Marketing, PR and communication professionals need tools to support them in the creation of engaging, up-to-date content experiences that their clients can use for establishing meaningful connections to customers and key stakeholders. Creative companies delivering these tools are the main enablers for all new forms of communication we currently experience: from cross-platform content creation to transmedia storytelling. Nowadays with multiple channels, vast amounts of social content, multiple touch points and interactions, constant innovation is required for keeping creative professionals and tools on top of trends and enabling them to deliver. Over the last 10 years, multimedia content analysis has been an exciting research area widely addressed in academia. While initial aspirations and expectations of these new algorithms were not immediately fully met, over the last couple of years the technology has matured a lot, up to a point where it can now be deployed in commercial settings. EMMA will transfer state-of-the art technology in multimedia analysis from the labs to creative industry SMEs, more specifically to solution providers for the media management, branding, marketing and communication. This new technology will enhance existing commercial services, helping SMEs that are active in these sectors to solve current needs of their customers, and thus become more competitive in their market. EMMA focuses on two application areas, tourism and events, addressing the needs of destinations, and events to better drive, connect and engage with audiences. The impact in these vertical markets is huge, since both are among the key industries in Europe. We plan to commercialise the results of EMMA soon after the project end and directly create over 50 jobs in the sixth year of operations.

BRIDGES aims to support and boost the pan-European interactive technologies industry and contribute to “bridging” the gap between interactive technologies and industry, through the development of a holistic solution for (remote and co-located) group interactions in room-scale immersive mixed reality (or eXtended Reality - XR) environments that blend the physical and virtual space. The BRIDGES solution is based on an existing Immersive DeckⓇ platform, which will be further enhanced and developed into a turn-key product with widespread applicability that may act as a stimulus for the uptake of interactive technologies by industry. BRIDGES will focus on the areas of training and informal learning, culture, and entertainment, as it is widely recognized that immersive XR is an extremely promising tool for the enhancement of the user’s experience in these areas, and an optimal medium for achieving enhanced performance, engagement, a high level of effectiveness, and the transfer of skills and knowledge into the real world. To ensure widespread uptake, we will carry out extensive and comprehensive studies to validate the proposed solution in the real world settings of two major international airports in Germany and Greece for training firefighters and first responders, and in a highly visited informal educational and cultural center/museum in Greece, for enhancing the learning and recreational experience of visitors. The extensive validation effort undertaken by BRIDGES is expected to lead to the short-term commercial deployment of the BRIDGES end-results in the specific domains addressed by the project pilots, but also to provide replicability recommendations and scale-up guidelines for deploying the resulting XR platform in other industrial and entertainment domains, in the longer term.

The proposal’s central concept is CultureLabs, an open and evolving ICT-empowered infrastructure which comprises a rich variety of resources including guidelines, methodologies, digital tools, existing community engagement projects, as well as novel ideas and approaches that can facilitate social innovation in culture. The infrastructure is addressed to both institutional stakeholders and community members to make use of existing shared, and in many cases commonly created, resources, according to their missions and needs. Different resources, the “ingredients”, can be combined in various ways to form a “recipe” that describes how to carry out a participatory project to address the needs of a specific target audience. The primary focus will be on approaches that build positive awareness about communities’ own heritage and memories, and engage their members as bearers and producers of culture. CultureLabs’ case studies focus on different immigrants communities (e.g. refugees, second generation immigrants, female immigrants etc). CultureLabs toolkits and infrastructure are reusable and extensible, and its ingredients can be easily combined and adjusted to meet the needs of different stakeholders and target groups. At least 20 concrete recipes will be designed through the collaboration between different stakeholders, including museums, civil organisations, and policy makers. Four of these recipes will be implemented and evaluated as pilots in three different countries. Research outcomes and the empirical evidence gained from the project’s activities, including the recipes’ design and implementation, will be consolidated into general-purpose methodological guidelines and best practices that can be adopted by any stakeholder who wishes to organise participatory approaches to CH with a social impact.