IAA - Digitising Maritime Heritage of Portbraddan: AR and VR reconstruction of salmon-fishing cobbler vis-a-vis oral maritime folklore audio records and the Ballintoy parish natural environment

The project will be joining up with Ulster Transport and Folk Museum (NMNI) to produce digital content with historical authenticity for heritage industry, one of the globally oriented markets that NI can be gaining commercial gain from if digital resources and applications produced by the project are properly researched and developed. The project will visualise conditions of salmon fishing in the area VR using digital twins. The main output is an augmented reality application for IOS and Android devices. The application will display an AR environment, local historical artefacts scanned as 3D assets and a character that will provide information, context and the history of the artefacts at certain locations that can be accessed through a QR code. The application will be built off of ARCore and ARKit for each respective device platform and will be developed through a contemporary game engine such as unity or the unreal engine. 3D assets will be provided from scanned data that will be optimised for realtime rendering on mobile devices. The visualisation will apply the methodology to the series of locations and places of heritage and national significance in NI (working towards the creation of the so-called “Northern Irish national maritime heritage trailâ€). This will allow the growth of the tourist industry in NI by bringing visitors from the specifically Belfast area outside to the areas of rural significance. The work will directly impact NMNI benefiting members of the public; tourists; visitors to NMNI sites and museums; and will have a wider educational outreach. It will introduce digital assets of NMNI for the multiple audiences to explore NMNI collection of artefacts and also the oral history archive that includes stories and memories recorded by NMNI. The project will result in a number of impact accelerator events to take place during the shelf life of the project. We envisage convening impact accelerator events at a number of local museums and cultural centres along the NI North Coast, within the confines of the annual Rathlin Maritime Sound festival (May 2023), NMNI annual maritime heritage exhibition at Cultra (June 2023), as well as Belfast Media and XR festivals (Nov 2023). Potential international impact accelerator events can be convened in Dublin (National Folklore Collection) and Brest (Centre for Celtic and Breton Studies, Maritime Research Centre), University of Western Brittany, France.