Periodic Reporting for period 2 - EMOTIVE (Emotive Virtual cultural Experiences through personalized storytelling)
Reporting period: 2017-11-01 to 2019-10-31
The cultural heritage market is now oriented to the storytelling approach in order to increase visitor engagement and number of visits. Lots of projects and companies follow this direction but EMOTIVE is not yet another similar project. On the contrary, EMOTIVE leverages storytelling combining it with an emotive approach enabling the visitors to actually feel and get emotionally engaged when in a cultural heritage site. EMOTIVE enhances people’s contact with and understanding of cultural heritage by making (remote) sites available to them on familiar terms. It empowers citizens to build their knowledge, competencies, sense of belonging and identities both via digital technologies and via recognizable storytelling genres that connect humans on a worldwide level. Moreover, the system allows us to extend citizens’ engagement not only with the cultural assets themselves, but with other human beings.
EMOTIVE provides tools to easily build a continuous exhibition space, ubiquitously populating the visitor’s life by mixing both virtual and real worlds contributing to increasing synergies between virtual and traditional museums.
The digital experiences and assets resulting from EMOTIVE ultimately become re-usable by both specialists and non-specialists (from tourists to the television, film and literary industries), and analysable (e.g. by professional cultural organisations, including UNESCO) as data points providing insight into broad-scale human patterns of value-building and sense-making about the past.
EMOTIVE provides tools to easily build a continuous exhibition space, ubiquitously populating the visitor’s life by mixing both virtual and real worlds contributing to increasing synergies between virtual and traditional museums.
The digital experiences and assets resulting from EMOTIVE ultimately become re-usable by both specialists and non-specialists (from tourists to the television, film and literary industries), and analysable (e.g. by professional cultural organisations, including UNESCO) as data points providing insight into broad-scale human patterns of value-building and sense-making about the past.
The EMOTIVE platform provides an end-to-end solution for the authoring and publication of interactive mixed-reality storytelling experiences. In order to address the variety of complex design challenges, which often reflect conflicting goals and user needs, the EMOTIVE platform provides a vast breadth of different functionalities and also a unified experience for all the different use-cases. Its strongest feature is the storytelling engine supported by a multi-level authoring tool combining Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, virtual reconstructions of the sites (hi-tech photo-realistic or via 360o panoramas), tangible objects (with virtual change on their appearence), collaboration, social interaction, chatbots, etc. easy to use by any author profile from the scripting process to authoring complex storylines and offering them to the end user through the web, mobile or desktop installation.
With the use of this platform, we have been able to design and develop several cultural experiences for different contexts and audiences: a Virtual Reality experience, a Digital Education Kit and Group Dialogues with 3D Moulds for the site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey, a mixed reality digital storytelling experience for the Hunterian Museum in Scotland, and a visitor-led touring experience for the York Minster in the UK.
The outputs of EMOTIVE have been disseminated in a wide audience through the project's online presence and the consortium's participation in conferences, exhibitions and public events. In addition, the project hosted a final public demo event (The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, 30 October 2019) where over 100 professionals and researchers from around the world working in interdisciplinary fields ranging from digital heritage, museology, user experience design, curatorship, digital engagement, immersive technologies, and interpretation have participated.
During the last year of the project, the consortium partners have performed focused contacts with external stakeholders and potential customers including cultural heritage partners and creative industries who are highly interested in using EMOTIVE tools and frameworks to author emotionally engaging stories for other cultural heritage sites and collections.
With the use of this platform, we have been able to design and develop several cultural experiences for different contexts and audiences: a Virtual Reality experience, a Digital Education Kit and Group Dialogues with 3D Moulds for the site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey, a mixed reality digital storytelling experience for the Hunterian Museum in Scotland, and a visitor-led touring experience for the York Minster in the UK.
The outputs of EMOTIVE have been disseminated in a wide audience through the project's online presence and the consortium's participation in conferences, exhibitions and public events. In addition, the project hosted a final public demo event (The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, 30 October 2019) where over 100 professionals and researchers from around the world working in interdisciplinary fields ranging from digital heritage, museology, user experience design, curatorship, digital engagement, immersive technologies, and interpretation have participated.
