Enchanted Network of Cultural Heritage Advanced by Narratives and Technologies for Emotional Dives

Venice, Bruges, Heraklion, and Zagreb come together as ENCHANTED cities engaged in preserving and enhancing their rich and composite cultural heritage with the use of cutting-edge digital technologies and digital humanities. ENCHANTED believes that: A. tangible or intangible heritage is a wealth, one that needs preserving, valorising, and continuously growing. B. 2. heritage is the foundations upon which building our future. C. now as never before, heritage can be boosted by digital technologies and social innovation to become an important source of economic development. It accordingly sets out to adopt an innovative approach aiming to develop a shared over-the-top digital facility connecting 45 cultural heritage institutions in 4 countries, used to provide visitors with immersive cultural journeys steered by novel storytelling and augmented by bundled digital technologies including artificial intelligence, virtual, augmented, and hybrid reality. The project meets visitors inside museums and, importantly, in the streets and temporary locations, eliciting the interest of both residents and tourists. We work with tangible, intangible, and born-digital assets, as well as heritage preserved in popular and less popular museums, libraries, archives, and sites. The goal is to make cultural heritage more accessible for a broad range of end users, meeting them with bespoke narratives and experiential formats, to trigger unprecedented emotional response and the desire to repeat the experience. For 42 months we work with a transdisciplinary group of cultural institutions, researchers, and technology providers, and engage the local communities from day one, to develop solutions that are truly attuned to the desires of the users and the local communities. The project aims to help the cultural and creative industry become more competitive, support more sustainable tourism, and better distribute the socio-economic benefits generated by more distributed tourist flows across cities.