1d. Arts and Culture

Scope and Introduction

The European arts and cultural sector demonstrates a significant capacity to engage with complex societal challenges, aligning with the European Union's mission-oriented policy objectives under frameworks such as Horizon Europe, the Green Deal, Digital Europe and the New European Bauhaus. Cultural actors contribute not only through dissemination and public engagement but also as co-developers of transformative practices.

From a policy perspective, initiatives like the New European Agenda for Culture and Creative Europe as well as the Council Resolution on the EU Work Plan for Culture 2023–2026, underscore the integration of culture and the arts within cross-sectoral innovation ecosystems. This reflects a growing recognition of the arts as a horizontal enabler in achieving Europe's green, digital, and inclusive goals.

Virtual Worlds (VW) offer a powerful platform for bringing arts and culture to a broader audience, showcasing its importance and impact on society and life in general. By leveraging VW, cultural institutions can reach global audiences, preserve heritage, and foster a deeper understanding of diverse cultures. The ability of VW to enrich arts and culture lies in their capacity to create engaging, educational, and accessible experiences for all.

Almost 8 million people fall in the context of cultural employment, through 1.2 million firms, 99.9% of which are small and medium-sized enterprises. On average, 22% of heritage collections in Europe have been digitally reproduced. According to Eurostat figures (2024), cultural and creative industries employ 7.9 million people in the European Union, equivalent to 3.8% of the total workforce, and represent 2 million cultural enterprises.

Use Cases

This section outlines key research areas within the arts and culture domain, detailing their significance, current challenges, and proposed objectives for future innovation.

Cultural Heritage and Museums

1d.1 User-centred Extended Reality experiences

User-centred XR experiences enable museum curators to develop engaging, informative, and high-quality interactions for visitors, thereby increasing engagement. This approach facilitates co-design processes, allowing for enhanced interaction and communication with audiences, including their involvement in co-creation tasks. It also supports the customisation of experiences to meet the diverse needs of different audiences and promotes the sustainability of XR content through archiving and adaptation for various purposes.

Challenges and opportunities: Current museum practices often rely on custom-built XR experiences tailored to individual institutions, limiting re-use and adoption opportunities. Co-design efforts typically involve non-XR or analogue methods, with social XR largely confined to prototyped or blended experiences. Customisation for specific users is rare, except for child-focused content. These limitations hinder scalability, increase costs, and restrict the widespread implementation of immersive cultural experiences.

Research and Innovation Objectives: Develop content templates and no-code content creation tools for XR applications, enabling museum curators to define high-quality experiences for various devices without coding (2c). Create multi-user platforms and back-end systems that support collaborative interaction and content sharing among museum visitors (2b). Ensure interoperability with existing collection management systems to facilitate seamless content integration and archiving (2d).

Performing Arts in Virtual Spaces

1d.2 Enabling immersive and interactive performing arts experiences

The integration of VR and AR technologies into performing arts productions allows creators to develop novel and engaging experiences. This approach facilitates the creation of entirely new digital performance spaces, enables avatar embodiment and unique audience perspectives, and offers the potential for highly interactive and personalised narrative experiences. It also opens avenues for remote collaboration and global audience reach, fostering new forms of artistic expression and storytelling.

Challenges and opportunities: The integration of immersive experiences in performing arts not only offers new means to extend the experience but also allows for exploring new ways to perform. However, integrating XR on a large scale is costly and technically complex, exacerbated by a lack of standardised workflows and interoperability between technologies. Challenges include ensuring reliable real-time interaction, low latency, managing complex integrated systems, optimising high-fidelity digital assets for real-time XR environments, and ensuring stable network infrastructure for hybrid and multi-user experiences.

Research and Innovation Objectives: Develop seamless integration solutions for XR hardware and software in live performance contexts (2a). Create real-time, cost-effective motion capture and avatar control systems (2e). Establish standardisation protocols for XR performance assets and data to promote interoperability (2d).

Cultural Events and Festivals

1d.3 Expanding outreach and digital archiving of cultural events

VW solutions allow cultural events and festivals to expand their outreach by providing year-round, interactive access to past events through virtual walkthroughs and digital archives. This extends the life of cultural work, enriches artistic content, strengthens knowledge and curiosity, engages new generations, and facilitates the sharing of best practices. VW solutions can take various forms, such as 360-degree video virtual tours or capturing and storing metadata for future regeneration of experiences.

Challenges and opportunities: Most cultural events and festivals are ephemeral, with their digital presence often limited to static web pages, images, and videos. There are few opportunities for the public to fully experience events retrospectively or as remote participants, largely due to a lack of simple tools for digital storage. Current adoption of VW solutions for this purpose is low, with traditional media being the common method for documentation.

