PLUGGY addresses the need of the society to be actively involved in cultural heritage activities, not only as an observer, but also as a maintainer, creator and a major influencing factor.
A heritage that is everywhere, and relevant to everyday life, is one of the preconditions for genuine sustainability. Currently, there are not adequate ICT tools to support citizens in their everyday activities in shaping cultural heritage and be shaped by it. Existing applications and repositories for heritage dissemination do not really create heritage communities. Social platforms certainly offer potential to build networks, but they have not been exploited yet with regards to cultural heritage promotion and integration in people’s everyday life.
PLUGGY, the Pluggable Social Platform for Heritage Awareness and Participation, aims to bridge this gap by providing the necessary tools to allow users to share their local knowledge and everyday experience with others, together with the contribution of cultural institutions, building extensive networks around a common area interest, connecting the past, the present and the future.
During the Final Event the project’s consortium will unveil its findings and provide opportunities for discussion concerning the best practices and lessons learnt around local and participative cultural heritage.
A parallel exhibition will showcase the PLUGGY’s Social Platform, Curatorial Tool and four developed apps, as well as the performed pilots, which were held in four different museums both in Greece and Slovakia, while promoting dialogue between the attendees and the presenting partners. Invited projects will also present their work at the exhibition.
Moreover, during the Final Event the PLUGGY AppChallenge winner who will get the 4000 euro award will be announced.
PLUGGY provides a social platform and a series of pluggable applications that aim at facilitating a continuing process of creating, modifying and safeguarding heritage where European citizens will be consumers, creators and maintainers of cultural activities. PLUGGY’s Social Platform users will be able to curate stories using PLUGGY’s Curatorial tool. Content will be both crowdsourced and retrieved from digital collections, allowing users to create links between seemingly unrelated facts, events, people and digitized collections, leading to new approaches of presenting cultural resources and new ways of interacting with them. PLUGGY’s users will build living Virtual Exhibitions around topics they think are important and publish them for others to experience. The collections of these Virtual Exhibitions will eventually form Virtual Museums, curated and experienced by virtual heritage communities. PLUGGY’s Social Platform users will be able to access its content through a dedicated web interface and Virtual Exhibitions through the pluggable applications. They will be able to search its overall content ranging from localized specific content to comprehensive personalized stories and experience Virtual Exhibitions through applications, covering a variety of technologies from Augmented and Virtual Reality to collaborative games for mobile devices. Through the Social Platform, they will be able to create networks, communities and link with other social media. PLUGGY will provide the necessary architecture, structure and interfaces for the creation of pluggable applications, allowing for beyond-the-project, not yet imagined ways to utilize the content on the social platform, while focusing on the design of the social interaction, helping to build new virtual heritage communities.
An Augmented Reality App to liven users’ stories. This App will include virtual models and overlaid information, suitable for museums and indoor applications.
A geolocation mobile App to showcase the geographical information of cultural heritage spots. The App will notify the user about nearby interesting ‘encounters’, targeted to outdoor activities.
A 3D sonic narratives App for stories that focus mainly on audio, utilizing advanced 3D sound techniques for a more accurate and realistic sense.
A video game authoring App that provides the basic bricks to develop without specific programming knowledge collaborative games, where participants will have to work together to compose a comprehensive story around a specific cultural heritage topic. This game will be deployed in mobile phones and will use their cameras and processing power to implement an Augmented or Virtual Reality game.
PLUGGY’s novel technologies are expected to enable the citizens of Europe, even in its less developed regions, to be actively involved in cultural heritage activities: this will allow a better understanding of their local surroundings and relations with far-away cultures.
Through their cooperation and interaction, the users of the PLUGGY social platform and its pluggable applications will be able to develop a common cultural and intellectual heritage of Europe and to participate in the shaping of an overall European culture landscape.
PLUGGY’s strong effects on:
Society | PLUGGY promotes wider understanding of heritage and recognises that objects and places are not, in themselves, what is important about cultural heritage, but rather the meanings and uses that people attach to them and the values they represent.
Economic Growth & Sustainability | PLUGGY improves innovation capacity and integration of new knowledge. Through its smart technologies, appealing and accessible by all, it will mobilise vivid economic sectors i.e. tourism and the creative industries, indirectly promoting local development and entrepreneurship.
Environment | PLUGGY promotes cultural diversity. Culture, like Nature, needs diversity to thrive. Understanding and promoting diversity in culture will inevitably promote ecological awareness.
Heritage & EU | PLUGGY’s crowdsourcing and Social Platform approach enables more participative, democratic and creative cultural heritage actions, a key objective of European Agenda for Culture.