One of the preconditions for genuine sustainability is a heritage that is present anywhere and anytime in everyday life. We present PLUGGY, a Pluggable Social Platform for Heritage Awareness and Participation. PLUGGY will address the need of society to be actively involved in cultural heritage activities, not only as an observer but also as a creator and a major influencing factor. With PLUGGY, we aim to bridge this gap by providing the tools needed to allow users to share their local knowledge and everyday experience with others, together with the contribution of cultural institutions. Users will be able to build extensive networks around a common area of interest, connecting the past, the present and the future. It will be powered by its users and puts people’s values, aspirations and needs first. Users of PLUGGY will be the providers of information about cultural heritage in the everyday and ordinary, real life. Through its social platform and by using its innovative curation tools, designed to solely focus on a niche area in social media, citizens will be able to act as skilled storytellers by creating fascinating personalised stories and share them through social networking with friends, associates and professionals. In this paper, we describe a structured formative and summative evaluative approach of PLUGGY’s core concepts, which results will be used to inform and improve its design.

Advanced three-dimensional extended reality (XR) technologies are highly suitable for cultural heritage research and education. XR tools enable the creation of realistic virtual or augmented reality applications for curating and disseminating information about cultural artifacts and sites. Developing XR applications for cultural heritage requires interdisciplinary collaboration involving strong teamwork and soft skills to manage user requirements, system specifications, and design cycles. Given the diverse end-users, achieving high precision, accuracy, and efficiency in information management and user experience is crucial. Human–computer interaction (HCI) design and evaluation methods are essential for ensuring usability and return on investment. This article presents ten case studies of cultural heritage software projects, illustrating the interdisciplinary work between computer science and HCI design. Students from institutions such as the State University of New York (USA), Glasgow School of Art (UK), University of Granada (Spain), University of Málaga (Spain), Duy Tan University (Vietnam), Imperial College London (UK), Research University Institute of Communication & Computer Systems (Greece), Technical University of Košice (Slovakia), and Indiana University (USA) contributed to creating, assessing, and improving the usability of these diverse cultural heritage applications. The results include a structured typology of CH XR application scenarios, detailed insights into design and evaluation practices across ten international use cases, and a development framework that supports interdisciplinary collaboration and stakeholder integration in phygital cultural heritage projects.

Spatial release from masking (SRM) in speech-on-speech tasks has been widely studied in the horizontal plane, where interaural cues play a fundamental role. Several studies have also observed SRM for sources located in the median plane, where (monaural) spectral cues are more important. However, a relatively unexplored research question concerns the impact of head-related transfer function (HRTF) personalisation on SRM, for example, whether using individually-measured HRTFs results in better performance if compared with the use of mannequin HRTFs. This study compares SRM in the median plane in a speech-on-speech virtual task rendered using both individual and mannequin HRTFs. SRM is obtained using English sentences with non-native English speakers. Our participants show lower SRM performances compared to those found by others using native English participants. Furthermore, SRM is significantly larger when the source is spatialised using the individual HRTF, and this effect is more marked for those with lower English proficiency. Further analyses using a spectral distortion metric and the estimation of the better-ear effect, show that the observed SRM can only partially be explained by HRTF-specific factors and that the effect of the familiarity with individual spatial cues is likely to be the most significant element driving these results.

Virtual trackball techniques are widely used when 3D interaction is performed through interfaces with a reduced number of degrees of freedom such as mice and touchscreens. For decades, most implementations fix a vertical axis of rotation, which is a suitable choice when the vertical axis should indeed be fixed, according to some mental model of the user. We conducted an experiment involving the use of a mouse and a touch device to study usability in terms of performance, perceived usability and mental workload when selecting different fixed axes in accordance with the user’s mental model. The results we obtained indicate that the consistency between the axis fixed by the technique and the object’s intrinsic axis has a positive effect on usability. We believe that implementations that allow to select different fixed axis for each specific object should be considered when designing future reduced-DoF interaction interfaces.

La enseñanza universitaria en el ámbito de la Ingeniería ha estado tradicionalmente orientada al trabajo individual del alumno, lo cual dificulta la adquisición de una de las aptitudes más valoradas en el mercado laboral, como es la competencia de trabajo en grupo. Este trabajo tiene como objetivo fomentar una componente de esta competencia, como es la interacción entre los estudiantes. Para ello se han diseñado y puesto en práctica una serie de actividades docentes en la asignatura “Microcontroladores“, asignatura de 2º curso común a los estudios de Grado en Ingeniería de Sistemas Electrónicos, Sistemas de Telecomunicación, Telemática, Tecnologías de Telecomunicación, y Sonido e Imagen, en la Universidad de Málaga. Asimismo, se ha establecido un conjunto de indicadores que permiten evaluar el grado de consecución de la meta planteada. Los resultados han puesto de manifiesto que la interacción entre los estudiantes se puede fomentar mediante el conjunto de acciones planificadas, aunque las mismas requieren un esfuerzo adicional por parte del profesorado. Finalmente, se han propuesto algunas mejoras en el diseño del procedimiento, para mejorar su eficacia. Este trabajo se enmarca en el proyecto ACAI, cuyo objetivo es implementar un diseño curricular para el desarrollo de la competencia de Trabajo en Grupo. Así, se propone continuar la experiencia aquí presentada fomentando, para los mismos estudiantes, otras componentes de la competencia en asignaturas de 3º y 4º de los grados mencionados.