Research and Innovation Objectives: Develop methodologies for capturing and storing heterogeneous cultural event experiences, including audiovisual works, physical installations, and virtual components (2c). Promote the sharing of content among artistic entities through universally accessible platforms (2d). Implement measures for inclusion, such as considering the needs of persons with impaired eyesight and other accessibility requirements (3a).

New Media Art and Creativity

1d.4 Artistic creation for embodied research

Artists are leveraging emerging and interactive technologies, including XR and AI, to create immersive, participatory experiences that challenge conventional thinking and speculate on future possibilities. This approach transforms how we perceive the physical world by enabling global access, embodied interaction, and the exploration of alternative narratives. Audiences are engaged as co-creators, fostering a dynamic relationship between artwork and participant.

Challenges and opportunities: New media art is currently realised through diverse digital installations, online exhibitions, and XR platforms. However, artists face challenges such as technical complexity, fragmented ecosystems, limited institutional support, funding issues, and preservation difficulties due to rapid technological obsolescence. There is also an issue of "sameness" in artistic output, suggesting a need for more innovative approaches.

Research and Innovation Objectives: Develop AI-based generative tools and multimodal analytics for artistic creation, fostering unique and diverse outputs (2f). Integrate blockchain technology for provenance and ownership tracking of digital artworks (2d). Establish transdisciplinary co-creation methods to facilitate collaboration between artists, technologists, and audiences (2c). Enable artistic research to explore new formats (2d).

1d.5 AI curated or generated art in virtual environments

Next-generation platforms leverage AI to enhance curatorial storytelling, spatial design, and artwork creation within hybrid physical-digital environments. This enables curators and artists to explore multiple narrative and spatial exhibition scenarios, moving beyond static tools to dynamic, intelligent systems. VW provide added value through real-time simulation of visitor behaviour, multilingual storytelling, and generative layout suggestions tailored to exhibition goals.

Challenges and opportunities: Current design practices often rely on static software or manual methods, lacking narrative intelligence, AI integration, or inclusive simulation tools. Artists frequently use generative AI tools without the capability to automatically explore how their artwork would be presented within a physical or virtual space. Adoption of VW solutions in this area is low, with existing tools lacking semantic AI and integrated audience feedback simulation or contextualisation.

Research and Innovation Objectives: Develop generative AI capabilities for text-to-scene conversion and curatorial narrative modelling (2f). Integrate visitor behaviour simulation to inform spatial layouts and exhibition flow (2b). Establish collaborative cloud infrastructure to support multi-user design and curation processes (2c). Establish methods to ensure high-quality checks for the generated content with a focus on storytelling (2f).

Cultural Tourism

1d.6 Virtual visits for cultural tourism

Immersive virtual visits allow tourists to explore heritage sites and cultural locations remotely, offering a highly immersive and interactive experience that goes beyond static images or videos. This approach broadens access to culture for individuals who may be geographically or physically restricted, supports sustainable tourism by reducing the environmental impact of physical travel, and creates new value streams for cultural institutions and virtual tour providers.

Challenges and opportunities: Current remote experiences of cultural locations primarily rely on images, prerecorded, or live videos, which offer limited immersion and interactivity. Existing business models for remote tourism are often confined to basic travel guides or video tours. Adoption of VW solutions for cultural tourism is currently low, with only initial proofs of concept and limited industrialised solutions available in the market.

Research and Innovation Objectives: Develop high-quality head-mounted displays and back-end platforms to support realistic VW representations (2a). Ensure high-quality content recording and streaming capabilities for immersive virtual tours (2e). Investigate and develop sustainable business models for virtual cultural tourism, including remote guiding and virtual entrance fees (3c). Ensure high quality content recording, including scanning and AI tools (2a).

1d.7 Enhanced experiences in cultural tourism

Tourists can enhance their on-location experiences by gaining access to additional content through wearable devices or smartphones. This includes virtual time travels or augmented experiences that overlay digital information onto physical spaces. This approach enriches the visitor experience by providing deeper insights and interactive elements, such as location-based services, virtual tours into hidden areas, or gamified experiences.

Challenges and opportunities: Existing enhanced experiences, such as virtual time travels or AR applications, are often limited to specific, pre-defined scenarios. The adoption rate of VW solutions for on-location enhanced tourism is currently low, with only initial proofs of concept and limited industrialised solutions available. Challenges include the seamless integration of digital content with physical environments and the development of engaging, context-aware applications.

Research and Innovation Objectives: Develop high-quality content for wearables and smartphones that seamlessly integrates with physical locations (2e). Create robust back-end platforms to support the streaming and delivery of enhanced content (2b). Design engaging gamified experiences that leverage AR and location-based services (2c).

Collection and Site Management

1d.8 Integrated information and monitoring for heritage collections and sites

VW solutions for collection and site management enable the integration of diverse information sources, such as sensors, Internet of Things devices, and social media platforms, into digital or memory twins of specific objects or sites. This provides managers and restorers with comprehensive, tailored insights, allowing for real-time monitoring of decay and change, assessment of potential threats, and prediction of consequences by overlaying time-series data.

