Award Announcement
XR Ireland, Nuwa's sister brand specialising in immersive humanitarian and cultural heritage applications, has been awarded cascade funding through the European Commission's VOXReality Open Call to develop the VAARHeT project addressing voice-activated extended reality experiences for cultural heritage visitor engagement. The VOXReality consortium, led by Maggioli Group, selected VAARHeT through competitive evaluation based on innovation potential, technical feasibility, market relevance for cultural and creative industries, and alignment with advancing voice-driven interaction in XR spaces serving European heritage sector needs. The funding enables proof-of-concept development integrating multiple VOXReality enabling technologies including Automatic Speech Recognition, Intent Classification, Dialogue Systems, and Neural Machine Translation within practical museum applications deployed at Āraiši Ezerpils Archaeological Park in Latvia, validating European AI component capabilities for heritage contexts whilst addressing institutional challenges around seasonal accessibility, multilingual visitor support, and cost barriers to specialist interpretation provision.
Partnership with Āraiši Ezerpils Archaeological Park
The VAARHeT project establishes development partnership with Āraiši Ezerpils Archaeological Park, operated by Cēsis Business and Tourism Agency, preserving Latvia's unique reconstructed 9th-10th century fortified lake settlement representing Iron Age Latgalian cultural heritage. The museum provides authentic operational environment for validation testing, heritage expertise informing content curation and archaeological accuracy requirements, and access to visitor populations enabling user-centric design validation ensuring technology serves genuine museum operational needs and visitor experience enhancement rather than pursuing innovation without clear practical application value. Eva Koljera, park manager and senior tourism officer, and Jānis Meinerts, archaeologist specialising in heritage management, contribute domain knowledge about open-air museum challenges including seasonal limitations from Northern European climate constraints, multilingual accessibility requirements serving international tourism whilst preserving Latvian cultural representation, and interpretation complexity for reconstructed archaeological buildings where construction technique communication proves difficult through conventional guided tours or static exhibits. Technical Art Services, with Cordula Hansen providing user experience research expertise and cultural heritage technology specialisation, contributes methodological design for validation frameworks, liaison functions bridging heritage domain knowledge and technical XR development capabilities, and evaluation instrument development ensuring rigorous assessment meeting academic research standards whilst generating actionable insights for commercial platform evolution informing Nuwa's Culturama Platform development priorities.
Three-Pilot Development Approach
VAARHeT will implement three distinct voice-activated XR scenarios addressing different museum operational requirements and visitor engagement needs. Pilot 1 develops mobile AR welcome avatar providing museum information delivery through conversational interaction with 3D virtual guide accessible on visitor smartphones, addressing reception bottlenecks during peak periods, enabling multilingual information access through voice-activated query handling, and extending museum staff capacity for routine visitor inquiries about facilities, events, and attraction details without requiring additional staffing investment. Pilot 2 creates VR site augmentation enabling archaeological building construction technique education through Meta Quest headset experiences with voice-triggered exploded structural views, camera perspective changes, and detailed component examination of faithfully reconstructed 10th century Latgalian dwelling, addressing seasonal interpretation limitations by providing climate-controlled indoor educational alternatives whilst communicating complex spatial and temporal construction concepts that conventional exhibits struggle to convey effectively. Pilot 3 develops AR live translation supporting multilingual accessibility for specialist tour guides and craft demonstrations through real-time speech recognition and neural machine translation displaying subtitle text on mobile devices or AR wearable glasses, enabling visitors to maintain visual attention on physical demonstrations whilst following narration in preferred languages without screen-focused distraction compromising observational learning that practical heritage interpretation emphasises. This three-pilot approach enables comprehensive validation across information delivery, educational immersion, and accessibility enhancement application categories, generating diverse evidence about voice interaction value propositions across heritage operational contexts whilst testing VOXReality component integration flexibility for varied deployment scenarios and user requirements.
