Report from the international online workshop “Evaluating Difficult Heritage XR”, 24 June 2026 by Kavi Othman Ali (Cultural Heritage Organization, Sulaimani, Iraqi Kurdistan.)
Workshop flyer, June 2026
What Happened?
On June 24th, 50 heritage and XR professionals (including museum professionals, digital heritage experts, XR developers and designers, cultural practitioners, organisation leaders, and researchers) from 34 different countries across 5 continents gathered for an online discussion about the evaluation of XR technologies in difficult heritage contexts.
Organised by Professor Maria Economou (co-lead of CREATe’s Digital Technologies & Humanism theme at the University of Glasgow) and her team, the workshop was co-organised with the Cultural Heritage Organization in Sulaimani, Iraqi Kurdistan, with support from CREATe and the Digital Cultural Heritage Arts Lab of the University of Glasgow.
Online workshop participants’ profile
XR holds immense potential for engaging with difficult events of the past in an ever more present manner. Yet significant questions remain regarding its efficacy and ethical application: Can immersive experiences deepen understanding without causing harm? How do we centre community voices rather than extracting them? And what does genuine impact look like?
The overwhelming response to the workshop—with over 100 people on the waiting list—underscores the urgent, global demand for frameworks and conversation around ethical evaluation of difficult heritage XR.
The workshop’s main aim was not to prove concrete answers, but rather to begin to weave these questions apart and bring different perspectives on the present challenges and approaches to solving them. To do this, 8 international speakers presented case studies of XR projects engaging difficult heritage, some of which are using the EMOTIVE framework to assess emotional engagement of participants. This was followed by a robust roundtable discussion where participants raised their own ethical challenges and barriers. Over 20 participants stayed an additional 20 minutes, demonstrating how urgent and compelling this work is.
Download the full programme, speaker biographies and abstracts here.
Evaluating Emotional Engagement by Maria Economou (University of Glasgow)
Does XR really work? How do we know that we are not turning trauma into spectacle?
The workshop was kicked off by Maria giving a brief summary of the EC-funded EMOTIVE project and its evaluation framework. She described two prototype EMOTIVE experiences designed for The Hunterian’s Roman Scotland display, Ebutius’s Dilemma and Views on Verecunda’s Life, and how these informed the framework’s development. Essential to both the design and evaluation framework of EMOTIVE are three key pillars:
- User-centred design
- Community co-design
- Measuring emotional engagement alongside learning
Maria then described a key project in which the EMOTIVE framework was adapted to fit a vastly different context with heavy emotional aspects: the evaluation of the Nobody’s Listening VR based at the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. This VR experience tries to show the life of a Yazidi man, a Yazidi woman, and an ISIS fighter after ISIS committed mass genocide against the Yazidis in August 2014.
Evaluation findings from Nobody’s Listening VR, Iraqi Kurdistan (Image courtesy of Maria Economou, University of Glasgow)
She then summarised the quantitative findings from the evaluation of Nobody’s Listening VR (published in Heritage) and on the basis of these findings, proposed a four-principle framework for justice-led, trauma-informed immersive heritage:
- Co-creation and consent
- Trauma-informed design
- Situated storytelling
- Action pathways and accountability
She closed her talk by emphasizing a critical gap: the need to understand how immersive experiences can bridge the gap from empathy to concrete advocacy and accountability—not just emotional response, but measurable action.
The workshop then continued with 7 other speakers, each with a different XR experience in different contexts and communities, some of which have adapted the EMOTIVE framework.
A participant asked: “You said people linked the Yazidi trauma to their own experiences, but how are you handling that huge responsibility of psychosocial association?”
Nobody’s Listening (Iraqi Kurdistan) by Rozhen Kamal Mohammed-Amin (Kurdistan Institution for Strategic Studies & Scientific Research; Cultural Heritage Organization, Sulaimani) and Kavi Othman Ali (Cultural Heritage Organization, Sulaimani)
Working on the ground!
Rozhen spoke from the perspective of the on-the-ground implementation of the Nobody’s Listening VR evaluation across Kurdistan and Iraq. She explained why the EMOTIVE framework was the right fit for the local context, while also acknowledging the particular risks it needed to address: re-traumatization of participants, potential politicization of the evaluation, and linguistic and cultural accessibility.
