Mixed Reality (MR) is where digital objects can be overlaid onto real world spaces made possible by wearable headset devices such as Microsoft's HoloLens, or where digital objects are overlaid onto a mobile phone's camera image. This technology has the advantage that a user can see the real place they are in at the same time as seeing 'fictional' objects within the same space which can be interacted with. These exciting developments can be mobilised within our Museums and Heritage sites to bring to life those places and their collections, helping to interpret and animate their hidden histories. This project will develop an application of MR for the use of visitors to the Telegraph Museum at Porthcurno in Cornwall, a small museum focused on the history of transatlantic telecommunications and the site of the first telecommunication cable running between Britain and the US. We will work closely with the staff at the Museum and with the Cornwall Museums Partnership to develop an application that will help the museum to attract wider interest from a younger audience who the Museum has had difficulty appealing to. Our plan is to design a multiplayer game using MR which asks the group to solve a fictional problem that has arisen in the Museum's cable tunnels and which takes place during World War II, when the location was of extreme strategic importance. Employing techniques found in role-playing games, the participant group must find and use virtual objects within the space to solve the problems they encounter. There will be various levels of difficulty in play to help include younger people as well as older, less game literate people. We will use this premise to tell some key stories about the location and bring it to life through interaction using audio, digital objects and characterisation. Central to our plan is to engage visitors with the Museum's locale and assets as performers (playing a role in a game) thereby engaging them with its rich history. We will encounter technical and design challenges because few applications of MR have yet been used in such contexts and the more superior HoloLens headset is still beyond the reach of many users. Our intention is to record and evaluate our approaches to the challenges we encounter to be shared with other researchers in this and related areas. This knowledge has high value culturally and economically and will help the country to develop the skills and content needed to be at the forefront of MR products both in the fields of games and entertainment, as well as in education and training, healthcare and business. We also hope to deploy the excitement around a MR experience, along with the Museum's place in our technological history, to encourage greater enthusiasm for STEM-based subjects. Alongside interpreting the museum's assets for new audiences, we will also develop models and approaches that can be used by other small Museums to do the same, and we will employ methods to share our research with the sector. The project is part of a larger endeavour here in Cornwall to develop and support the growth of immersive media design, expertise and infrastructure that will link our efforts to the broader games, film and TV industry. This bid will help build expertise in the technical and design aspects of developing mixed reality applications. These are needed if we are to create meaningful and vivid interpretational applications that can extend and enrich the experience of visiting a Museum and for visitors to get the most out of the assets and collections that they hold. Even for content creators with expertise in traditional media and VR, the design methodologies for meaningful and compelling MR experiences are lacking and untested at larger scales. Technical and design challenges at the heart of this project require urgent attention if museums are to unlock the considerable power of MR to enthuse and enthral their visitors of all ages.

Based on the work carried out for the 'Augmented Telegrapher: Mixed Reality in a Museum Context' project, we propose to extend our collaboration with both Porthcurno Telegraph Museum [PTM] and Cornwall Museum Partnership [CMP] to help tackle some of the Museum's key economic and interpretational areas of challenge. It became apparent through our previous collaboration that our experimental and investigative work could be leveraged, if commercially optimised, to help the museum to bring in footfall during the low season months as well as provide an additional highly marketable attraction for the public in the high season months. Part of this work is therefore also to provide means using the latest Augmented and Mixed Reality technology to help audiences, and particularly the under-engaged 16-30 age group, to engage enjoyably and meaningfully with the importance of the location and the collections within the museum. Our aim then is to attract, surprise and delight audiences with the availability of creative and innovative uses of immersive technology that will bring to life a unique location steeped in telecommunications heritage. To aid in the process of attracting visitors and in the development of a new income stream we will use a range of existing assets and designs to create a commercial, group-based 'Escape Room' type offering that can be booked across the winter months to bring in a new income stream. In close collaboration with our partners, existing digital assets will be optimised and polished, and made ready to be used to develop an online platform designed to better attract the interest of the under-engaged market. These assets will also be used to integrate Mixed Reality methods with the permanent collection with the aim of connecting past experiences of the impact of communications on daily lives with those experienced in our internet age. These additions provide therefore the basis for new income streams and business model for the Museum, helping to tackle some of its economic, thematic and cultural challenges.

European nations are often thought of as culturally homogenous. Yet over 200 national minorities have found recognition through the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages, with many more European languages thought by UNESCO to be critically endangered. Clearly the picture is more complicated than meets the eye. One way that minority cultures express their distinct identities is through intangible cultural heritage (ICH). ICH describes a culture's traditions rather than its monuments: from language to crafts, from dancing to food, it is the 'traditions or living expressions inherited from our ancestors and passed on to our descendants' (UNESCO). The ICH of national minorities is therefore an important part of this more complex cultural landscape between and within nations. Yet alongside these expressions of minority culture sit majority narratives. Influencing how a minority culture is seen from the outside, these can be powerful in creating imaginative geographies of minority cultures - such as through literature, television, or how tourist destinations are marketed. These may ring true with the minority culture but may also be dissonant, constructed by an external gaze. The dominance and visibility of these narratives across a nation's culture and beyond can mean the minority culture is less visible, less resilient, fragmented, and so marginalised. This marginalisation can mean that the ability of those who identify with a minority culture to feel at home in this national, European, and global context - to meaningfully express their perspectives and identities, and sustainably live their cultural heritage - is threatened. But these narratives and perspectives, too, are complicated, since the people who create and consume these narratives occupy not just a binary either/or of belonging to the minority or majority, but also a spectrum of more fluid identities both within communities and even within individuals. This project will use archival and desk research, primary data, and creative practice-based research - compared across minority cultures in the UK (Cornwall), Netherlands (Fryslân), Latvia and Estonia (Livonian) - to better understand this complex cultural landscape. Using live cultural events as a focus, taking inter-disciplinary and cross-national perspectives we will ask: How can a better understanding of the interplay between majority and minority narratives, perspectives, and performances of intangible cultural heritage enable us to make marginalised cultural landscapes more visible and resilient? Findings will inform recommendations for stakeholders from local communities to (inter)national policy-makers. By generating new knowledge about the socio-spatial geographies of existing heritage challenges, we intend that stakeholders will use insights to change policies, practices, or behaviours to make marginalised ICH more visible and resilient. Longer-term, we hope to impact the visibility and resilience of minority cultures within regional, national and global society, economy, and culture.

