LoGaCulture has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Framework Programme.

LoGaCulture is led by the Interactive Technologies Institute (Portugal), in partnership with the Instituto Superior Técnico Association for Research and Development, (Associação do Instituto Superior Técnico para a Investigação e Desenvolvimento). Together with the National Trust, Bournemouth University and the University of Southampton (United Kingdom), Trinity College Dublin and the Irish Office for Public Works (Ireland), the Hochschule RheinMain of Wiesbaden and the Senckenberg Naturmuseum of Frankfurt (Germany), the Câmara Municipal do Funchal (Portugal) and ECCOM, the project wants to investigate how locative games can foster innovation in the cultural heritage sector and establish shared guidelines for their use at a European level.

Locative games are based on the interaction between the environment and the player’s location, allowing for an innovative and playful engagement with space through the use of geolocation. They are in the process of entering the mainstream, and there are many contexts in which they can be used. In a cultural context, they can improve access by offering alternative experiences and broadening audiences, they can aid by managing footfall, and they can increase engagement and encourage visitors to view their heritage in new ways.

LoGaCulture brings together European academic leaders in digital locative experiences in order to explore how a new generation of innovative locative games might be able to benefit European society by enhancing cultural heritage sites. Four interconnected case studies conducted in four European countries (the Avebury Henge and Stone Circles in the UK, the Natural History Museum of Funchal on the island of Madeira, Portugal, the site of the Battle of the Boyne and The Hill of Tara in Ireland, and the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum of Frankfurt in Germany) focus on analysing the spatial aspects of cultural sites in order to help us understand how to apply the principles of interactivity, storytelling, and gaming. The project examines how augmented reality and soundscapes can affect visitors’ immersive experiences. It explores the role of heritage sites in transmedia applications and social media, as well as investigating how the barriers to creating and distributing such systems might be lowered. The goal is to improve our know-how as regards the design, deployment and maintenance of local heritage games, and to lay the groundwork for their mass adoption by cultural institutions. This can be done by encouraging these organisations to treat locative experiences that offer new forms of access and engagement as an integral part of their existing cultural heritage work.

In this context, ECCOM’s contribution embraces all the phases of the project, from the moment of development and monitoring all the way through to the final evaluation. The first phase involves interviews with visitors, to collect insights about their transmedia journey and their motivations for visiting a heritage site, to determine their social and demographic characteristics, and to comprehend their expectations as well as the role of technology during their visit.

The next step is to design new transmedia journeys for the case study sites. Artists and designers will work together to outline an interactive narrative in the form of a detailed script and to plan and anticipate its graphics with the use of vignettes and storyboards. At the same time, developers and researchers will be involved in planning the system’s interactive structure and special features.

The final phase of the project consists of a specialised evaluation of the transmedia and social visiting aspects of the heritage games, with the aim of fully understanding their impact on the visitor experience, and their effectiveness in changing visitors’ attitudes and behaviours.

For further information, visit the LoGaCulture website (logaculture.eu), Facebook page and Instagram account.