A key contribution from Rozhen was describing the intensive pre-evaluation testing process, which revealed that participants’ most immediate and embodied reflections emerged right after the experience.
Data collection from 127 non-Yazidi participants across five sites in Iraqi Kurdistan (Image courtesy of Rozhen Mohammed-Amin and Kavi Ali, Cultural Heritage Organization, Sulaimani)
This led the team to reorder the data collection sequence — conducting interviews first and deferring self-completion questionnaires afterward — so that the richest, most authentic responses could be captured before they faded. She also described training team members to standardize procedures across sites and ensure trauma-informed practices were consistently applied. She linked the rigour of the evaluation directly to increased project visibility and follow-on opportunities, both local and global.
Kavi focused specifically on the methodological adaptations made to the EMOTIVE framework to make it appropriate for the conflict-sensitive context of Iraqi Kurdistan. She emphasized three key adaptations:
- Redesigning the consent process by making it multilingual (Kurdish, Arabic, and English), trauma-sensitive, and written in simplified language to maximise both accessibility and ethical clarity for participants.
- The implementation of a pre-experience demographic survey designed to capture a conflict-sensitive baseline before the VR experience rather than after, to avoid the experience influencing how people recalled or framed their backgrounds.
- Reframing the evaluation’s outcome measures away from conventional museum-focused emotional engagement metrics and toward empathy, moral reflection, justice orientation, and intended action.
A participant asked: “How does the framework hold when the audience itself contains descendants of both the perpetrator and the victim of the same colonial history?”
Eyes of History XR project (Catalonia) by Albert Sierra Reguera (Catalan Cultural Heritage Agency)
Students experiencing the Eyes of History VR room in their school, Catalonia (Image courtesy of Albert Sierra Reguera, Catalan Cultural Heritage Agency)
Albert brought a decade-plus of immersive heritage work at the Catalan Cultural Heritage Agency to the session and presented the Eyes of History (Ulls de la Història) programme, a large-scale initiative delivering shared VR room experiences across multiple heritage sites and schools in Catalonia. The programme installs one new shared VR room, accommodating up to 12 simultaneous users, approximately every six months, with plans to expand from six to twelve sites over the next 2.5 years. In its first school year it reached around 5,000 students, with projections of approximately 10,000 the following year.
He then presented the Miravet Castle case as an example of how the programme handles difficult and politically sensitive local histories. The experience reframes the site’s past to centre underrepresented groups, following Said, a Muslim farmer’s son, through a dramatised VR narrative. The content was developed by a team of scriptwriters in consultation with experts on the history of the castle and the social context of the period. Members of the Muslim community were also consulted, and the project received positive feedback during a number of community screenings prior to the official launch of the experience. Teachers’ feedback following school deployments has been strong. Albert noted that the political sensitivity of the subject matter has prompted the team to consider commissioning a dedicated EMOTIVE framework evaluation to properly assess the experience’s impact on students from diverse social backgrounds.
A participant asked: “What methods were used to develop the scripts with Muslim communities in the Miravet castle experience? Did you use participative design methods in this process?”
Block 15: a German Occupation concentration camp (Greece) by Agiatis Benardou (DARIAH-ERIC)
Can difficult heritage be reinterpreted through gamification methods?
Agiatis presented a 2020–2024 project using immersive technologies and gamification methods to reconstruct Block 15 at the Haidari concentration camp, which is a WWII-era site that remains inaccessible to the public, located within an active army camp and largely absent from Greek public memory. The project drew on extensive archival research across German and Greek archives, a single COVID-limited site visit, interactive storytelling, and 3D asset modelling to produce a ten-scene VR experience grounded in real testimonies and objects.
