This paper presents Merchants of Istanbul, a serious game in the form of a visual novel designed to teach students basic knowledge about the early modern Ottoman Balkans. The game immerses players in the historical journey of a caravan travelling through Southeast Europe in the late 16th century, bringing to life the geopolitical dynamics, trade routes, and daily life of the various ethnic, linguistic and religious groups within the Ottoman Empire.

Based on historical textual sources in various languages and visual material, Merchants of Istanbul offers students the opportunity to experience semi-fictional adventures of a caravan travelling through the early modern Ottoman Balkans, and more precisely from Lemberg/Lviv (in present-day Ukraine) to Istanbul via various towns in present-day Romania and Bulgaria. The main objective of the game is to become wealthy by purchasing luxury goods and safely bring them to Istanbul. By doing so, students acquire knowledge about the society, its ethnic, religious, and linguistic background, government structures as well as trade practices in the Ottoman Empire through an engaging narrative. Besides text and dialogue, which are the main features of a visual novel, the game contains various gameplay features to promote active learning: These include navigable world and town maps, time-sensitive mini-games (quick time events), a travel journal to track progress, an interactive card game to negotiate resources for the best discount, and a source-based glossary that allows students to deepen their knowledge on the history and historiography of the Ottoman Empire. By playing the game and studying the glossary, Merchants of Istanbul aims at teaching students to develop critical skills in historical inquiry.

Through gameplay, Merchants of Istanbul makes the history of the early modern Ottoman Balkans more accessible to students, especially in Western Europe where this is typically not part of the schoolsʼ curriculum. Additionally, the paper illustrates the importance and challenges of interdisciplinary approaches in serious game design: By combining knowledge from historians and game designers from various academic backgrounds as well as programmers and illustrators, Merchants of Istanbul is the result of joint academic communication that aims at promoting ludic teaching in the field of digital humanities.

Over the past twenty years, the approach to cultural heritage has evolved from a focus on preservation to one centered on its broader value. This shift recognizes the importance of cultural heritage across various sectors, where advanced technologies are crucial in addressing its challenges. The HERIFORGE project builds on this idea by connecting ecosystems in Poland, Cyprus, and Turkey -countries where cultural heritage is a core national value. The project aims to foster innovation in both cultural heritage and creative industries, utilizing extended reality (XR) technologies and digital cultural assets to strengthen social resilience. HERIFORGE brings together academic institutions, SMEs, public authorities, and community actors, following the quadruple helix model. The three hubs collaborate to develop a long-term vision (so called strategic impact package) for integrating XR technologies and utilizing digitized cultural heritage assets stored in data spaces and cloud platforms, ensuring their reuse and contribution to future initiatives. Ultimately, the three hubs are to create a pan-regional HERIFORGE Hubs Network for innovation in cultural heritage and XR.

As part of this broader vision, the HERIFORGE project includes the Joint Research Pilot Projects (JPRPs), which focus on exploring the practical applications of XR technologies in cultural heritage. These pilots are designed to address key challenges, such as digitisation, data management, and social inclusion through the use of Virtual Worlds. By creating federated repositories and providing quality CH datasets, the pilots will enhance XR applications in sectors like culture and tourism, fostering innovation and new business opportunities. The pilots also seek to revive lost cultural heritage, offering displaced individuals a sense of belonging by engaging them with their cultural memories in immersive XR environments. Furthermore, the pilots will explore the use of gamification and storytelling techniques in Virtual Worlds to convey historical narratives and transfer knowledge, focusing on enhancing well-being and positive social impacts. JPRPs are led by the hubs in Cyprus, Poland, and Turkey, each contributing expertise in areas such as digitisation, storytelling, gamification, and data orchestration. The collaborative efforts across these hubs will create a unified platform for sharing and accessing digital assets, promoting greater inclusion and cultural understanding. Ultimately, the pilots will demonstrate how XR technologies can play a key role in bridging cultural gaps, revitalising heritage, and fostering social resilience.

As an extension to JPRPs, the HERIFORGE project will organize open calls to identify and fund innovative third-party projects that address specific challenges in using immersive technologies for cultural heritage and social resilience. These calls aim to stimulate innovation, especially in culture, tourism, and social inclusion, while fostering new business opportunities for SMEs. By selecting approx. 12 projects, HERIFORGE will support the development of technical solutions that align with the project’s research and innovation challenges.

The HERIFORGE will also foster engagement with international organisations and initiatives, data spaces, other excellence hubs as well as established European research infrastructures – especially DARIAH and social sciences and art communities.

