobile game in which users can walk and explore medieval cities which we enriched with strangely animated objects, monsters, and uncanny creatures. 
To advance in-game and make it attractive we added some elements of gamification: by finding hidden elements on maps users gain points to access more complicated maps and learn more about their history. Our aim was to create relaxing, but also educative experience for cultural data lovers. Our target user loves history, medieval curiosities such as Discarding Images, and spending time on public domain repositories such as Polona. 


While creating the prototype of the game we worked with Aldona Warzecha and Anna Sokół from the National Archive, who provided us with a lot of contextual information and additional knowledge. They provided us with the initial feedback and advice. For the demo version we decided to create an example user journey and show the basic functionality of the game. The demo was created as an interactive high fidelity mock-up. 

After the hackathon, we wish to continue working on it and implement the pilot version with the help of developers dedicated to the project. Pilot: beta live version of the game would allow us to gather feedback from its prospective users and accordingly refine it mechanics and storyline and next iterations. We would like to continue working with the National Archive team and create a tool which would allow the institution to promote their collection in fun and unusual way.