The discussion on values is now as pertinent as ever. The vision of VAST is to bring (moral) values to the forefront in the field of advanced digitisation. VAST seeks to study European values across space and time and to exploit the digitised tangible and intangible cultural assets associated with values, in order to support and empower cultural heritage institutions and practitioners, promoting this way Europe’s cultural heritage. Emphasis will be placed in those values considered fundamental for European Union and a unifying axis for all member states, forming sustainable communities and enabling citizens to live well together, such as freedom, democracy, equality, tolerance, dialogue, human dignity, and the rule of law. By providing advanced modelling, methods, techniques and digital tools, VAST will study how the meaning of specific values has been expressed through different narratives and user experiences. We aim to track these values in different mediums across space and time. We will study (1) values in ancient Greek tragedies and how they are appropriated by contemporary theatrical plays and audiences, (2) values in works of seventeenth-century natural philosophy and how they are received by experts in science museums and museum visitors and (3) values in folktales across countries and time periods, through a cross cultural perspective and how these values are received by storytelling experts in fairytale museums and museum visitors. VAST will create a collaborative platform to assist scholars, researchers, artists, museums and educators to curate, re-use and re-purpose this material, re-visiting moral values in the context of modern society. We will combine a storytelling platform with crowdsourcing, by providing a storytelling application that will allow the users to create their own stories and remix the content together with pre-selected tags of values, supporting the continuous consolidation of assets.

VOXReality is an ambitious project whose goal will be to facilitate and exploit the convergence of two important technologies, natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV). Both technologies are experiencing a huge performance increase due to the emergence of data-driven methods, specifically machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). On the one hand, CV/ML are driving the extended reality (XR) revolution beyond what was possible up to now, and, on the other, speech-based interfaces and text-based content understanding are revolutionising human-machine and human-human interaction. VOXReality will employ an economical approach to combine these two. VOXReality will pursue the integration of language- and vision-based AI models with either unidirectional or bidirectional exchanges between the two modalities. Vision systems drive both AR and VR, while language understanding adds a natural way for humans to interact with the back-ends of XR systems or create multimodal XR experiences combining vision and sound. The results of the project will be twofold: 1) a set of pretrained next-generation XR models combining, in various levels and ways, language and vision AI and enabling richer, more natural immersive experiences that are expected to boost XR adoption, and 2) a set of applications using these models to demonstrate innovations in various sectors. The above technologies will be validated through three use cases: 1) Personal Assistants that are an emerging type of digital technology that seeks to support humans in their daily tasks, with their core functionalities related to human-to-machine interaction; 2) Virtual Conferences that are completely hosted and run online, typically using a virtual conferencing platform that sets up a shared virtual environment, allowing their attendees to view or participate from anywhere in the world; 3) Theaters where VOXReality will combine language translation, audiovisual user associations and AR VFX triggered by predetermined speech.