LUTE

What is LUTE?

The LoGaCulture Unity Toolkit/Engine (LUTE) is a technology framework developed by Bournemouth University and University of Southampton as part of the LoGaCulture project. Built on top of the Unity engine LUTE is a total conversion plugin that provides a visual interface, libraries, and a toolkit for building mixed reality games within Unity.

The LUTE technology has provided a platform that has enabled research across the LoGaCulture project contributing to all Work Packages (WP) as well as enabling the creation of a range of cultural heritage games for the project (as part of WP2). LUTE serves as both an authoring tool to help creative designers build locative games in an accessible and easy to learn way (WP3), but also a modular technology framework with tools to support game mechanics and storytelling (WP5), multiplayer and social visiting (WP4), and immersive eXtended Reality (WP6).

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Making Games With LUTE

LUTE is fully open source (MIT license) and available on GitHub where there is also a full wiki guiding designers in the installation and use of LUTE with a range of examples. Designers build games in LUTE using the visual flow engine which uses hypertextual patterns (as shown to be powerful in previous authoring tool and locative media research) to structure the game in terms of sculptural open sections that respond to the users context (such as visiting a location or triggering an event) and more calligraphic controlled sequences (such as conversation trees with characters or mixed reality puzzles).

Nodes in LUTE obey the content conditions of the system (such as one part of the game following another, or organising content into particular chapters), but also contextual rules tying content to real world locations and/or times. Each node in the flow engine can then specify its content in terms of “Orders” – these are modular declarative structures that specify media such as images, videos, text, and their layout, interactive elements such as buttons, game mechanics such as adventure game inventories, and locative elements such as maps or visual augmented reality using a camera. All of this is presented inside a visual authoring tool where the user can add comments, organise and group content, and colour code items to aid in the creative process.

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How does LUTE work?

LUTE is built in a modular framework around its “orders”. Each node within the flow engine flows the hypertextual rules assigned to create a structure for the game, whereas content is handled separately in orders on those nodes.  Each order follows a standard structure of scripts and prefabs that determine game content range from a word on screen all the way to an augmented reality character. This modular structure ensures that LUTE is highly extensible – as the games created in LoGaCulture needed new features this was a simple matter of creating new order(s) for those features and they would work within the wider LUTE framework.

This also makes LUTE a highly flexible tool – expert users don’t need to be limited to the visual authoring tool and can “pop the hood” on a LUTE project and edit orders directly. This allows them to create custom variations of existing functions, as well as use a default order to create their own orders for new features. Furthermore, as LUTE is built entirely in Unity a developer if needed can open a LUTE project inside Unity and edit it directly as though it were any other Unity project.  This means the LUTE can serve as an accessible authoring tool for designers with less technical expertise, as a framework for more experienced users to extend and modify, or a prototyping tool that can create a sketch of a game that can then be passed to developers for refinement.

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LUTE in LoGaCulture

LUTE was created through a process of codesign and prototyping by Bournemouth University and the University of Southampton – the design process and research for which is documented in LoGaCulture D3.1.  LUTE has been used in the creation of games for the Avebury Stone Circle site as part of WP2 case studies 1 and 2. This includes the LoGaCulture creative commission run by Bournemouth University which has seen a longitudinal study of ten designers using LUTE and Unity over 12 months to build locative games providing not only further insight and refinements to LUTE, but also evaluation of the technology, and data on the creative best practice in making locative games.

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The LUTE Team is:

Dr Jack Brett – Lead Engineer
Dr Charlie Hargood – Academic Investigator and Architect
Dr David Millard – Academic Investigator and Architect
Dr Yoan Malinov – Engineer
Dr Bob Rimmington – Qualitative Researcher