Design Sprint Completion
XR Ireland and Āraiši Ezerpils Archaeological Park have completed intensive design sprint activities establishing comprehensive requirements and technical specifications for three voice-activated XR museum applications serving cultural heritage visitor engagement and educational delivery needs. Following user-centric design methodology inspired by Double Diamond framework and Don Norman's human-centred design principles, the partnership conducted collaborative workshops, focus groups, semi-structured stakeholder interviews, and extended on-site visits to Latvia's unique 9th-10th century reconstructed lake settlement, gathering operational requirements from museum staff whilst validating visitor expectations and environmental constraints that remote requirements engineering would not adequately capture. The design phase generated validated deliverables including comprehensive requirements documentation (D1.1), three detailed pilot scenario specifications covering AR welcome avatar for visitor information delivery, VR archaeological building reconstruction for educational content, and AR live translation for multilingual tour accessibility (D1.2), and implementation planning with key performance indicators ready for Phase 2 development commencement (D1.3), establishing foundation for VOXReality component integration and validation activities progressing project toward Technology Readiness Level 7 achievement through operational museum environment deployment.
User-Centric Design Methodology and Stakeholder Collaboration
The design sprint employed participatory approaches ensuring technology development would serve genuine heritage institutional needs rather than pursuing innovation divorced from operational reality and visitor service requirements. Semi-structured interviews with Eva Koljera, park manager and senior tourism officer, and Jānis Meinerts, archaeologist specialising in heritage management, explored daily museum operations, visitor demographic patterns, seasonal constraint impacts from Northern European climate limiting outdoor programming during winter months, multilingual accessibility challenges serving international tourism whilst preserving Latvian cultural representation, and budget limitations preventing extensive digital infrastructure investment or staffing expansion during peak visitor periods. Affinity mapping categorised gathered data into context, needs and wants, current practices, attitudes, motivations, and frustrations themes, enabling synthesis of dispersed observations into coherent problem space understanding whilst identifying commonalities with other European open-air museums suggesting broader transferability potential beyond single validation site. User persona development articulated primary museum visitor archetype representing families with children aged 25-50 seeking educational outdoor experiences connecting with cultural heritage and secondary museum management stakeholder concerned with operational sustainability, visitor satisfaction, and institutional mission fulfilment, providing concrete reference points for evaluating design decisions against user priorities throughout development rather than abstract general visitor population assumptions. Collaborative design workshops alternated between conventional videoconferencing and immersive virtual world prototypes using Mozilla Hubs, enabling heritage professionals to experience spatial interaction concepts and conversational voice engagement before articulating specific technical requirements, transforming abstract possibilities into experiential understanding that informed more precise requirement specifications than pure discussion would achieve. The extended on-site visit in mid-November 2024 provided critical contextual validation discovering infrastructure constraints including inconsistent mobile data connectivity across outdoor archaeological terrain and absent Long-Range WiFi coverage necessitating deployment architecture adaptation toward edge processing capabilities versus pure cloud dependency that initial planning assumed feasible.
Partnership Collaboration and Domain Expertise Integration
Cordula Hansen from Technical Art Services provided critical liaison role bridging heritage domain expertise and technical XR development capabilities throughout design sprint activities. Hansen brought over a decade of experience in user experience research, digital cultural heritage technologies, and heritage preservation methodologies, enabling translation between museum operational language and technical development vocabulary whilst managing expectation calibration ensuring both XR Ireland technical team and Āraiši museum stakeholders maintained realistic understanding about what voice-activated immersive technology could accomplish within project timeline and budget constraints. Her expertise in evaluation methodology, simulation exercise design, and cultural heritage pedagogy informed validation framework development including participant recruitment criteria, test scenario definition, evaluation instrument selection combining System Usability Scale with heritage-specific added value assessment, and ethical approval procedures ensuring compliance with European research standards and GDPR requirements. The collaborative process demonstrated value of dedicated translator roles facilitating communication between technical and domain specialist teams rather than assuming direct collaboration proves automatically effective across organisational culture gaps, professional vocabulary differences, and divergent priorities that heritage preservation missions and technology innovation objectives might create without skilled intermediary managing alignment and mutual understanding development. F6S Innovation provided third-party coordination support through VOXReality cascade funding administrative oversight, mentor connection facilitation linking VAARHeT team with VOXReality consortium technical experts for component integration guidance, and communication channel establishment ensuring project progress aligned with broader VOXReality research programme objectives whilst maintaining VAARHeT autonomy for heritage-specific design decisions reflecting Āraiši museum needs rather than forcing generic consortium technology showcase that might not serve genuine institutional requirements.
