This work regards the digital representation of tangible and intangible dimensions of heritage crafts, towards craft preservation. Based on state-of-the-art digital documentation, knowledge representation and narrative creation approach are presented. Craft presentation methods that use the represented content to provide accurate, intuitive, engaging, and educational ways for HC presentation and appreciation are proposed. The proposed methods aim to contribute to HC preservation, by adding value to the cultural visit, before, and after it.

Virtual Humans are becoming a commodity in computing technology and lately have been utilized in the context of interactive presentations in Virtual Cultural Heritage environments and exhibitions. To this end, this research work underlines the importance of aligning and fine-tuning Virtual Humans’ appearance to their roles and highlights the importance of affective components. Building realistic Virtual Humans was traditionally a great challenge requiring a professional motion capturing studio and heavy resources in 3D animation and design. In this paper, a workflow for their implementation is presented, based on current technological trends in wearable mocap systems and advancements in software technology for their implementation, animation, and visualization. The workflow starts from motion recording and segmentation to avatar implementation, retargeting, animation, lip synchronization, face morphing, and integration to a virtual or physical environment. The testing of the workflow occurs in a use case for the Mastic Museum of Chios and the implementation is validated both in a 3D virtual environment accessed through Virtual Reality and on-site at the museum through an Augmented Reality application. The findings, support the initial hypothesis through a formative evaluation, and lessons learned are transformed into a set of guidelines to support the replication of this work.

In this article, the Mingei Online Platform is presented as an authoring platform for the representation of social and historic context encompassing a focal topic of interest. The proposed representation is employed in the contextualised presentation of a given topic, through documented narratives that support its presentation to diverse audiences. Using the obtained representation, the documentation and digital preservation of social and historical dimensions of Cultural Heritage are demonstrated. The implementation follows the Human-Centred Design approach and has been conducted under an iterative design and evaluation approach involving both usability and domain experts.