Virtual Reality of Medieval Culture: Collaborative Network for Cultural-Feed Virtual Heritage (CfVH) platforms of medieval Cairo

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Theme: "The Digital World: Opportunities and Challenges". Iconic heritage is globally threatened by terror, climate change, rampant commercialisation, and overexploitation by tourism; and in the case of Egypt, significant disinvestment. Lack of responsible planning, maintenance and preservation strategies have equally caused unmitigated dereliction and irreversible damage to many heritage sites and cultural traditions in the medieval city in Cairo. Instability across the MENA region has prompted calls for the protection of culture and archaeological heritage as a political, economic and global challenge. With the increasing rate of destruction of heritage sites, digital preservation of historic artefacts and cultural heritage has arisen as an international priority. With tourism industry contributing 11% to Egypt's GDP and Non-governmental organisations, charity foundations and private sector enterprises are dramatically growing, technical and community support to this industry has become at the forefront of sustainable economy and social welfare of local populations. Yet, there are strategies, practices, skills and technologies that can protect, develop and sustain these places, in other forms of reproduction; such as digital modelling, immersive virtual and augmented reality, and cinematography and Audio-visual archives. Digitisation of heritage through customs, photo archives, film footage, oral history documentaries has become central for the preservation of national identity and effective tool in strategies of undermining radical ideologies in marginalised communities. The use of online platforms, virtual exhibitions and digitization of heritage is ever increasing and the virtual reality models of historic sites are becoming a main tool to engage with distant and remote heritage locations, yet stretch audience outreach and contribute to online income generating activities. Virtual environments which embed cultural heritage through digital media are often categorized as 'virtual heritage'. Such new media and technology platforms offer the possibility to experience virtually reconstructed historic sites or heritage sites as visitors, travellers or even as a resident. The proposed Cultural-feed Virtual Heritage CfVH collaborative network will develop projects, forums of exchange and activities that focus on undertaking creative and practice-led research on Imaging Cultural heritage in virtual environments. It will support young researchers, entrepreneurs to engage with innovative technological industry and inform policy makers and online tourism on the advantages and reward of engaging with digital platforms of virtual heritage. This project aims to help participants, academic and none-academic, to take part in the development, design and planning of virtual heritage platforms using latest technology (CAVE & Virtual HoloDeck) and develop practice-led workshops. Young professionals and graduates will acquire creative and technical skills that support self-development as entrepreneurs and offer venues for networking with UK-based experts and researchers. The collaboration is designed to train a catalyst group of 30-40 Egyptians to acquire, learn, practice and promote the digital production of Virtual heritage and support their future research projects of cultural and archaeological heritage, both in Egypt and in the UK. Participants will be trained for an average of 60-80 hours on research, production and business planning to help develop private enterprises and engage with local communities and school children. The collaborative network anticipates supporting 4-6 start-ups and research projects in the two years following its conclusion and will initiate graduate courses in Heritage Digitisation at Egyptian Universities and at the University of Wolverhampton with prospected 60-80 graduates over 5 years.