From the British Museum to Historic England, decolonisation has become a critical challenge for heritage institutions and for reconsidering colonial legacies in national heritage. Internationally, settler countries are grappling with this issue with a specific focus on settler/Indigenous relations, with applications and implications for heritage practice that can inform and support those in Britain. In 2015 Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) acknowledged a history of cultural genocide against Indigenous peoples in Canada and committed to addressing this difficult heritage in the 94 'Calls to Action'. British Columbia (BC) is leading the response, becoming the first province in Canada to enshrine United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) into law. This established UNDRIP as the foundational framework for reconciliation in BC, placing Indigenous heritage rights at the centre (via Articles 11, 12, 13, and 31). Yet by February 2020 Indigenous leaders were declaring reconciliation dead in response to the treatment of Wet'suwet'en protests in BC about natural gas pipelines planned to be built across traditional unceded territories. This highlights how Indigenous heritage rights are intertwined with land, resource, social, and environmental justice. (Re)conciliation is a difficult process that requires sustained effort, time, a willingness to decolonise approaches, and engage with non-western epistemologies, ontologies and axiologies. The (re) is bracketed in recognition that conciliation is often needed first. Preliminary research with community leaders and heritage professionals in BC indicates a mix of hope and cynicism about the new laws: will they support Indigenous rights, or simply pay lip service to the idea? While aspects of North West Coast Indigenous heritage have been explored before, this Fellowship will bring a new lens to the analysis. By focusing on renewing relations it will consider this heritage holistically, bringing together multiple dimensions of heritage, reconnecting people with places, collections, practice, and environment. The research will explore different approaches to reclaiming, renewing, and (re)conciling heritage, exploring the history of the struggles and achievements that led to this significant change in law. The research focuses on the importance of (re)connections, (re)newing relations within and across cultural groups and heritage organisations, and recognising the role of ecosystems and environment in maintaining and sustaining heritage. Crucially, the project explores the potential of heritage to positively contribute to (re)conciliation and decolonisation. This interdisciplinary project aims to make a future-oriented contribution to (re)conciliation and (re)negotiation of Indigenised heritage in Canada and its (post)colonial legacies in museums and heritage in the UK.

Older people's connection with community, groups and activities in their neighbourhood and the cultural landscape, are essential for social inclusion and healthy ageing. As society becomes ever more digital those excluded are at risk of social exclusion. Peripheral rural and coastal economies such as Devon and Cornwall tend to have low productivity reflecting the shift in deprivation away from cities. Traditional industries such as farming, mining, fishing, and port activity have all declined. Alternative high-wage digital sector jobs have not emerged resulting in an exodus of younger people with higher qualifications. The region has major assets of environment and heritage and a thriving third sector. We will develop novel technologies in games, extended reality, underwater telepresence, and artificial intelligence (AI) voice interfaces to use these assets to tackle digital exclusion. The multidisciplinary project will take an inter-generational approach to co-design technologies to connect digitally excluded people with community groups and the cultural landscape, while creating opportunities for excluded younger people in digital careers. The academic team comprises a principle investigator with long track record in digital health inclusion, four early career researchers (games, digital arts, robotics, and AI), post-doc researchers (evaluation, co-design, eHealth and robotics), and advisors from arts and heritage, social policy, architecture, marine biology, and health informatics. A major strength is the extensive network of external partners including digital inclusion networks, businesses setting up village hubs, care home and sheltered housing chains, farming networks, museums, heritage and environmental sites, further education colleges, community groups from deprived and ethnically diverse communities, and organisations for sensory impaired people. This network has been built by our projects such as EPIC (Ehealth Productivity and Innovation in Cornwall) and GOALD (Generating Older Active Lives Digitally). The 30 month project will work with 20 partner organisations, recruit 80 older (50+) people and 40 younger (16-20) people who will work with researchers to co-develop novel technologies helping participants to connect to community and cultural landscape in the region. Three strands of technology development will require access to broadband at home or in village halls: (i) enhanced virtual reality giving the ability to move around heritage sites and significant natural landscapes such as Tintagel Castle or Eden Project, (ii) social games connecting older people (e.g. between care homes) based on local history, culture and environment, (iii) underwater telepresence enabling the user to explore and engage with the Plymouth Marine Park. The fourth will give digitally excluded older people with no broadband, telephone access by AI voice interface to online resources such as museums and community groups. The 120 participants would join monthly workshops, in person or online, over 18 months receiving expenses and a participation certificate. We will interview participants at beginning (expectations) and end (reflections). Interviews will be thematically analysed. Questionnaires will be used to assess change in digital use and confidence, connectivity to community and culture, young people's interest in STEM subjects and their attitudes to older people. We will compare interview findings with quantitative approaches to see if there is consistency. We will set up a social enterprise which will work with our partner organisations and participants to demonstrate the technologies to regional and national audiences of 300-400. This social enterprise will carry forward the development, sale (either to individuals or to organisations) at low price, implementation of the technologies and continued engagement of young people in this digital development.