Interactive Technologies Institute (Portugal)
The Interactive Technologies Institute (ITI) joint runs the project through the Association of Instituto Superior Técnico for Research and Development (IST-ID), which is a private, not-for-profit institution, fostering knowledge transfer and promoting the involvement of national and foreign researchers, both at national and international levels. With a research pole based in Madeira island, the Interactive Technologies Institute has been awarded the international ” Excellent ” evaluation since 2001. The institute turnover is over 2M€ of competitive research funding, including seven ongoing Horizon 2020 projects. With the focus on user needs, tasks, experiences and social and political contexts, the Interactive Technologies Institute is well suited to address a new breed of socio-technical systems that combines emerging technologies with the underlying cultural and social fabric. Attempts to reach this will lead to general theories and methods that enhance and broaden the field. Contributions of the Interactive Technologies Institute to this project in cultural heritage fall under the development, deployment and evaluation of technology interventions for public use, engagement and awareness in participatory culture in which private individuals do not act as consumers only but also as contributors or producers. The Interactive Technologies Institute has a long track record of research in participatory culture, including work in the intersections with art, design, and creativity that emerged in collaborations between artists, biologists and ecologists, social scientists and technologists.
Valentina Nisi
Professor, PI
Nuno Nunes
Professor, Co-PI
Pedro Ferreira
Senior Researcher
Anna Bertmark
Researcher
Marta Ferreira
Researcher
Mathilde Gouin
Researcher
Matteo Cappello
Researcher
Luísa Seixas
Project Manager
Dina Dionísio
Project Manager
Bournemouth University (United Kingdom)
Bournemouth University (BU) has a history of research in digital media in digital art and animation, television production, and game design and development. It hosts the NCCA (the National Centre for Computer Animation), the EPSRC-funded Centre for Digital Entertainment, and the Department of Creative Technology, which has been awarded the TIGA (The Independent Games Developer Association) games educational institution award. The Creative Technology department is active in the domain of both locative narrative research and UX research into the author experience. BU will work closely the National Trust (NT) to deliver a case study based in Avebury in the UK.
Dr. Charlie Hargood
PI
Mr. Jack Brett
Researcher
Prof. Mark Gillings
CI
Dr. Natalia Adamczewska
Researcher
Prof. Wen Tang
Contributing Professor
University of Southampton (United Kingdom)
The University of Southampton (UOS) has been involved in mixed reality and locative research for heritage since 2002, when they created one of the world’s first interactive locative educational experiences at Chawton House in Hampshire, UK. Most recently, they completed the Leverhulme-funded StoryPlaces project, which explored the poetics of locative narrative games. It led to a key publication in the International Journal of Cultural Heritage on balancing visitors’ attention to heritage sites. They have established significant expertise in locative technology and experience design from a technology and literary perspective. The Web Science group at Southampton is also a world-leading centre for studying socio-technical systems, with over a decade of experience in understanding the social, psychological, and economic forces that interact with digital systems and produce a change in society. UOS, therefore also brings substantial experience in interdisciplinary work and insights into the ethics of digital systems. UOS will work closely with the National Trust (NT) to deliver a case study based in Avebury in the UK.
Prof. David Millard
PI
Dr. James Jordan
CI
Dr. Tom Blount
Associated Fellow
Yoan Malinov
Researcher
Trinity College Dublin (Ireland)
Trinity College Dublin (TCD) is a leading research centre for digitally enhanced realities and creative technologies in Europe. TCD’s School of Computer Science and Statistics (SCSS), which will host LoGaCulture in TCD, is a participant in several national research centres and major strategic initiatives funded by Science Foundation Ireland, such as the AI-Driven Digital Content Technology (ADAPT) Centre; the Centre for Research Training in Digitally- Enhanced Reality (D-REAL); and the Extending Visual Sensation through Image-Based Visual Computing (VSENSE) project. Researchers at SCSS have been working with technology for cultural heritage since the late 1990s and specifically with locative media for cultural heritage since 2008 (Carrigy et al. 2010). Their work has produced many cultural heritage experiences and several company spinouts, whose work in locative cultural experiences have won multiple awards. TCD is also home to world-class postgraduate courses of relevance to LoGaCulture. TCD will work with the Irish Office of Public Works (OPW) to deliver a dual case study based around the Battle of the Boyne and the Hill of Tara.
Mads Haahr
Carol Carmody
Joris Vreeke
ECCOM (Italy)
ECCOM – European Centre for Cultural Organisation and Management (IT) was founded in 1995. It is a transdisciplinary organisation created to promote the cultural and creative sector and support the needs of those who work in the cultural system. It collaborates with public and private entities at a local, national and international level, and actively works with economists, archaeologists, art historians, sociologists, scientists, jurists and communication experts from different countries.
Within LoGaCulture, ECCOM will use its expertise in audience development and audience engagement to help develop transmedia audiences for the case studies, particularly for the one on Madeira island. Natural heritage comprises natural sites with cultural aspects such as “cultural landscapes, physical, biological or geological formations”. LoGaCulture will look at nature as a cultural heritage and leverage an existing sensor infrastructure to deploy novel forms of locative gaming and interactive storytelling to promote locals and tourists’ engagement with the UNESCO-protected natural world of Madeira. This “Nature as Culture” case study, led by the Institute of Interactive Technologies with the cooperation of ECCOM, will deploy and evaluate a game connected to popular natural hotspots but also to endemic megafauna (e.g. marine mammals and turtles) in order to generate digital twins of these natural and cultural entangled landscapes. This will become visible via transmedia gaming to locals and tourists to increase their connectedness to nature and promote ecological behaviour.