During the last year of the project, the consortium partners have performed focused contacts with external stakeholders and potential customers including cultural heritage partners and creative industries who are highly interested in using EMOTIVE tools and frameworks to author emotionally engaging stories for other cultural heritage sites and collections.
EMOTIVE is heavily based on research in order to produce an innovative concept. More specifically, EMOTIVE’s research and innovation beyond the state of the art involves:
- An EMOTIVE conceptual framework, offering guidelines on how to design EMOTIVE experiences.
- A coherent definition and methodological approach to emotional engagement for the cultural heritage sector.
- A framework for designing and assessing experiences to achieve ‘prehistorical empathy’ amongst visitors.
- A set of experiences, on-site and virtual, that combine different technologies in a coherent visitor activity, individual or social, to foster engagement with heritage and historical empathy.
- A comprehensive mixed-methods evaluation framework for emotional experiences in digital cultural heritage.
- An EMOTIVE technological framework based on a set of complementary authoring tools addressing different author profiles and needs.
- An easy way of producing and providing trans-device and multiplayer experiences without requiring programming skills from the author.
- The Curiosity-Driven Information Exploration concept, a personalized approach for catering to the visitor information needs, once they are engaged with the experience.
- A model for facilitated dialogue, including patterns and templates to assist professionals in designing their own dialogical experiences - arguably the most powerful means to emotionally affect visitors.
- Development of several ground-breaking research results in Image-based rendering, inpainting and relighting technologies, that will facilitate the creation of much more realistic virtual reality experiences for emotionally engaging immersive experiences.
- Development of innovative techniques for cheap 3D fabrication of physical objects and exploration of their ability to increase the users’ emotional engagement.
- A novel chatbot designed for engagement, provocation, and transformation which is beneficial for museums and cultural heritage sites.
EMOTIVE is a) proposing how to design and evaluate digital applications as a means to create a deeper connection with the past and a more effective visitor experience; and b) how to assist cultural and creative industry professionals as storytellers and authors of cultural content. This is a significant and unique contribution to the international cultural heritage community, as despite the widespread increasing recognition that emotions play a fundamental role in how visitors experience cultural heritage, there is still very little research on how emotionally engaging experiences are best supported; designed; and evaluated and even less applied to digital heritage applications.
- An EMOTIVE conceptual framework, offering guidelines on how to design EMOTIVE experiences.
- A coherent definition and methodological approach to emotional engagement for the cultural heritage sector.
- A framework for designing and assessing experiences to achieve ‘prehistorical empathy’ amongst visitors.
- A set of experiences, on-site and virtual, that combine different technologies in a coherent visitor activity, individual or social, to foster engagement with heritage and historical empathy.
- A comprehensive mixed-methods evaluation framework for emotional experiences in digital cultural heritage.
- An EMOTIVE technological framework based on a set of complementary authoring tools addressing different author profiles and needs.
- An easy way of producing and providing trans-device and multiplayer experiences without requiring programming skills from the author.
- The Curiosity-Driven Information Exploration concept, a personalized approach for catering to the visitor information needs, once they are engaged with the experience.
- A model for facilitated dialogue, including patterns and templates to assist professionals in designing their own dialogical experiences - arguably the most powerful means to emotionally affect visitors.
- Development of several ground-breaking research results in Image-based rendering, inpainting and relighting technologies, that will facilitate the creation of much more realistic virtual reality experiences for emotionally engaging immersive experiences.
- Development of innovative techniques for cheap 3D fabrication of physical objects and exploration of their ability to increase the users’ emotional engagement.
- A novel chatbot designed for engagement, provocation, and transformation which is beneficial for museums and cultural heritage sites.
EMOTIVE is a) proposing how to design and evaluate digital applications as a means to create a deeper connection with the past and a more effective visitor experience; and b) how to assist cultural and creative industry professionals as storytellers and authors of cultural content. This is a significant and unique contribution to the international cultural heritage community, as despite the widespread increasing recognition that emotions play a fundamental role in how visitors experience cultural heritage, there is still very little research on how emotionally engaging experiences are best supported; designed; and evaluated and even less applied to digital heritage applications.