The Haidari Block 15 VR reconstruction and the prehistoric settlement of Dhaskalio in Keros: “What Does It Mean, and What Does It Take to Reconstruct a Site You Can Never Truly Visit?” (Image courtesy of Agiatis Benardou, DARIAH-ERIC)
The heart of her presentation was the ethical and narrative design choices the team wrestled with: whose point of view to adopt, which timeframe to depict, and how to represent violence responsibly. The team ultimately settled on a 24-hour prisoner-centred narrative set on 9–10 August 1944, structured around interactive storytelling including real testimonies to balance historical immersion with ethical restraint. She also shared findings from demographic testing, which revealed that teenagers respond differently to violent content in VR than older visitors, as they find it less emotionally affecting, while older participants found it harder to bear. The experience was set with a minimum recommended age of 12.
A participant asked: “How do you approach the risk of trivialising such difficult history by using gamification techniques?”
Corfu Prisons (Greece) by Georgios Papaioannou (Ionian University, Corfu)
The Corfu Prisons site: a functioning correctional institution largely inaccessible to the public (Image courtesy of Georgios Papaioannou, Ionian University)
How do you navigate around giving meaningful public access to a site that remains an active and operational correctional institution? Georgios presented the Corfu Prisons documentation and interpretation project, which addresses this challenge. Following 2017 policy changes that opened the prison’s disciplinary cells for memorialisation, the project undertook a long-term digital documentation programme using photography, laser scanning, photogrammetry, and 3D techniques to build a comprehensive digital archive of the site.
VR was employed as the primary means of providing remote educational and memorial access and allowing audiences to engage with a space they cannot physically visit. The project pairs this digital access with managed in-person options: formal applications and coordinated guided visits through the Museology Research Laboratory for those who wish to attend in person.
Georgios noted that while the exhibition is technically complete, it has not yet been formally inaugurated, as discussions about the terms and format of public presentation are still ongoing.
A participant asked: “How does the feedback from those who experience these projects shape what future XR experiences should look like?”
IMPULSE VR (Poland) by Dimitris Charitos (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens) and Martin Gordon (Film University Babelsberg)
Dimitris introduced the Impulse project, framing it as a forward-looking tool for the field. The project, based at the National Kapodistrian University of Athens, developed a custom multi-user Impulse VR platform designed to support the co-creative reuse or “upcycling” of digitised cultural heritage assets. The platform is intended to facilitate artistic experimentation and the development of educational content by enabling multiple users to collaborate simultaneously within a shared virtual environment.
Martin then went on to answer the difficult question of “What do you do when you want to tell an important historical story, but have almost no evidence left?” Martin and his team tackled this challenge with colleagues from Jagellonian University in two WWII Polish projects. The first centres on a laundry facility on the outskirts of Auschwitz, an ordinary-looking building in a residential neighbourhood, where locals helped prisoners pass messages to the outside world. The second project takes place in a single university room at Jagellonian University where, in 1939, an entire faculty was lured and arrested. Using photogrammetry, drone footage, and 3D reconstruction, the team built immersive first-person walkthroughs of both sites.
Top: the Auschwitz laundry facility, an ordinary-looking building where locals helped prisoners pass messages; Bottom: VR reconstruction of Room 56, Jagellonian University, where an entire faculty was arrested in 1939 (Image courtesy of Martin Gordon, Film University Babelsberg)
For one project, they even designed a “digital detective” workshop where participants entered a space cold and tried to piece together what happened from hidden digital clues alone. They have also been carefully mapping out which uses of generative AI cross ethical lines as not all historical reconstruction is created equal.
A participant asked: “In post-disaster heritage contexts, what evaluation methods would you recommend for measuring the long-term impact of XR experiences on local communities rather than only immediate visitor responses?”
Flipping Difficult Heritage Questions with XR (Australia) by Erik Champion (Adelaide University)
Students working with school children to co-design a heritage game at Adelaide Gaol — Erik Champion’s finding: designing the experience taught both groups more than playing it (Image courtesy of Erik Champion, Adelaide University)
Erik argued that we have spent decades perfecting photorealism and solo VR experiences, and suggested that we may have been solving the wrong problem. His talk made the case that the most meaningful moments in heritage engagement don’t happen inside the technology, but rather around it; in the conversations people have with each other that no platform ever captures.
