INT-ACT

INT-ACT focuses on intangible cultural heritage – i.e., practices and aspects of culture that shape our understanding of ourselves, our sense of belonging, and our relationships to each other and to the tangible cultural environment – as a means of bridging the past, present and future to provide novel approaches to transforming society and addressing societal challenges facing humanity at these times of epochal changes. INT-ACT does this by: 1) developing effective methods for extracting, structuring, and presenting the Emotional, Experiential and Environmental (3E) dimensions as formalised knowledge, 2) developing transdisciplinary methods of inquiry for capturing, compiling, and preserving the 3E dimensions contained in human narratives, 3) proposing and testing interaction techniques, narrative methods and audio-visual media choices for immersive eXtended Reality (XR) environments that present the 3E dimensions of intangible cultural heritage in the context of their associated tangible cultural heritage sites, and 4) providing solutions that address societal challenges by utilising these immersive XR environments. INT-ACT uses four selected tangible cultural heritage sites to develop its methods of extracting their associated intangible cultural heritage knowledge and human narratives, which are used for creating the content of four small-scale XR-based demonstrators. These demonstrators are then used in four case studies dealing with cultural, social and technological changes facing citizens and cultural heritage, namely: cultural tourism, ageing societies, disappearing communities, and immigration and multiculturalism. Each of these case studies targets a different societal challenge of importance and relevance to the multidisciplinary consortium of INT-ACT.

2024

2026