Challenges and opportunities: Current collection management often involves fragmented information across different databases, lacking full integration and direct access to all relevant data for a specific asset. Monitoring is typically tailor-made, with data available primarily via charts without direct correspondence to the specific site or object, often focusing on limited parameters. Previsualisation of restoration actions is traditionally done through physical or digital mock-ups, which are less dynamic.

Research and Innovation Objectives: Develop connectors to integrate data from heterogeneous sources, including sensors, Internet of Things devices, and social media platforms, into Digital Twins (2e). Create industry-grade head-mounted displays and AR applications that provide tailored data views for monitoring and assessment (2a). Ensure interoperability and retrieval capabilities from various data sources to facilitate comprehensive data integration into spatial, temporal, and semantic contexts (2d).

Architectural Design

1d.9 Integration into architectural workflows

The integration of VW and XR technologies into architectural design and construction workflows significantly improves client interaction, design presentations, and experimentation with new architectural styles. This enables architects to create and evaluate designs in various XR interaction spaces, with live manipulation and high-fidelity visualisation. It also allows construction engineers to simulate structural loads from DT, plan and review cost, and manage manufacturing processes.

Challenges and opportunities: Current architectural workflows primarily rely on digitised processes with a strong emphasis on 2D outputs, and while Building Information Modelling standards are prevalent, XR is only occasionally used. Industrialised XR solutions for architects are available but are in an early adoption state. Challenges include integrating XR seamlessly into existing computer-aided design/manufacturing systems and ensuring that high-fidelity visualisations can be verified and documented within standard planning processes.

Research and Innovation Objectives: Develop industry-grade visualisation tools, including head-mounted displays, caves, and holographic devices, for multi-level visualisation and interaction in architectural design (2a). Create multi-user platforms and back-end systems that support collaborative design and review processes (2c). Ensure robust interoperability with existing computer-aided design/manufacturing systems to facilitate seamless data exchange and workflow integration (2d).

Fashion

1d.10 Immersive digital fashion experiences

The fashion industry is embracing VW to revolutionise design, presentation, and consumer engagement by leveraging immersive technologies. This enables designers to host virtual runway shows, create digital garments for avatars, and reduce waste through digital prototyping. Virtual fashion offers global access, promotes sustainable practices, and creates new digital revenue streams through non-fungible tokens and avatar fashion.

Challenges and opportunities: Traditional fashion events are often physical, costly, and exclusive, and prototyping generates significant waste. Online shopping lacks realistic virtual try-ons, contributing to high return rates. Existing digital initiatives in fashion are fragmented with low interoperability. While interest is rapidly growing, particularly among younger demographics, the adoption rate of VW solutions by end-users is currently low.

Research and Innovation Objectives: Develop advanced 3D modelling and real-time rendering capabilities specifically for digital garments and virtual fashion environments (2a). Establish robust avatar and DT systems that accurately represent physical apparel in virtual spaces (2e). Create interoperability standards and blockchain/non-fungible token infrastructure to support digital ownership and cross-platform use of virtual fashion assets (2d). Enable creation tools for virtual fashion (2c).

Gaming

1d.11 Inclusive game design for cultural and creative organisations

Cultural and creative organisations are seeking to engage wider and more diverse audiences through immersive, accessible, and meaningful game experiences. VW offer co-creation platforms that allow cultural actors to collaborate with developers in designing heritage or socially meaningful games, preserving and sharing diverse cultural stories in an engaging and accessible format.

Challenges and opportunities: In cultural experiences game design is frequently outsourced, costly, and lacks participatory elements. End-users typically have no input in the cultural stories being told, and digital accessibility is often an afterthought. There is a significant lack of game design knowledge and guidance within cultural institutions, and few links exist between the game industry and cultural organisations.

Research and Innovation Objectives: Develop VR and XR ready co-creation environments that support multiplayer collaboration (2c). Create open-source design tools with integrated explainable AI for adaptive storytelling (2f). Establish ethical and inclusive game design frameworks, along with accessibility testing tools for developers and curators (3a).

Intangible Heritage

1d.12 Documenting and preserving intangible cultural heritage

Leveraging advanced 3D digital technologies, such as 3D scanning, motion capture, and volumetric video, enables the accurate documentation, preservation, and communication of knowledge, skills, and cultural context related to Intangible Cultural Heritage, particularly traditional crafts. This approach allows for the visualisation and interaction with Intangible Cultural Heritage in immersive 3D environments.

Challenges and opportunities: Traditional methods of documenting Intangible Cultural Heritage (text, audio, video) often lack the nuance required to capture embodied practices like craftsmanship or dance, and struggle with documenting movement and spatial relationships in 2D media. Access to Intangible Cultural Heritage can be geographically limited, and the preservation of living traditions requires ongoing effort. Digital preservation demands specialised skills and infrastructure, and technological limitations hinder the capture of full sensory and social context.

