Interactive digital storytelling becomes a form of information presentation in many fields. Its application spans from media industry through digital cultural heritage, serious games, information visualization to contemporary theater and visual arts. In order to develop a new digital storytelling methodology hyper-storytelling, we engaged a team of multidisciplinary experts from computer science, visual arts, literature, film directing, psychology, communicology and human computer interaction. In this paper we present the first findings of this team in form of guidelines for interactive digital storytelling presentations of cultural heritage.

Commercial sea routes joining Europe with other cultures are vivid examples of cultural interaction. In this work, we present a serious game which aims to provide better insight and understanding of seaborne trade mechanisms and seafaring practices in the eastern Mediterranean during the Classical and Hellenistic periods. The game incorporates probabilistic geospatial analysis of possible ship routes through the re-use and spatial analysis from open GIS maritime, ocean, and weather data. These routes, along with naval engineering and sailing techniques from the period, are used as underlying information for the seafaring game. This work is part of the EU-funded project iMareCulture whose purpose is in raising the European identity awareness using maritime and underwater cultural interaction and exchange in the Mediterranean sea.

The project iMARECULTURE is focusing in raising European identity awareness using maritime and underwater cultural interaction and exchange in Mediterranean Sea. Commercial ship routes joining Europe with other cultures are vivid examples of cultural interaction, while shipwrecks and submerged sites, unreachable to wide public are excellent samples that can benefit from immersive technologies, augmented and virtual reality. The projects aim to bring inherently unreachable underwater cultural heritage within digital reach of the wide public using virtual visits and immersive technologies. Apart from reusing existing 3D data of underwater shipwrecks and sites, with respect to ethics, rights and licensing, to provide a personalized dry visit to a museum visitor or augmented reality to the diver, it also emphasizes on developing pre- and after- encounter of the digital or physical museum visitor. The former one is implemented exploiting geospatial enabled technologies for developing a serious game of sailing over ancient Mediterranean and the latter for an underwater shipwreck excavation game. Both games are realized thought social media, in order to facilitate information exchange among users. The project supports dry visits providing immersive experience through VR Cave and 3D info kiosks on museums or through the web. Additionally, aims to significantly enhance the experience of the diver, visitor or scholar, using underwater augmented reality in a tablet and an underwater housing. The consortium is composed by universities and SMEs with experience in diverse underwater projects, existing digital libraries, and people many of which are divers themselves.