Drawing on real barriers facing heritage sites, such as unstable Wi-Fi, tight budgets, and guides who don’t want to be replaced by an app to name a few, he co-created with his team, open-ended XR experiences where communities help build the story, not just consume it. His most striking finding was that people consistently learn more from designing these experiences than from playing through them.
A participant asked: “Is there a reason most people have preferred VR over AR?”
Nicosia Airport (Cyprus) by Georgios Artopoulos (The Cyprus Institute)
There’s a bombed airport in Cyprus that’s been sitting in a UN buffer zone since 1974. Inaccessible, frozen in time, and full of living memory. Georgios and his team at the Cyprus Institute got rare permission to go in with laser scanners and drones, and turned what they found into a virtual environment with a twist: they built it deliberately incomplete.
The idea was to treat the 3D model as an open invitation rather than a finished statement, letting museum visitors, eyewitnesses, and experts gradually fill in the gaps. They did this through live booth interactions and a rotary phone.
Nicosia International Airport virtual reconstruction: before and after community contributions (Images courtesy of Georgios Artopoulos and Colter Wehmeier, The Cyprus Institute)
Two years and thousands of visitors later, the results were striking. Counterintuitively, 71% of participants — those with the strongest personal memories of the airport — said higher fidelity would not improve their experience. They described the incomplete visuals as “emotionally safer”, allowing them to revisit painful memories without being confronted by the trauma of 1974 or the site’s current state of ruin. Yet when asked to rank next steps, these same visitors placed model refinements highest and community contributions lowest, suggesting that people don’t want institutional expertise replaced by participation, but made accountable to their lived experience. Incompleteness in XR, Georgios showed us, can be a deliberate and ethically generative design choice, not a technical shortcoming.
A participant asked: “Audio can change the feelings people experience in XR, causing unreliable results – how do you choose the correct audio for difficult heritage?”
Participant Engagement and Roundtable Discussion
From the start, participants were encouraged to ask questions and voice their challenges in relation to their respective XR projects for the speakers. Some questions were answered in the chat and others were shared on a shared whiteboard.
Not all questions were answered and not all experiences were shared, but some very interesting themes emerged from the discussions, and that was the purpose of this workshop; to get the conversation started.
Key themes and questions that emerged
- Handling the responsibility of psychosocial association and projection
- Managing the risks of using gamification techniques
- Preserving knowledge while straddling the line between appropriation and experience
- Adaptation of the framework in conflicted and multi-perspective contexts
- Featuring accessibility in design and implementation
- The effect of sound design on user experience and engagement of difficult heritage XR
- Balancing the needs of commercial partners and the truth of the community
- Importance and difficulty of measuring long-term effects on visitors/users
And many more…
While the official allotted time for the discussion was only 25 minutes, many participants stayed an extra 20 minutes, which highlights the value of such group discussions and the urgency of the topics discussed.
Conclusion
Both the experiences of the speakers and the questions of the participants revealed three key facts:
- The role of XR in difficult heritage is growing
- The possibilities are vast
- The challenges are shared
We need more discussion surrounding the difficult questions of ethical design, practical implementation and responsible evaluation methodologies in difficult heritage.
Future plans include potentially repeating the workshop for at least some of the other 100 keen participants on the waitlist, conducting more in-depth discussion with smaller focus groups, and developing resources to support practitioners working in this space. If the response to this first workshop is anything to go by, this is a conversation that will run and run.
In the meantime, the full programme, speaker biographies and abstracts are available to download here.
Organiser’s note: This workshop would not have been possible without the dedicated support of Makennah Bristow (Research Assistant, University of Glasgow), whose hard work before and during the event was invaluable. I am also grateful to Dr Rozhen Mohammed-Amin and Kavi Ali, who played a central role in co-organising the workshop alongside their contributions as speakers, and to the University of Glasgow’s Research Impact team for their advice and support throughout — from survey design and brainstorming to the workshop flyer. I am grateful to Weiwei Yi for the video editing and to Phalguni Mahapatra for the blog preparation and social media promotion. My warmest thanks go to all nine speakers, who gave their time and expertise so generously, and to all the participants, whose questions, challenges and enthusiasm made the roundtable discussion as rich and compelling as the presentations themselves.
– Maria Economou