Interactive Media for Cultural Heritage

Fotis Liarokapis is currently an Associate Professor (MRG Leader) of Extended Experiences (EX) at CYENS - Centre of Excellence, Nicosia, Cyprus and a Senior Researcher B (Associate Professor level) with the Cyprus University of Technology, Limassol, Cyprus. He is also a visiting Professor at Birmingham City University, Birmingham, UK. Dr. Liarokapis holds a BEng from the University of Sussex, an MSc from the University of Hull, and a DPhil from the University of Sussex. Before moving to Cyprus, he was an Associate Professor and the Director of the HCI Lab at Masaryk University, Czech Republic. Prior to this, he was employed as a Senior Lecturer by the department of Computing, Faculty of Engineering and Computing at Coventry University. He was also a research fellow at the 'Serious Games Institute' (SGI), Coventry University. Previously, he worked as a research fellow at City University and before that as a research officer at the University of Sussex. He has contributed to more than 170 refereed publications in the broad areas of virtual and augmented reality, serious games, computer graphics and brain computer interfaces. He has organised multiple conferences and workshops and he is the co-founder of the International Conference on Virtual Worlds and Games for Serious Applications (VS-Games). Recently, he was the program-chair of IEEE CoG 2020 and IEEE CoG 2021 as well as the general chair of IMET 2022, the general co-chair of IMET 2023 and the publications chair of Mobile HCI 2023. He co-organized the 'Mixing Realities: Cross-reality Visualization, Interaction, and Collaboration' workshop at IEEE VR 2023. Currently he is the general co-chair of Eurographics 2024.

Maria Shehade is a Senior Research Associate at the Museum Lab of the CYENS Centre of Excellence and an Adjunct Lecturer at the Cyprus University of Technology. She obtained her PhD in Cultural Heritage Management from University College London. She also holds an MA in Cultural Heritage Management from University College London and a BA in History, Archaeology and History of Art from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She has many years of proven experience in research on digital cultural heritage, cultural policy, cultural heritage management and cultural diplomacy and was involved as a Senior Researcher in several research projects in the UK, Greece and Cyprus, with special focus on digital applications for museums and heritage sites, developing long experience on European-funded research programs. She also has many years of teaching experience and has taught in several universities in Cyprus and the UK, including most recently, the University of Nicosia, Open University Cyprus and the Cyprus University of Technology. She also serves as a member in several national evaluation committees and review panels as expert evaluator for research proposals, as acted as a board member for several international conferences on the application of new technologies in the GLAM sector. She has received several scholarships and awards for her research from the National Foundation of Scholarships of Greece, the UCL Graduate School and the Leventis Scholarship Foundation, which also funded her doctoral research. Her research interests lie on heritage management and cultural policy, with an emphasis on interactive and emerging technologies in museums and heritage sites, especially focusing on the visitor experience, and issues of presence, authenticity, immersion and engagement. Her research also focuses on multisensory experiences in museum environments and the visitors' sense of presence, which was the subject of the latest book she co-edited, entitled Museums and Technologies of Presence, which was published in 2023. 

Andreas Aristidou is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Cyprus and a Research Associate at the CYENS Center of Excellence. He com

Conveying Intangible Cultural Heritage via Mixed-Reality installations in Museums: Reflections from three Case Studies.- Creating innovative technologies for archaeological sites: Augmented - Mixed Reality Educational Platform at the Spartan sanctuary of Apollon Amyklaios.- Mindsets not Headsets: A Review on Human-Centred Extended Reality Experimentations for Cultural Heritage.- Immersive Acoustics in Cultural Heritage Applications.- Mapping lfactory emories: maps as an interactive medium for olfactory cultural heritage.- User Acceptance of 720-Degree Virtual Tour Systems for Online Museum Experiences.- Immersed in Architecture's Digital Surrogates: Reconstructing difficult heritage of Modern architecture.- From physical to digital and back: novel modalities for interaction with cultural heritage through 3D digital fabrication, current trends and future perspectives.- Photogrammetric Computer Vision - Good practices and pitfalls.- Digital Cultural Heritage Twins: New Tools for a Complete Fruition of the Cultural Heritage Entities.- Motion labelling and recognition: A case study on the Zeibekiko dance.- Virtual restoration of archaeological artifacts.- Low-Barrier-to-Entry Multispectral Imaging: Enhancing Understanding and Furthering Access of Cultural Heritage Artifacts.- Gameplay Elements in Digital Cultural Heritage Applications.- A Systematic Review of Interactive Narrative in Cultural Heritage. The road travelled and the road not taken.- Delving into Fairy Tales Designing for digital interactions in a children's museum.- ReInHeriting cultural heritage spaces.- Human Animatronics in Museum Experience: Casa Parlante - The Living Museum, Corfu, Greece.- Multimodal presentations of the tangible and intangible dimensions of traditional crafts.- Similarity, Serendipity or Mediation: How Different Associative Principles Shape Interactive Media Design in Virtual Collections.- Designing and developing interactive kiosks for Cultural Heritage: best practices and common issues.- Interactive tangible and intangible heritage applications built on real-time graphics systems: heritage experiences in desktop CG, virtual and augmented reality.