Furthermore, ECCOM will also help to shape the major deliverables in order for them to have a value also in terms of policy proposals.
Cristina da Milano
Project Manager
Francesca Guida
Senior Researcher
Pascuala Migone
Researcher
Claudia de Simone
Administrative officer
Ariana Picistrelli
Communication Manager
Hochschule RheinMain (Germany)
As a university of applied sciences in Wiesbaden, Germany, Hochschule RheinMain (HRM) has formed active and interdisciplinary research groups that combine the development of smart systems with design projects. Researchers from HRM have been involved in several projects applying digital storytelling, location-based AR and VR to cultural heritage projects, e.g. starting with the first pioneering immersive AR storytelling project GEIST in Germany in 2001, participating in the German-funded Spirit project (2013-2017), which combines state-of-the-art consumer AR with emotional storytelling and evaluation aspects of ‘presence’ at the historical site of a Roman fort, and ‘presentXR’ (2019-2023), which extends these concepts to immersive AR using head-mounted displays (MS HoloLens2) in museums. These projects generated knowledge contributions on interactive storytelling, authoring for immersive AR and practical applications of innovative technologies in cultural contexts.
HRM will collaborate with the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt (SGN – “Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung”) to produce a case study on Senckenberg’s “Museum for Tomorrow”, applying storytelling in immersive augmented reality in the context of a natural history museum.
Ulrike Spierling
Professor, PI
Jessica L. Bitter
Researcher
Yu Liu
Researcher
Senckenberg Museum, Frankfurt (Germany)
The Frankfurt Museum of SGN is one of Europe’s largest natural history museums and has more than 380,000 visitors annually (2019). Exhibitions cover all aspects of natural history in modern research, connecting the earth system’s history and recent Anthropocene problems, such as climate change and biodiversity loss. With highly relevant fields of education and knowledge transfer, the museum aims to highlight human-nature interactions, the history of natural sciences, and the biocultural background of individual specimens. The curators, museum technicians and education experts have long experience establishing innovative exhibition technologies. Experience with technology and visitor acceptance issues are shared with other museums in conference presentations nationwide, such as within the German Leibniz Research Museums organisation. The Museum team is responsible for the conceptual design within the case study, ensuring a strong outcome, e.g., scientific content, storytelling and technology, to meet the day-to-day demands of the museum and its visitors.
Thorolf Müller
Senior Curator
Kathrin Helsper
Research Assistant
Câmara Municipal do Funchal (Portugal)
Câmara Municipal do Funchal (CMF) manages the Natural History Museum of Funchal and is working closely with the Interactive Technologies Institute to deliver a case study based around the natural heritage of the Island of Madeira, the outermost region of Europe, leveraging on the interdisciplinary collaboration of nature conservation scientists from the Natural history Museum of Funchal and its cultural operators at CMF, and Human-computer interaction and computer science researchers, designers, and artists at the Interactive Technologies Institute.
Câmara Municipal do Funchal (CMF), through the Natural History Museum of Funchal (MMF), makes available to the world the natural heritage of the Madeira archipelago. One of the major concerns is how visual and virtual information impacts visitors, so beyond the traditional methods, it’s critical to provide access to knowledge with alternative approaches such as technology. MMF expects future missions to enhance visitors’ curiosity, involvement and interaction with nature. Therefore, it presents the means to provide the space and contents to develop and test new technology for accessible and sustainable experiences. MMF has an unequalled natural and cultural heritage, offering a platform with a unique opportunity for learning, understanding and interaction with biodiversity, evolution and human influence. Through the museum’s collaboration, this project contributes to a well-informed society by providing sources that ensure the public a better understanding of the natural world through digital experiences.
Ricardo Araújo
Museum Director
Tânia Chaves
Museum Communications
Carolina Ornelas
Museum Curator
The National Trust (United Kingdom)
The National Trust is Europe’s largest conservation charity (supported by 53,000 volunteers and 5.8 million members), with statutory powers (awarded by the UK government in 1907) to preserve and promote places of beauty and historic interest in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. They jointly manage the Avebury World Heritage site with English Heritage and maintain the Alexander Keiller Museum and Avebury Manor. Currently, the Trust codirect the Living with Monuments project at Avebury (AHRC £1m – 2016-21) with Prof. Mark Gillings and are partners in the Joint Berlin-Bournemouth Avebury World Heritage Site: Extensive High-Resolution Geophysical Surveys project (2012-present). The National Trust do not typically receive direct research funding. Still, they are a full partner, offering significant in-kind contributions (regarding expert time and use of onsite facilities) to LoGaCulture.
Rosamund Cleal
Jeremy Grimoldby
Innovation Manager
Irish Office for Public Works (Ireland)
The OPW is an Irish government office which manages most of the Irish State’s property portfolio and oversees many National Monuments. It directly manages 780 heritage properties, including flagship national heritage sites, such as Newgrange, the Rock of Cashel and Dublin Castle. Cultural heritage sites operated by the OPW received a total of 9.3 million visitors in 2019. As a public body, the OPW do not typically receive direct research funding, but they are a full partner and are offering significant in-kind contributions (in terms of expert time and use of onsite facilities) to LoGaCulture, TCD is also employing an additional researcher based in the Humanities (and who will spend some time on placement with OPW in the Boyne Valley) who will undertake some of the specialist work on Case Study 4 and will work closely with the OPW on interpretation and media creation.
Mary Heffernan