Deliverable Outputs and Implementation Planning
Design sprint produced three comprehensive deliverables advancing project from conceptual proposal to detailed implementation readiness. D1.1 VAARHeT Use-Case Requirements Document specified user and technical requirements through structured analysis following IEEE 830 and ISO 29148 standards, documenting functional requirements for each pilot application including AR avatar information retrieval capabilities, VR voice-triggered content activation, and translation language pair support, alongside non-functional requirements addressing performance latency thresholds, connectivity resilience, multilingual capability, and factual accuracy standards that heritage contexts demand exceeding general commercial application tolerances. D1.2 VAARHeT Use-Case Description, Specifications, and Implementation Plan elaborated pilot scenarios with detailed user journey maps showing visitor interaction sequences from application access through content engagement to experience completion, technical architecture specifications describing VOXReality component integration within Unity development framework, and high-level implementation planning allocating development activities across Phase 2 sprints with dependency identification and risk mitigation strategies. D1.3 KPIs and Implementation Plan established measurable benchmarks tracking project progress including Technology Readiness Level progression, user cohort size targets, performance latency thresholds, visitor feedback collection, and dissemination activity metrics, whilst documenting sprint objectives, deliverable relationships, and success criteria enabling objective assessment of whether development and validation achievements met project commitments and VOXReality programme requirements. These deliverables collectively provide comprehensive specification foundation enabling Phase 2 implementation to proceed with confidence about what requires building, how components should integrate, which quality standards must be met, and how validation will assess whether delivered capabilities satisfy institutional needs and visitor expectations rather than merely demonstrating technical feasibility without operational viability evidence.
Insights Informing Culturama Platform Development
Design sprint activities generated strategic insights fundamentally shaping how VAARHeT findings would inform Nuwa's Culturama Platform commercial development priorities beyond pure validation outcome waiting. The discovery that open-air museums prioritise "bringing life" to heritage sites and extending visitor engagement over purely automating operational processes suggested immersive experiential applications would likely demonstrate higher value proposition than efficiency-focused information delivery automation, informing hypothesis that VR educational content and spatial exploration would outperform AR chatbot functionality during subsequent validation. Recognition that heritage institutional staff in Latvia possess surprisingly high digital literacy through regular technology training and sophisticated software familiarity challenged assumptions about heritage sector technology adoption barriers, suggesting interface design and institutional support prove more critical than fundamental capability gaps for successful deployment. Museum stakeholder emphasis on seasonal limitation mitigation enabling winter visitor programming when outdoor exhibits prove inaccessible validated VR climate-controlled indoor alternative as addressing genuine operational priority, whilst multilingual accessibility requirement serving international tourism without proportional staffing increase identified translation as addressing authentic institutional challenge beyond purely aspirational innovation. Infrastructure discovery revealing rural connectivity limitations prompted architecture adaptation toward hybrid cloud-edge processing enabling graceful degradation versus pure cloud dependency that might prove unviable for substantial European heritage population operating in similar infrastructure-constrained contexts, demonstrating value of on-site contextual validation discovering constraints that remote requirements gathering and urban-centric planning assumptions would miss. These design sprint insights enabled informed Phase 2 development prioritisation and architectural decisions grounded in authentic heritage operational reality rather than technology-driven speculation about what museums should need, establishing user-centric foundation that subsequent validation evidence confirmed as essential methodology for successful heritage XR deployment rather than optional best practice that resource or timeline constraints might justify skipping.
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