Culture meets immersive environments: a new media landscape across Europe

Abstract

The traditional media landscape is in the middle of a monumental shift: the new prosumer profile, the need for faster and more efficient communication, and the search for more user-driven and accessible multimedia experiences. New technologies (and more specifically, immersive environments) can provide great opportunities in the entertainment sector, and also in communication, learning, arts and culture. These technologies are gaining popularity due to the COVID-19 crisis as they enable interactive, hyper-personalised and engaging experiences anytime and anywhere. The EU-funded projects TRACTION (870610) and MEDIAVERSE (957252) are embracing new technologies in order to establish an effective participatory production workflow and are exploring novel audio-visual art representation formats. TRACTION will provide a bridge between opera professionals and specific communities at risk of exclusion based on trials, understood as experimental attempts at fostering an effective community dialogue between diverse individuals at risk of exclusion in three different situations, across three countries: Ireland, Portugal and Spain. MEDIAVERSE will enable the creation of a decentralised network of intelligent, automated, and accessible services, tools, and authoring platforms for digital asset management; legal and monetisable discovery and distribution of verified content, and barrier-free usage and integration in target media and platforms.

An Extended Reality System for Situation Awareness in Flood Management and Media Production Planning

“…All in all, these users of XR4DRAMA were particularly excited about the prospect of exploiting XR for a different purpose than what has previously been explored. Recent research [10][11][12][13][14] has focused on facilitating the creation of appealing XR stories for audiences. On the other hand, this work enables media people to use a single and complete XR solution that handles and optimizes the management of any media production, addressing its requirements for collaboration, content sharing, and realistic visualizations of remote locations.…”

“…Ever since the new wave of XR tools emerged, media organizations have been experimenting with the technology. For example, the Fader Enterprise project [10] was about building an interactive, browser-based 360/VR storytelling platform, V4Design [11,12] aimed at reusing/recycling content for 3D/immersive worlds, and MediaVerse [13] has also included immersive aspects in its quest to give users access to a wealth of media assets and co-creation opportunities. There were also smaller lab or hackathon projects such as Hidden Stories (https://innovation.dw.com/articles/hackathon-visualizing-globalinequalities-heres-what-we-came-up-with (accessed on 28 May 2023)) (in situ AR storytelling and explainer journalism), Deutsche Welle 360 World Heritage (https://www.…”