Within the frame of HORIZON Europe, the European Commission has fixed the mission of preserving and enhancing cultural heritage with advanced digital technologies. That is why the project MuseIT and five more, namely PERCEIVE, SHIFT, MEMENTOES, PREMIERE and MEMORISE, have been selected to work on expanding and further supporting the application of digital tools to preserve cultural heritage and to make it widely accessible.
But how do these six projects, part of HORIZON-HERITAGE-01-04 project cluster, precisely respond to this mission, and what are their specificities? Discover it here!
MuseIT focuses on ensuring that culture is accessible and enjoyable for everyone, including those with different abilities. With the broader ambition of equality, democratisation and social inclusion, MuseIT proposes innovative methods and technological tools that facilitate and widen access to cultural assets, regardless of all disabilities, and helps preserve and safeguard cultural heritage in an inclusive way. This objective will be achieved through the creation of multisensory representations, immersive virtual experiences, co-creation services for multi-modal born-digital cultural assets, and an inclusive repository, that will be available and accessible to all on a web-platform (https://muse-it.eu).Â
MEMENTOES brings together museum experts and game developers to create gaming experiences that immerse players in the past. The project seeks to help users learn about historical injustice, develop empathy with marginalized groups, and draw conclusions about issues of today. The challenges Europe faces today – wars, pandemics, populism – feel overwhelming, have all occurred before. Those who remember – survivors, historians, museum experts – work hard to bring attention to the lessons these histories teach us, but their efforts are largely drowned out in today’s oversaturated media environment. MEMENTOES seeks to fill this gap and bring the lessons of history to the fingertips of a wide audience using a ubiquitous modern technology: video games (https://mementoes.eu/).
MEMORISE aims at keeping the memories of victims of Nazi persecution and eyewitnesses of the Holocaust alive, by developing new strategies to tell their stories to younger generations. To achieve this, this project will make use of digital technology to digitize diaries of victims, testimonials and other materials that inhere memories, and make them accessible to the general public in new forms. Their plans include the development of a novel smartphone app that narrates victims’ experiences on the basis of diaries, augmented reality (AR) solutions to enhance memorial site visitor experiences and a web-based interface that gives access to all materials and supports narrative virtual experiences for everyone (https://memorise.sdu.dk/).
PERCEIVEÂ focuses on creating a new way to perceive, preserve, curate, exhibit, understand and access colored Cultural Heritage collections and Digital Artworks, promoting their re-appropriation through AI and virtual experiences. This project aims at making heritage science results accessible, improving museums curatorial approaches to the study of colored collection, improving color reconstruction and prediction methodologies and workflow, widening the access and explore the use of colored collections and digital artworks, and finally wishes for an European Citizens re-appropriation of Colored Collections (http://perceive-horizon.eu).
PREMIEREÂ develops and validates a comprehensive ecosystem of digital applications, designed to fulfil the needs of diverse end-user communities involved in performing arts productions, including amateur and professional performers, performance art producers and curators, performance art spectators and scholars, powered by leading edge AI, XR and 3D technologies. The objectives are to broaden accessibility to audiences that cannot attend live performances, enhance the understanding of present and past performances, enrich the creative process by adding new elements, dimensions and capabilities, offered by advanced digital technologies and enabling international collaboration, and finally increase the visibility of performances by supporting both spectators and producers/curators (https://premiere-project.eu/).
SHIFT supports the adoption of digital transformation strategies and the uptake of tools within the creative and cultural industries (CCI), where progress has been lagging. The project is strategically conceived to deliver, by advancing beyond the state-of-the-art, a set of loosely coupled technological tools that offers cultural heritage institutions (CHI) the impetus to stimulate growth and communicate new experiences to all citizens (including people with disabilities) by embracing the latest technological innovations in artificial intelligence, machine learning, multi-modal data processing, digital content transformation methodologies, semantic representation, linguistic analysis of historical records, and use of haptics interfaces (https://shift-europe.eu/).Â