Since the 1970s, the commemoration and preservation of ‘difficult heritage,’ a term coined by Sharon Macdonald over fifteen years ago, has become a subject of increasing public attention. In the escalation of the European historical turn to memory, we are witnessing the emergence of a new dimension: the distinction of place through reference to historical narrative, whereby historical content is legitimized through exhibitions, memorial plaques, and other modes of urban commemoration. However, despite the opportunities afforded by immersion, there has been a lack of substantive evidence to evaluate current approaches and guide future developments, especially in difficult heritage sites. Particularly in Europe, immersion has not been employed widely in such sites.

This talk will discuss and expand on the affordances and challenges of designing, developing, and assessing the first Virtual Reality production in Greece on Block 15, co-funded by the Greek-German Fund for the Future and the Greek Ministry of Culture.

Block 15 was the building that served as an isolation and torture space within the Concentration Camp of Haidari, Attica, Greece, during 1943 and 1944.

Furthermore, the talk will build on the theoretical and applied approaches to the design and employment of immersive technologies to reconstruct difficult pasts at heritage sites around the world, as discussed in the volume Difficult Heritage and Immersive Experiences (1st ed.). Routledge (2022), which was co-edited by “Block 15” project members, Drs. Agiatis Benardou and Anna Maria Droumpouki.

“Block 15” aimed at identifying and re-purposing archival and historical resources toward the development of an immersive VR production on the tangible and intangible heritage of the site. To that end, a series of challenges had to be addressed and overcome, ranging from the overarching methodology, the point of view and narrative backbone of the digital storytelling, the development of historically accurate assets, and the integration of findings from user experience surveys carried out for the purposes of the production.

In addition to the talk, a 2D version (video) of the final production, which was submitted in January 2025, will also be presented, offering an alternative means of engaging with the project's outcomes and reflecting on the potential of immersive media in difficult heritage interpretation.

Interactive visualization and virtual reconstruction are reshaping museum engagement by fostering participatory knowledge elicitation and crowdsourcing. While photorealistic digital heritage approaches prioritize accuracy (Parker and Saker 2020; Petrelli 2019), this paper argues that such practices risk limiting deeper cognitive engagement, particularly when the goal is dialogic engagement rather than dissemination. Drawing on participatory heritage and digital humanities scholarship, the study proposes that strategically designed ambiguity in visual representations can instead invite visitors to actively interpret and co-construct meaning, aligning virtual reconstructions with the intellectual and cultural aims of the Digital Humanities and decolonized cultural values.

This research examines modern architectural heritage intertwined with contested histories through Nicosia International Airport (1968), abandoned in Cyprus’s UN buffer zone since 1974. The site’s significance lies in its layered narratives—as a symbol of modernization, a time capsule of de Certeau’s (1984) ‘spatial practices’ of the everyday (e.g., public terraces and amenities), and a monument to abrupt historical rupture. Its virtual reconstruction confronts the urgency of integrating living memory and embodied knowledge with archival documentation, particularly as firsthand experiences of its social role fade.

To address this, a year-long museum installation featured an interactive virtual environment of the airport, set in 1969—before the division of the country—and intentionally embedding spatial, temporal, and sensory interpretation gaps. These gaps transformed the visualization into a collaborative research instrument and conduit for collective storytelling, inviting users to bridge omissions through personal memories, historical hypotheses, and creative inputs. The approach prioritized democratizing access to cultural heritage and positioned the virtual model as a dynamic, community-informed work-in-progress.

Two methodological frameworks structured the experience:

1. Scaffolded Interactions through Meaningful Play (Salen and Zimmerman 2003): Context-dependent design balanced accuracy and ambiguity. Foundational elements (e.g., architectural geometry, historical timelines) were rendered precisely, while speculative or socially charged spaces (e.g., public terraces central to pre-conflict daily life) employed abstract or incomplete visualization. This duality encouraged visitors to negotiate interpretations through speculative scenarios and creative dialogue.

2. Feedback Mechanisms: Real-time annotation tools allowed visitors to critique ambiguities, share narratives, and propose revisions, fostering a sense of ownership and sustaining the reconstruction as a reflective, evolving discourse. These mechanisms enabled crowdsourcing knowledge and ensured the model remained a platform for responsible reflective discourse.

The installation demonstrated that strategic ambiguity, when coupled with structured interactivity, deepened engagement by transforming passive observation into active inquiry. Visitors collaboratively debated the airport’s cultural meanings, contributing perspectives often excluded from institutional narratives. Critically, the balance between accuracy and abstraction proved foundational: overly ambiguous representations confused users, while excessive realism discouraged creative participation.

By privileging abstraction over photorealism, this approach redefines virtual reconstructions as dynamic spaces for negotiating memory, identity, and loss. The study advances a framework for heritage visualization where designed ambiguity becomes a deliberate tool for social reflection, urging practitioners to embrace incompleteness as a catalyst for participatory meaning-making. This methodology aligns with decolonized cultural values, positioning digital heritage not as a static replica but as a platform for communities to articulate evolving relationships to place and history.