VIRTUAL London Heritages Conference
Abstract
Beyond the Lighthouse project aimed to create engaging immersive experiences of singular seascapes, in order to promote a greater awareness among young people about the urgency to protect natural and cultural heritage. This was a pilot project, with researchers from Lusófona University and Évora University (Portugal), IADT (Ireland) and LUCA (Belgium), supported by FilmEU Seminal Funding. Lighthouses were the central axis of this exploratory project, which had as main goal to provide the experience of seascapes through virtual reality (VR). More than mere sources of light for navigational aid, lighthouses are also panoramic viewpoints, allowing us to have a broad perspective of space – and also a deep perspective of time. For this project two lighthouses were selected, due to its unique geographical location and historical importance: Berlenga Lighthouse in Portugal and Kish Bank Lighthouse in Ireland. A VR application prototype made in Unity for Meta Quest headset and for PC was the main output of the Beyond the Lighthouse project. Both versions of the VR app were made publicly available online in November 2024 via the website produced for the dissemination of the project: https://lighthouses.ulusofona.pt. Complementary to the VR app, the website offers extra content and resources, such short flythrough videos of both lighthouses and respective seascapes, detailed articles about each lighthouse with related bibliography, and more. In this presentation, besides the presentation of the project main outputs, the development process will also be revealed, highlighting the challenges faced by its team and the solutions devised and implemented to pursue the goals and objectives originally defined. Several of the lessons learned from this project are already being reflected in a new related project – Infamous Shipwrecks -, which expands the scope of this pilot, aiming to engage with specific audiences, particularly students and teachers from basic and secondary schools.
Célia Quico is an associate professor and researcher at Lusófona University, Portugal, with a PhD in Communication Sciences from Universidade Nova de Lisboa, obtained in 2008. She specializes in research and development in interactive media and immersive media, currently having as main areas of interest content production about Portuguese cultural and natural heritage, as well as the promotion of media literacy, health literacy and ocean literacy among specific audiences.