ADAPTECH

Cultural heritage is one of the pillars of European identity—with over 60,000 museums and 87% of Europeans considering it important to Europe and its identity—but participation remains uneven: more than one-third of Europeans do not visit a museum or historical site in a year. Meanwhile, GenAI, extended reality (XR), and digital twins remain largely isolated, single-institution experiments, lacking a comparable evidence base across different sites and clear ethical governance regarding the AI-generated creation of cultural content. ADAPTECH responds with a unique framework that integrates XR, GenAI, and digital twins into an architecture designed from the outset to be ethical and verifiable.

Objectives

• To understand museum audiences and adaptation strategies in the context of GenAI: types of multicultural audiences, perception profiles, curatorial ethics, and accessibility, with comparative research in Italian, Greek, and Spanish contexts
• Define an end-to-end technological framework that integrates XR environments, GenAI narrative pipelines, and Digital Twin analysis into an “ethics-by-design” architecture, with open-source components and explainable interfaces for both visitors and curators
• Develop the first validated Digital Twin methodology for analyzing visitor behavior—movement trajectories, dwell times, interactions—correlated with narrative adaptation interventions, featuring low-cost, privacy-conscious implementations
• Validate the entire framework in at least 4 pilot museums across 3 European countries, using pre-registered evaluation protocols and comparable visitor cohorts