Re-Thinking Visitor Experience with Ancient Manuscripts via the Holographic Showcase: The Case of the Codex4D Project and Its First Public Results from a Mixed-Method Evaluation In Situ

Ancient manuscripts are precious and fragile objects, preserved in libraries, museums, and archives. Some of them are masterpieces, made with several materials and insights, but generally they are not accessible to wide communities of users. The purpose of this study is to present the preliminary results of the Codex4D project: a holographic showcase, conceived for museums, presenting the first 4D model of an ancient manuscript to the public at the Science Festival in Genoa in 2022. The manuscript, preserved in the Angelica Library in Rome, has been represented in a multidimensional digital model, documenting both its visible and invisible aspects, on the surface and in the stratigraphic layers. We analysed the visitor experience: informal learning, the meaning-making process, interactions between visitors, and gesture-based interaction with the showcase. The methodology used for evaluation is based on four different qualitative methods (grounded theory, narrative inquiry, case study, and digital ethnography). We collected notes from observation, narratives from interviews, and answers from structured interviews. The main findings are patterns of the visitors’ experiences with a digital interactive 4D model of an ancient manuscript, supported by storytelling, and a list of design issues and possible improvements for the next version of the Codex4D holographic showcase

User eXperience (UX) Evaluation for MR Cultural Applications: The CEMEC Holographic Showcases in European Museums

Within the EU CEMEC project framework, a novel approach for using holographic showcases in museums has been conceived and experimented upon in different venues in the context of an itinerant exhibition dealing with Early Medieval European collections. The purpose of this holographic showcase, the so-called “box of stories”, is to improve the link and interaction between real and virtual contents in the museum’s context, making the exhibited object “alive” in the visitors’ perception. An Avar sword and a Byzantine treasure have been used as the main case studies, and they have been experienced in the museums of several European regions by audiences with different cultural backgrounds. This has been a great opportunity to carry out user experience (UX) evaluations in order to collect feedback (from about 600 museum visitors) regarding the attractiveness of such a mixed reality (MR) system, its usability, the comprehension of the contents, the efficacy of the logistics and environmental conditions, as well as the educational impact. The results of such inquiries helped the CNR ISPC team to identify the most meaningful User eXperience Analytics (UXA) able to support the work of UX evaluators and UX designers to assess the efficacy of digital cultural products. Indeed, this manuscript presents UXA and tries to draft a concrete and effective evaluation model for future digital projects for museum contexts

User eXperience (UX) Evaluation for MR Cultural Applications: The CEMEC Holographic Showcases in European Museums

Within the EU CEMEC project framework, a novel approach for using holographic showcases in museums has been conceived and experimented upon in different venues in the context of an itinerant exhibition dealing with Early Medieval European collections. The purpose of this holographic showcase, the so-called “box of stories”, is to improve the link and interaction between real and virtual contents in the museum’s context, making the exhibited object “alive” in the visitors’ perception. An Avar sword and a Byzantine treasure have been used as the main case studies, and they have been experienced in the museums of several European regions by audiences with different cultural backgrounds. This has been a great opportunity to carry out user experience (UX) evaluations in order to collect feedback (from about 600 museum visitors) regarding the attractiveness of such a mixed reality (MR) system, its usability, the comprehension of the contents, the efficacy of the logistics and environmental conditions, as well as the educational impact. The results of such inquiries helped the CNR ISPC team to identify the most meaningful User eXperience Analytics (UXA) able to support the work of UX evaluators and UX designers to assess the efficacy of digital cultural products. Indeed, this manuscript presents UXA and tries to draft a concrete and effective evaluation model for future digital projects for museum contexts

ATON: An Open-Source Framework for Creating Immersive, Collaborative and Liquid Web-Apps for Cultural Heritage

The web and its recent advancements represent a great opportunity to build universal, rich, multi-user and immersive Web3D/WebXR applications targeting Cultural Heritage field—including 3D presenters, inspection tools, applied VR games, collaborative teaching tools and much more. Such opportunity although, introduces additional challenges besides common issues and limitations typically encountered in this context. The “ideal” Web3D application should be able to reach every device, automatically adapting its interface, rendering and interaction models—resulting in a single, liquid product that can be consumed on mobile devices, PCs, Museum kiosks and immersive AR/VR devices, without any installation required for final users. The open-source ATON framework is the result of research and development activities carried out during the last 5 years through national and international projects: it is designed around modern and robust web standards, open specifications and large open-source ecosystems. This paper describes the framework architecture and its components, assessed and validated through different case studies. ATON offers institutions, researchers, professionals a scalable, flexible and modular solution to craft and deploy liquid web-applications, providing novel and advanced features targeting Cultural Heritage field in terms of 3D presentation, annotation, immersive interaction and real-time collaboration

La traducción del teatro áureo en Italia, desde el siglo XIX hasta nuestros días. Constantes y variables en la formación de un canon

This essay aims to provide an over view of the Italian translations of Spanish Golden Age theatre from the 19th centur y to the present, identifying above all the differ-ences in the approach to Spanish texts compared to previous centuries and the distinc-tive features of each historical-cultural period within this long span of time. Romantic translations (a period marked by the great collections of theatrical texts by Monti and La Cecilia) were characterised by their marked preference for religious and honour-based dramas and for the works of Calderón; while the 20th centur y saw a general reworking of the corpus of translated texts, with a stable presence of Calderón and the recover y of the dramas on peasant honour by Lope de Vega. The emergence and affirmation of the poetic translation is highlighted, from the early experiments of the 1920s to the general acceptance of our days, and the role hispanists and writers played in this choice. An analysis of the corpus of translation collections in the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as of the many individual translations, also shows how the canon of the Spanish Golden Age theatre has changed both on the academic and editorial side