Leonor Medeiros

Beyond their direct use, buildings and heritage places are objects and settings which help to guide community actions. Cognitive perception systems interact directly with the built environment through action and generate experiences that will be used for subsequent actions. This requires a reorientation towards phenomenological perspectives that query the conceptual boundary between cognition and action. Five universities from three countries (Portugal, Italy, and Spain) came together in July 2023 through an Erasmus+ BIP (Blended Intense Programme) experience, developed for the La Latina neighbourhood, in the historical centre of Madrid. The intention was to highlight the importance of different disciplines, and interdisciplinary working, for planning an urban future which includes the goals of socio-economic and environmental sustainability, happiness, and the right of residents to maintain longstanding emotional connections with their neighbourhoods. The novelty of this experience compared to existing Master’s and PhD programmes in Europe was the early and intense contact of students with the subject through the development of fieldwork over two weeks. This was led by teachers from different disciplines to provide interdisciplinary perspectives for a training programme which included architecture, urbanism, urban anthropology, geography, history, and archaeology. Through this training, the intended outcomes were twofold: to equip students with the necessary knowledge and criteria to critically address these issues and to raise awareness among local stakeholders about the negative transformations affecting historic centres and their impact on residents’ quality of life.

The use of world-simulation videogames for cultural heritage (CH) communication presents one of the greatest opportunities for engaging people with the safeguarding of cultural resources. However, not all simulation videogames have the capacity to transmit heritage values efficiently. This article reviews the use of serious and commercial videogames in CH to frame and properly identify characteristics for the selection and assessment of videogames in the context of cultural communication. Based on the analysis of the capacities of videogames to motivate, immerse and represent reality, the videogame Minecraft is identified as one of the optimal solutions to represent and promote engagement with the cultural built environment. As such, the authors assessed the capacity of the videogame Minecraft to be used as an efficient tool to communicate built heritage environments, considering identified criteria on immersion, motivation, and fidelity on simulation.

The representation of archaeological artefacts aims for the graphic description of relevant information from the object, to allow for the proper interpretation of evidences from the past. Concavities and convexities are elements often difficult to represent through classical (analogical) representation techniques, especially when these geometrical characteristics are neither continue nor parameterizable. Digital techniques have advanced on the accurate reconstruction of 3D shapes, while attaching real colour to the geometry. However, the perception of concave/convex shapes from photorealistic true-orthoimages continues to be limited, especially when rich and homogeneous textures camouflage slight slope changes or volumetric deformations. In this paper we first critically review the current practice on the representation of solid-of-revolution artefacts with concave-convex predominance, and alternative photorealistic representations aiming at a better understanding of volume and colour. Given the limitation targeted, we then propose a workflow for the creation of true-orthometric maps enhanced by customized shadows. The work-flow integrates considerations on: (i) The orientation of archaeological artefact; (ii) the creation of accurate orthometric images based on Digital photogrammetry techniques; and (iii) the application of synthetic attached and cast shadows according the shape (information) to be represented. The workflow is demonstrated with a sample of plates retrieved from the Rua-das-Madres archaeological site, in Portugal.