Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - EMOTIVE (Emotive Virtual cultural Experiences through personalized storytelling)

Teaser

The principal objective of EMOTIVE is to research, design, develop and evaluate methods and tools that can support the cultural and creative industries in offering their diverse audiences effective emotive storytelling. This means storytelling that can engage visitors, trigger...

Summary

The principal objective of EMOTIVE is to research, design, develop and evaluate methods and tools that can support the cultural and creative industries in offering their diverse audiences effective emotive storytelling. This means storytelling that can engage visitors, trigger their emotions, connect them to other people around the world, and enhance their understanding, imagination and ultimately, their experience of cultural sites and content. EMOTIVE aims to do this by providing authors of cultural products with the means to create high-quality, interactive, personalised digital stories. More specifically, it provides:
- Emotional, interactive forms of storytelling to resonate with the “everyday visitor”
- A continuous exhibition space online, on-site, or simultaneously online and on-site
- Group personalization of the visitor experience responsive to the needs and interests of multiple users at once
- Different digital platforms to support users’, including groups’, technological circumstances;
- Innovative Computer Graphics research providing new solutions to multi-view inpainting and Image-Based Rendering and allowing simple-to-create, highly realistic Virtual Experiences
- Physical artefacts designed to extend the visitor experience
- Collection and analysis of data on visitor choices and behavior to facilitate both personalization of experience and generalization.
To achieve its objectives, EMOTIVE adopts a holistic approach integrating interdisciplinary research involving a complementary group of world-class experts from multiple scientific and technological domains working at two main UNESCO sites, the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey and the Roman Antonine Wall in the UK through the Hunterian Museum’s collection.

Work performed

The objectives of the EMOTIVE activities for Year 1 (M1-M12) were the following:
- The collection of user requirements (WP3)
- The design and production of EMOTIVE experiences (WP3)
- The establishment of EMOTIVE’s conceptual framework (WP5) for the design of emotional storytelling at cultural heritage sites
- The transformation of end-user requirements into system specifications, and their prioritization for the three EMOTIVE releases (WP8)
- The design of the first version of the EMOTIVE Architecture framework and integration plan (WP8)
- The initiation of the technical development efforts, leading to the release of the EMOTIVE Alpha version (WP8), including the EMOTIVE Authoring Tool (WP4), that supports multi-level authoring for different roles of authors, the EMOTIVE Backend (WP5), which is a supportive system that brings all EMOTIVE platform components together, Novel Methods for Virtual Display and Physical Reproduction of Sites and Artefacts (WP6), including Image-Based Rendering (IBR) and Low-Cost Physical Artefact Reproduction techniques, the EMOTIVE Front-end System (WP7) that supports multi-device presentation of cultural heritage experiences.
- The development of the evaluation framework for the effective evaluation of tools and experiences (WP9), and the implementation of initial formative evaluation trials
- The implementation of dissemination activities (WP2) including project’s identity and style, website, social media, newsletter, promotional material, publications and event attendance
- The implementation of initial exploitation activities (WP2) towards the commercialisation of the project’s results
- The establishment of the ethical, societal and privacy principles and procedures (WP1 and WP10)
- The definition and implementation of quality procedures and project management tools (WP1)

Final results

EMOTIVE’s advances beyond the state of the art are towards the following directions:
- EMOTIVE provides a story-based rather than an object-based approach that resonates with people keeping however the cultural site’s offer at the center.
- Interactive storytelling in EMOTIVE is coupled with personalisation, adaptation and social interaction.
- EMOTIVE builds a continuous exhibition space, blending the online with the on-site experience, seamlessly integrating the pre-, during, and post-visit activities, the virtual and real world and the intangible with the tangible.
- Visitors navigate in a hybrid 2D/3D space which comprises high quality reconstructions of the physical space and objects.
- Innovative Computer Graphics research in EMOTIVE has advanced the state of the art in multi-view inpainting, allowing removal of objects in captured scenes with unprecedented levels of quality, and in the field of IBR, allowing free-viewpoint navigation in large wide-baseline scenes for the first time.
- EMOTIVE enables affordable massive physical reproduction of artefacts and their widespread use as part of augmented reality experiences.
- EMOTIVE can effectively support collaborative visits with virtual and on-site visitors sharing a cultural experience and bringing into the group experience a different, complementary perspective.
- Authoring in EMOTIVE combines for the first time adaptation techniques with collaborative, multimodal and multi/trans-device dimensions populating the visitor’s environment to seamlessly interact with an ongoing, consistent, potentially ubiquitous, experience.
- EMOTIVE enables the author to “bend” time and space so that one single person can simulate a virtual museum scenario involving multiple participants using multiple devices, in different places, and interacting with each other’s and the museum environments along a non-linear story that can last hours.
- EMOTIVE supports authors with very different levels of computer science knowledge through the use of a complete authoring environment made of several components, each one specialising in its own domain.
- EMOTIVE provides the first coherent conceptual framework for the design of personalized experiences under a variety of settings.
The EMOTIVE platform is expected to be a cutting edge end-to-end solution for the authoring of cultural heritage interactive experiences and presenting them to visitors. The outcome will put tools in the hands of professionals to create engaging, memorable stories, and enable the public to enjoy and share these stories, from anywhere. It will engage audiences in new ways, putting emotional stories at the heart of museums and heritage sites.We believe that drama-based narratives containing careful reference to a site’s cultural content have the power to transform heritage and museum visitor experiences, encouraging repeat visits, facilitating direct and ongoing interaction and deepening knowledge transfer.
Therefore, 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.
The development of innovative research in engaging technologies such as mobile AR or VR combined with the emotive storytelling approach and the virtual museum concept, promise significant impact on the interest of visitors, especially young generations, for cultural heritage.
The digital experiences and assets resulting from EMOTIVE ultimately become re-usable by both specialists and non-specialists and analysable as data points providing insight into broad-scale human patterns of value-building and sense-making about the past.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.emotiveproject.eu/.