David Millard

This year I am delighted to start work as Co-Director for the LoGaCulture project, which is an EU/EPSRC funded project to explore Mixed Reality Games for Cultural Heritage. We wrote LoGaCulture as a follow up to StoryPlaces, extending our ideas about locative storytelling to the broader canvas of mixed reality games, and looking at how they should be designed for cultural sites, with existing stakeholders, and existing visitor patterns.

The project will take place over three years (2023-2026) with eleven partners, and is worth just over three million euros, so its a significant step up from StoryPlaces, and I am really excited to get to work with colleagues in Ireland, Germany, and Portugal who I have known for a number of years through ICIDS and the ACM Hypertext Conference.

The project is exploring five research themes:

• The Ethics of Mixed Reality Games for Cultural Heritage
• The Authoring of Mixed Reality Games for Cultural Heritage
• The Role of Transmedia and Social Visiting in Mixed Reality Games
• The Narrative Conventions and Mechanical Patterns in Mixed Reality Games
• Immersion and Presence in Mixed Reality Games

We will do this across four different case study locations, developing mixed reality games in each, working with our cultural partners:

• Avebury in the UK
• The Island of Madeira, Portugal
• The Battle of the Boyne & The Hill of Tara, Ireland
• The Senckenberg Natural History Museum, Germany

We kicked off the project with an all-hands meeting in Madeira, where we focused on the goals of the project, and our initial plans to understand the sites, build relationships across the project, and explore the foundation ideas of the project: ethics, authoring, transmedia, mixed reality patterns, and immersion.

Madeira is a truly wonderful place, and our colleagues from Portugal set a high bar for future events with a fascinating visit to the Natural History Museum of Funchal, and the Laurisilva of the island where we walked the medieval Levadas, as well as a trip to one of the highest peaks. Seeing the landscape laid out below us and spreading to the sea was a fitting metaphor for the undiscovered country ahead.

You can find out more details of the project on the new project website, where we will also post updates as the project progresses.