Promoting Heritage In Virtual Environments

Heritage plays an important role in social, educational and economics of aspects. Accelerated by COVID 19 impact we have seen digital representations of heritage become increasingly important both for its preservation and promotion. As commodity computers and phones have become both more accessible and more powerful, the digital literacies that accompany them have become ubiquitous.  PHIVE seeks to cluster together 2 main NPA, 1 NPA COVID-response, 1 NSR and 1 Horizon 2020. - The  CINE project brought together heritage organisations, digital enterprises and knowledge organisations to develop interactive maps, galleries, reconstructions and archives.  - The ongoing STRATUS project is pushing the boundaries of Virtual Reality, creating linked virtual reality tours, and collective experiences.  - The CUPIDO project will disseminate across the North Sea Region, and will provide Workshop and VR materials for development. - TechSolns COVID-response technology project.  In PHIVE we will develop a synthesis of these EU projects bringing together: 1) Virtual Centre of Excellence for using Virtual and Augmented reality to promote and preserve heritage post-COVID;  including online live workshops, with accompanying learning materials and virtual tours; to disseminate how we create exemplar virtual reality content for collaborative environments. 2) Virtual Time Travel demonstration will provide a framework for live exploration of the past. This will bring together work on Downpatrick site in the STRATUS project and digi-tourist framework in the CINE project. 3) Exhibition System based on the International Image interoperability Framework enabling exploration of maps, timelines, virtual tours, objects, and landscapes. The centre for excellence, virtual time travel and gallery will be housed inside a Virtual Museum framework which will be available throughout the NPA region and will connect with Europeana and Zenodo.