It’s been a wonderfully busy 4 months, since the beginning of the EMOTIVE project, for “team EMOTIVE” at the Athena Research Center in Information, Communication and Knowledge Technologies (ATHENA).
Our multidisciplinary team has been actively working on many aspects of the project in tandem. As a first taste, early on in December 2016, our archeologist-storytellers Francesco and Katerina used our authoring tool to quickly whip up some prototype stories for the Ancient Agora of Athens, which explored the power of love and war.
The 1st EMOTIVE user workshop that followed engulfed us all in a creative frenzy. In this context of user requirements elicitation and user experience design, Akrivi and Maria, our modern-day renaissance women, worked closely with the heritage partners at the University of York (YORK) and the University of Glasgow (UGLA), to start forming and consolidating the first version of the project’s conceptual framework for emotive storytelling experiences for cultural heritage, available also in card format.
Meanwhile, Manos, Emotive’s technical manager par excellence, and software engineer wizards Vassilis and Ektor, are working with the project’s techies to define the architecture that can support the experiences-to-be with advanced graphics and interactivity, virtual, mixed and augmented reality, 3D printed artefacts, even artificial conversational entities. Stavros, our AI expert, along with the University of York are currently designing a chatbot that will allow visitors to converse with cultural heritage site experts. And Yannis, who is also President and General Director of the Athena Research Center at large, has been waving his wand over our team’s research efforts.
The ATHENA research team has been working on interactive, personalised, mobile storytelling since the CHESS project. EMOTIVE has brought to the team the exciting chance to continue previous fruitful collaborations but also form new ones with talented researchers and companies in the project’s consortium. For us, this project is opening up a range of possibilities in learning how to craft engaging experiences for on-site and virtual visitors of cultural heritage sites.
Image source: Athena RIC