Research and Innovation Objectives: Develop high-resolution 3D scanning and modelling techniques for artefacts and environments, alongside accurate and cost-effective motion capture systems (2e). Create accessible volumetric video capture solutions for realistic recording of performances and practices (2a). Develop AR/VR platforms for online access and sharing of digital Intangible Cultural Heritage assets, supporting experiential interaction with cultural practices (2b).

Cross-cutting Enablers

1d.13 Co-creation and participatory art for stakeholder engagement

Using art as an enabling technology through co-creation and participatory processes in VW can significantly increase stakeholder engagement and acceptance of XR technologies. This approach fosters emotional attachment between people and complex problems, enabling stakeholders to collaboratively propose, discuss, and prototype art and culture solutions with high impact.

Challenges and opportunities: Traditional stakeholder engagement methods, combining analogue and basic digital tools, often lack the interactivity and engagement of physical presence. A key challenge is creating engaging and collaborative VW that are easily accessible to diverse groups, from experts to untrained citizens. There is a notable lack of toolkits and best practices for utilising VW for co-creation and participatory art.

Research and Innovation Objectives: Develop multi-stage methodologies that integrate co-creation, community participation, and innovation, supported by frameworks like the Place by Design Playbook (2c). Create toolkits and best practices for implementing co-creation and participatory art within VW (2c). Research and develop functionalities that enable easy access and intuitive collaboration for diverse user groups in virtual environments (3a).

1d.14 User accessibility to immersive cultural experiences

Ensuring user accessibility to immersive cultural experiences in VW allows individuals with physical, sensorial, intellectual, or learning disabilities, as well as the elderly, to participate in cultural life that might otherwise be inaccessible. By incorporating accessibility features and services, the range of users is widened, fulfilling human rights and enabling individuals to enjoy new experiences.

Challenges and opportunities: Current VW often have limited alternative access options because accessibility services are not consistently considered during development. Challenges include ensuring access through different devices and alternative authentication methods, managing roles and permissions, and guaranteeing interoperability with assistive devices. Self-representation through avatar choices, content perception, navigation, and interaction require alternative options tailored to user needs.

Research and Innovation Objectives: Develop accessible VR applications with accessible authentication and platform features, ensuring interoperability with assistive technologies (2d). Integrate access services such as subtitling, audio description, and sign language interpreting directly into AR/VR/XR experiences (3a). Conduct further research to understand the most effective ways to integrate access services within AR/VR environments (3a).

Recommendations

To foster a vibrant, inclusive, and sustainable participation/engagement of the cultural and artistic sector within VW, a comprehensive set of recommendations is proposed, addressing critical challenges in infrastructure, accessibility, sustainability, ethics, and creative collaboration.

Technical Infrastructure: Strengthening technical infrastructure, tools, and standards is essential. A coordinated effort is needed to develop shared specifications for content formats, metadata, avatar behaviour, and interaction models—building on frameworks like BIM, GLTF, and the European common data space for cultural heritage. Investment in modular, possibly open-source, authoring tools, including no-code and low-code options, will empower non-technical users.

Scalable Pipelines: Establishing scalable pipelines for creation, testing, and distribution is vital to move beyond fragmented prototypes and bridge the digital divide. This involves shared authoring standards, modular, possibly open-source tools, and networked environments accessible to diverse organisations. Coordinated investment in interoperable tools, evaluation frameworks, and accessible repositories will reduce redundancy, build capacity, and accelerate broad public impact.

Sustainability and Funding: Enhancing sustainability, funding, and institutional support is key to the long-term impact of immersive cultural experiences. This requires funding models that support full project lifecycles and integration of VW into national and European cultural policies. Dedicated resources and capacity-building in XR workflows, storytelling, asset management, and ethical AI are essential for the digital transition of cultural institutions.

Accessibility and Inclusion: Accessibility, inclusion, and reach must be built into VW from the start. This means designing for users with disabilities and vulnerable groups, ensuring access services like subtitles and audio description, and inclusive avatar representation. Broader access requires lightweight, mobile-friendly XR applications and support for audience development to reach diverse, global users.

Co-creation: Co-creation and collaboration are key to unlocking the participatory potential of VW. Priority should be given to tools for real-time, multi-user content creation and adapted participatory design methods. Training digital facilitators will support inclusive and impactful community engagement.

Content Integrity: Safeguarding content integrity and ethics is crucial as immersive and AI-generated content grows. Clear frameworks must address authorship, consent, and data sovereignty, especially for underrepresented communities. Validation, explainability, and human oversight are key, along with preserving cultural context through metadata, multilingual narration, and rich storytelling.