Due to its exposed geographical position in the Mediterranean – a major island a couple of hundred kilometres offshore from European, Asiatic and African coasts – Crete always was and still is at a crossroad of cultures, religions, Christian confessions and modern ideologies. The story of the unique cultural heritage is a story of sieges, captures and conquests, but also a story of interactions between groups which first met in a frame of hostility and in the course of time found ways of peaceful coexistence. An integral part of the modern cultural evolvement on the island is tourism. Groups of people visit Crete, often for a short period of time, and face a wealth of remains, which are stimulating, but too numerous, disparate and complex as to put them into a narrative and perceive the relevant cultural messages. The project aims:
- to collect pieces of information relevant to the collective memory of mankind and to configure them into narratives
- to link these narratives to material remains, such as buildings and more generally objects of cultural heritage and places of memory, which will be recorded digitally (primarily photographs, videos, maps, graphical representations and texts)
- to combine these data -textual and visual- in a cloud-based repository
- to develop an application for mobile devices and a web portal, which creates a location-based Mixed Reality experience by fusing Augmented Reality with Virtual Reality to allow users of the application to gain instant access to information on their smartphone or tablet, relevant to the place -buildings, places, sites of memory- where they are.