Locative Games are in the process of entering the mainstream, in cultural heritage they can improve access by offering alternative experiences and widening audiences, they can aid in preservation by managing footfall and focusing digital assets, and they can increase engagement and allow visitors to see their heritage in new ways. However, existing design approaches and infrastructures for locative heritage are bespoke and poorly integrated with existing visitor structures. There is also a lack of guidelines on what is ethically desirable in these digitally mediated spaces, and how designers might mitigate against unintended consequences or abuses. This is a barrier to the widespread adoption of locative heritage applications and means that more complex experiences are currently not sustainable in the wider sector. LoGaCulture will change this by bringing together the leaders in digital locative games, in collaboration with some of Europe’s most significant cultural institutions, to enable a new generation of locative cultural heritage games through proposals for design guidance, validated ethical frameworks, and an open, extensible, and reusable set of technologies. Through a set of five interlinked case studies across four countries the project will: gather evidence from the heritage design space for interactivity, narratives, and play; look at how augmented reality and soundscapes can affect visitors’ immersion; explore the place of locative heritage in the wider visitor journey through transmedia and social visiting; and explore how the barrier to authoring and deploying such systems might be lowered. The goal is to create a step change in knowledge in how to design, deploy, and maintain locative heritage games, and lay the groundwork for their mass adoption by cultural institutions by allowing them to treat locative experiences that offer new forms of access and engagement as an integrated part of their existing cultural heritage work.

MEMEX promotes social cohesion through collaborative, heritage-related storytelling tools that provide access to tangible and intangible Cultural Heritage (CH) for communities at risk of exclusion. The project implements new actions for social science to: understand the NEEDS of such communities and co-design interfaces to suit their needs; DEVELOP the audience through participation strategies; while increasing the INCLUSION of communities. The fruition of this will be achieved through ground breaking ICT tools that provide a new paradigm for interaction with CH for all end user. MEMEX will create new assisted Augmented Reality (AR) experiences in the form of stories that intertwine the memories (expressed as videos, images or text) of the participating communities with the physical places / objects that surround them. To reach these objectives, MEMEX develop techniques to (semi-)automatically link images to their LOCATION and connect to a new opensource Knowledge Graph (KG). The KG will facilitate assisted storytelling by means of clustering that links consistently user data and CH assets in the KG. Finally, stories will be visualised onto smartphones by AR on top of the real world allowing to TELL an engaging narrative. MEMEX will be deployed and demonstrated on three pilots with unique communities. First, Barcelona’s Migrant Women, which raises the gender question around their inclusion in CH, giving them a voice to valorise their memories. Secondly, MEMEX will give access to the inhabitants of Paris’s XIX district, one of the largest immigrant settlements of Paris, to digital heritage repositories of over 1 million items to develop co-authored new history and memories connected to the artistic history of the district. Finally, first, second and third generation Portuguese migrants living in Lisbon will provide insights on how technology tools can enrich the lives of the participants.