A connectionist approach in creating cultural heritage content: The Open City Museum App 

 

"The paper presents the framework under which an AR application was developed, the Open City Museum, which aimed to establish the notion of the distributed museum – a museum that “happens” all around a historical site and not only within a specific building. The app was developed as a project of Athens Digital Lab, on the Unity platform and Wikitude AR SDKit for the monuments’ real – time recognition. The content was created through Visual Layering; a methodology of TUC TIE Lab that creates visual narratives, providing a holistic understanding of every projected situation.

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The city of Athens provides a suitable plateau of application, a city rich with monuments, with many going unnoticed, adjacent to the most popular ones. The app aims to “awaken” the historical remnants, bringing them into the spotlight, and create a narrative that connects present and past, cultural memory and emotional affect. It focuses on the transformation of their social context through history, in-situ via a “time leap” experience.

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The term “time leap” hints that an exact representation is not sought after. What is of true importance is the depiction of the sense of place each monument had at each era it existed in, all the while demonstrating its impact to the locals. Communicating the monument’s cultural value to the people is key.

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Our goal is to create an experience, not superimpose information. In this perspective, the approach of the graphics as well as the UI/UX allows the user to be “included”, “adding” his own experiences to complete the view provided. To further this, the users are allowed to create their own content, communicating their vision of the monuments.

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In conclusion, the cultural experience of OCM can set an example for context-based experience apps that can revive history within its cultural and social importance, and not only as representation. "