Open Access

Digital games increasingly serve as interactive spaces for historical representation and emotional engagement. However, the mechanisms through which point-and-click adventure games create historical immersion and empathy remain underexplored. In many contemporary historical games, historical settings primarily function as aesthetic backdrops or gameplay environments, while emotional reflection and empathic engagement with history often receive less attention. This research project investigates how narrative, environmental and emotional design strategies can be used to stage historical spaces in ways that foster immersive and empathic player experiences. The project is based on the historical setting of the Nürnberg dungeons (“Lochgefängnisse Nürnberg”) and explores how point-and-click adventure games can encourage reflective engagement with historical themes through atmosphere, exploration, dialogue and moral ambiguity. The project further engages with criteria commonly found in cultural funding frameworks for digital games, particularly regarding narrative innovation and cultural-historical representation. By combining historical reconstruction, environmental storytelling and narrative empathy within a point-and-click adventure format, the project explores new approaches to fostering reflective engagement with cultural heritage and difficult historical subjects through interactive media. The first phase of the project focuses on establishing a theoretical and methodological foundation for the later development of a research-based game prototype. Therefore, the current research primarily consists of a systematic literature review guided by PRISMA-informed principles. The review examines narrative empathy, immersive storytelling, emotion design in games and environmental storytelling. Particular attention is given to the question of how audiovisual atmosphere, spatial design and interactive narrative structures contribute to historical immersion and emotional perception in digital games. The insights gained during this phase will serve as the conceptual basis for the later iterative development and evaluation of a historical point-and-click prototype. In the long term, the overall research project aims to contribute to the development of a research framework for historical immersion and empathic game design in narrative adventure games. The framework draws on theoretical concepts of narrative empathy, historical immersion and character engagement, including models such as Recognition, Alignment and Allegiance. These concepts will inform the design and evaluation of a research-based point-and-click adventure prototype situated in the historical Nürnberg dungeons.

In Industry 5.0 (I5.0), close-proximity human–robot collaboration demands communication beyond conventional alarms and speech. Nonverbal auditory communication offers a complementary modality, yet its role in I5.0 remains unmapped. This scoping review maps nonverbal auditory communication research in I5.0 Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) and compares it with general HRI literature to identify transfer potential and research gaps. Peer-reviewed English-language articles (2023–April 2026) addressing nonverbal sound in HRI contexts were included. Speech, emotion detection, haptic interfaces and non-HRI domains were excluded. A search with two syntaxes across Web of Science, Scopus, IEEE Xplore, ACM and MDPI, supplemented by citation searching, targeted I5.0-specific (Syntax S1) and general HRI auditory literature (Syntax S2). This created two article record sets, n1 and n2. Articles were organized following Arksey and O’Malley’s framework and PRISMA-ScR into four inductively derived clusters: Sonification, Multimodal Feedback Systems, Safety and Frameworks and Concepts. From 782 initial records, 16 (n1) and 32 (n2) articles were included. In I5.0, multimodal feedback dominates: intentionally designed nonverbal sounds improve situational awareness, reduce cognitive workload and increase perceived safety. Compared to n2, which is shaped by social robotics and emotion-driven sound design, five gaps emerge in I5.0: absent emotion-related sound perception research, missing field studies, missing industry-specific sound design frameworks, underutilized sonification for spatial awareness and safety and no unimodal auditory studies under realistic industrial conditions. A dedicated sound design framework operationalizing I5.0 communicative requirements into designable sound parameters is needed, alongside empirical validation under realistic industrial noise conditions.

Spatial audio plays an increasingly important role in virtual environments and computer games. Head-Related Transfer Functions (HRTFs) allow a more realistic simulation of spatial hearing than conventional stereo rendering, but they also require additional implementation effort. This paper presents the current state of a master’s thesis that investigates whether this effort leads to measurable improvements in horizontal sound localization. A Unity-based experimental environment has been developed in which participants localize virtual sound sources presented via headphones. The study compares HRTFbased binaural rendering with conventional stereo playback and evaluates localization accuracy as well as front-back confusions. In addition to broadband noise, speech stimuli will be used to increase ecological validity. The paper describes the theoretical background, implemented prototype, planned experimental design, and expected outcomes.

The FAME 2026 challenge comprises two demanding tasks: training face–voice associations combined with a multilingual setting that includes testing on languages on which the model was not trained. Our approach consists of separate uni-modal processing pipelines with general face and voice feature extraction, complemented by additional age-gender feature extraction to support prediction. The resulting single-modal features are projected into a shared embedding space and trained on an Adaptive Angular Margin (AAM) loss. Our approach achieved first place in the FAME 2026 challenge, with an average Equal-Error Rate (EER) of 23.99%.