Welcome to the MEMENTOES newsletter!

Welcome to the MEMENTOES newsletter, a guide to our latest work and news.

MEMENTOES is an EU-funded project based on collaborations between museum professionals, video game developers, and research centres which aims to combine the educational and empathy-building impacts of historical museums with the global reach and entertaining format of video games. Together, we’ll produce three digital games based on instances of historical injustice, designed to teach players about the past and think critically about its parallels with the present. We’ll also codify best practices, develop new technological services, and publish an accessibility toolkit to encourage future partnerships between the tech and cultural heritage sectors and promote inclusive interaction with cultural heritage.

Stay Informed

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What we've been up to

The MEMENTOES partners have been busy pushing forward the development of our three video games and planning for testing sessions to validate the games' efficacy as tools for education and transitional justice. We've also been working on software tools to aid in the development of universally accessible games and preparing for our next in-person plenary meeting next month! Read on for our latest updates.

New Blog: MEMENTOES AI Services

Did you know the MEMENTOES project is creating a series of AI services designed to streamline the inclusion of historical objects in video game development? These services provide a range of features, allowing users to digitise cultural artefacts, improve the quality of historical photos, and apply a range of filters to change the characteristics of digitised objects. These tools will be available to other game developers soon – stay tuned for more updates.

Data Management in the MEMENTOES Project

The MEMENTOES project rests on a series of collaborations between partners from different organisations. In order to facilitate these collaborations and produce high-quality research outputs, the consortium relies on a streamlined approach to data management that enables information sharing within the consortium, while protecting the privacy and rights of any data subjects impacted by the project’s work. To learn more about our approach to safe and secure data management, check out our latest blog.

New: Publications Page

Read all of our journal articles, policy responses, and posters at the link below.

Read Our Publications

In case you missed it

Those From Below: Meet the Creators

Check out the latest Q&A interview with Le Bois Du Cazier and Causa Creations, who are working together to create Those From Below, a VR game based on the experiences of migrant labourers working in Belgian mines in the 1950s.

Poster: "A Video Game About Gulag Archaeology and the Memoirs of Women Prisoners"

Our partners at FORTH recently presented a poster at IEEE GEM 2024 about their work on Gulag Diaries, a game developed in partnership with Gulag.cz. The poster presents their approach to game development, covering their co-creation process with Gulag.cz, game prototyping, and the different modes of gameplay used.

The poster accompanies a publication with the same title, which you can read here.

See the poster at the link below.

Policy Response: "Feedback to the European Commission call for evidence on 'Virtual worlds (metaverses) - a vision for openness, safety, and respect'" (2023)

Last year, our partners from Trilateral Research contributed to an EC policy consultation about Virtual and Extended Reality using learnings from the MEMENTOES project. The response emphasises the importance of government-led policy interventions to ensure virtual worlds remain open, safe, and secure and hold tech developers accountable for safety features in their products.

Interested in learning more about the MEMENTOES games? Check out these one-pagers outlining each of the three games in development.

Those From Below by Causa Creations and Le Bois du Cazier

Toys by Charles Games and the War Childhood Museum

Gulag Diaries by ICS-FORTH and Gulag.cz

MEMENTOES partners

The MEMENTOES consortium includes three research institutions, two game development organisations, and three museums. The Centre for Research & Technology Hellas (CERTH) is the project coordinator and leads tasks on software development and image processing techniques. The Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas (FORTH) is the technical manager of the project and develops one of the three video games. Trilateral Research contributes to dissemination, exploitation, and ethics. The game developers involved in the project are Charles Games and Causa Creations Interactive Media. The museum partners are Le Bois Du Cazier, the War Childhood Museum, and Gulag.cz.

This project has received funding from the European Research Executive Agency under grant agreement No 101061496.

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union of the European Research Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

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