VOXReality Technology Integration
The platform will integrate four VOXReality consortium AI components validated through operational heritage deployment. Automatic Speech Recognition will convert visitor spoken questions and guide narration into text transcriptions enabling natural language input without typing burden whilst supporting European language diversity including English, German, Latvian, and extensibility to additional European languages serving regional heritage institutions. Intent Classification will map transcribed queries against predefined authorised interaction categories enabling voice-activated content triggering, information retrieval, and experience navigation whilst constraining system behaviour to validated capabilities preventing queries exceeding knowledge boundaries from generating speculative responses risking factual errors. Dialogue System implementing Retrieval Augmented Generation will ground AI responses in curator-validated museum knowledge bases ensuring historical accuracy and institutional credibility preservation whilst enabling conversational delivery adapting to visitor question phrasing rather than forcing hierarchical menu navigation. Neural Machine Translation will enable real-time tour guide speech translation supporting multilingual accessibility for international visitors without requiring separate language-specific programming or multilingual guide staffing that resource constraints often prevent. This technology combination enables features impossible through conventional museum interpretation including hands-free voice interaction accessible to diverse visitor populations, natural conversational engagement without restricted command vocabulary, curator-controlled knowledge ensuring factual correctness, and adaptive multilingual support serving European linguistic diversity without proportional staffing multiplication.
Development Timeline and Validation Planning
The VAARHeT project proceeds through three phases spanning twelve months from August 2024 through August 2025. Phase 1 (Design Sprint, August-November 2024) focuses on requirements gathering through user-centric design sessions combining semi-structured interviews with museum staff, collaborative design workshops, affinity mapping categorising visitor and institutional needs, user persona development, journey mapping, and on-site visits to Latvian archaeological park providing contextual validation and infrastructure constraint discovery including rural connectivity limitations requiring deployment architecture adaptation. Phase 2 (Implementation Sprint, December 2024-June 2025) develops Unity-based applications integrating VOXReality components with mobile AR, Meta Quest VR, and AR wearable modalities, deploys cloud infrastructure on European servers ensuring GDPR compliance and EU data residency, and conducts internal testing validating technical integration functionality before visitor validation commencement. Phase 3 (Demonstration Sprint, July-August 2025) executes comprehensive usability testing with minimum 30 museum visitors recruited through Āraiši networks representing validated visitor personas, collects quantitative metrics and qualitative feedback through structured evaluation instruments, achieves Technology Readiness Level 7 through operational environment deployment, and generates commercialisation pathway analysis informing Culturama Platform strategic development. Validation methodology developed by Cordula Hansen combines System Usability Scale assessment, added value ratings, Net Promoter Score measurement, task completion observation, and qualitative feedback collection, with ethical approval through Maynooth University ensuring participant protection and GDPR compliance throughout evaluation activities.
Strategic Significance for European Heritage Technology
The VOXReality funding enables XR Ireland to access cutting-edge European research AI technologies and consortium expertise that would prove economically infeasible to develop or license independently, whilst providing VOXReality consortium with validation evidence about component capabilities addressing real-world heritage challenges with measurable institutional impact and visitor experience enhancement. The project contributes to European leadership in culturally beneficial XR and AI applications whilst addressing genuine museum operational challenges that conventional approaches cannot effectively resolve, demonstrating public research investment catalysing practical innovation serving cultural preservation missions. Findings will directly inform Nuwa's Culturama Platform development priorities, evidence-based understanding of where voice interaction and immersive technology deliver proportional value justifying development investment versus where conventional digital solutions adequately serve heritage needs without elaborate technical overhead, and strategic positioning around selective application focus concentrating resources on defensible competitive advantages rather than comprehensive platform approaches attempting universal coverage regardless of technology appropriateness. Partnership with Āraiši positions XR Ireland within European archaeological and open-air museum networks, creates reference implementation supporting future commercial customer development, and establishes credibility with heritage sector stakeholders who might otherwise perceive technology vendors as lacking domain understanding or cultural sensitivity required for appropriate heritage application development.
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