Digital Heritage and Digital Humanities focus on distinct typologies of heritage: tangible and intangible Cultural Heritage (CH) objects and their preservation, education, and research versus the application of digital technologies to support research in the humanities. Both allow scholars to go beyond textual sources to integrate digital tools into the humanistic study. This project aims at supporting a new way of experiencing CH in the Serralves Museum and Coa Archeologic Park through more involving and culturally-qualified user experience. The main goal is to understand the potential of eXtended Reality within CH while also proposing the idea of developing a digital experience platform: an authoring tool based on an engine with core experiences functions that can be applied for developing multiple experiences for CH. This platform will contribute to new approaches, technologies, and tools for creating, processing, and delivering immersive and interactive content for engaging and meaningful experiences in these specific CH environments.

A video coding algorithm focus on the trade-off between the distortion and bit rate, where usually to a decreasing distortion corresponds an increasing rate and vice-versa. In R-D theory, the R-D function allows to estimate the lower bound for the rate at a given distortion. However, this value may not be possible to obtain in practical video encoders implementations. Operational R-D (ORD) theory applies to lossy data compression with finite number of possible R-D pairs (Schuster & Katsaggelos, 1997a).

The public health measures that were put in place to contain COVID-19 impacted the lives of people and institutions alike. For its global impact and transformation, the pandemic has the potential to be classified as a mega-event. Such radical events have become great opportunities to the testing of new technologies and forms of organisation, (Masi, 2016) that might in the future become prevalent. The impact of the pandemic was particularly felt in the contemporary art world, as the entire cultural activity was suspended. During this period, art institutions and collectives around the world reacted by adapting and providing alternative materials online. This paper aims at reflecting upon the challenges facing the exhibition of contemporary art online. Following Boris Groys’ (2016) actualisation of Walter Benjamin, we problematise how the digital reproduction of art affects the aura of an artwork. Proposing a critique of the apparatus of digital platforms, we analyse how the digital reproduces and enhances ideological structures that overpass the whole of society. For that purpose we analyse how four different organisations (an artist-run space, an art gallery, a museum and an art biennale) have migrated their activity to online platforms. The case-studies will allow a broad understanding of the different approaches available – with some radically taking advantage of the digital environment, and others merely digitising the role taken henceforth by printed catalogues.

As mobile technology sustains exponential growth and spread to all aspects of our everyday life and smartphone computational power increases, new promises arise for cultural institutions and citizens to use these tools for promoting cultural heritage. This survey proposes to review available smartphone applications (apps) relating to cultural heritage in three different contexts: cities, street art, and museums. Apps were identified by searching two app stores: Apple's App Store and Google Play (Android). A data search was undertaken using keywords and phrases relating to cities, street art, and museums. A total of 101 apps were identified (Google Play only= 7, Apple App Store only = 26, both Google Play and Apple App Store = 61, Apple Web Store and Web App = 6). Apps were categorized into the following categories: museums (39), street art (30), and cities (32). The most popular features are photos (96%) and maps (79%), and the most uncommon the 360 (4% – only in museums apps), games (6%), and video (15%).

Motion estimation is one key point in MPEG VideoCoding allowing the use of desired bitrates in video compression. To obtain a good tradeoff between compression ratio and quality, we need more than just the reduction of the spatial redundancy in the images: the use of techniques to exploit the temporal redundancy existing in image sequences. One of such techniques is the block matching motion estimation algorithm. In this paper different search algorithms are briefly described and compared regarding matching criteria, computational complexity and search window size. Results obtained show that, depending of the type of image, there are algorithms much simpler than the full search algorithm. First results favor the adoption of algorithms designated OSA, LAS and CSA.