New Media Students at the Open Culture VR-Hackathon

Next weekend (May 16-17, 2020) the VR hackathon of the initiative “Open Culture BW meets VR” of MFG Baden-Württemberg will take place completely online. Here, the participants, including 10 students of New Media as well as Prof. Mario Doulis and lecturer Jörg Frohnmayer will develop novel VR and AR applications based on open culture data.

Unpublished photographs, sound recordings of contemporary witnesses, historical maps, travelogues, 3D scans and digitized copies of valuable manuscripts – museums, libraries and archives often hold treasures of cultural data.

But how can these treasures be raised and shown to the public? It is not easy for cultural institutions that want to open up their digital collections – also because the developers of digital formats move in different worlds. With the initiative “Open Culture BW meets VR”, MFG Baden-Württemberg supports cultural institutions in the southwest in using their cultural data in an innovative way and brings them together with students of media technology studies.

Cooperation with the Open Culture Initiative is also an integral part of the curriculum: In the semester project by New Media Professor Mario Doulis, students deal with the question of how digital (isated) data can be prepared and made publicly accessible as interactive installations or virtual spaces.

The ideas developed during the hackathon weekend will be further developed over the summer semester and the results presented to the public in October 2020.