Ralph BARTHEL | Aleks CICHA | Andrew HUDSON-SMITH
(University of Greenwich, London, UK)
Keywords: IoT, cultural heritage, interactive design, augmented reality, story telling
Abstract:
The project, aims to familiarise visitors and tourists with the history of the University of Greenwich’s campus site. We plan to create a series of interactive IoT devices which will be located around the site. Enhanced through technology storytelling techniques we investigate how uses of mixed-reality applications alter what we perceive and value as cultural heritage. We augmented existing on-site objects with fictive stories ( personal memories of a character ) and assigned them to several IoT enabled storytelling devices. These devices, apart from playing the memories back, will also allow visitors in the future to record memories that relate to the site and add them to an online collection. In this way we aim to increase personal bounds between people and the site. To achieve it we use technologies and techniques like, digital fabrication, blue-tooth beacons, custom programmed electronics, sound design and voice over narration.
We have developed conceptual designs for seven IoT enabled objects and implemented one of the design as research prototype. We recorded historic sounds and a voice over narrative with the help of an actress that given an insight into life on the campus in the 1940’s. We are in the process of augmenting a bench on site as a means to access this provenance information. We will be conducting user tests with different audiences and will report outcomes from this empirical work at the conference.
One research goal of this project is to investigate, how through technology, people can engage with culture and heritage related stories/ facts/ memories in a different, more personal and memorable way.
The already existing research and design study in the field of cultural heritage and IoT, focuses on a very narrow audience and mostly tailored to a museum collection, objects. Locating our devices in the open environment allows us to target more broad audience. In this way we encourage more people to participate and contribute to the project.
We explore different technologies such as the Internet of Things, costum electronics and combine this with script writing, sound and voice recording and integrate these layers into digitally fabricated, site related objects. This creates a new environment and an additional layer of provenance information about a place, which has the potential to change the way people engage with the history of places and objects. We believe this approach provides interesting new ideas and opportunities for informal education, and increases participation through novel digital cultural heritage applications.