Furiose Interazioni
- Year: 2023
- In collaboration with: Fondazione TICHE – Cluster Nazionale delle Tecnologie per il Patrimonio Culturale, Comune di Reggio Emilia – Musei Civici, Reggio Children, Scuole Nidi d’Infanzia – Istituzione del Comune di Reggio Emilia, Università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa - Centro di Ricerca Scienza Nuova.
Project
An interactive journey into the imaginary universe of the poem Orlando Furioso.
Technology demonstrator co-financed by TICHE Foundation.
Furiose Interazioni is a TICHE technological demonstrator resulting from a long interdisciplinary collaborative process of creativity and experimentation between traditional humanities disciplines and modern technologies. RE:LAB has dealt with technology development and user experience design as a partner in Tiche.
Inspired by a combination of ideas by scholars from different fields and part of various innovation projects for the digitalization of the Italian cultural heritage, F.I. aims to realize a digital atelier for developing technological solutions around Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and its imaginative universe.
The digital technologies, designed to amplify learning processes, are developed through a double path inside the Mauriziano villa, the noble country villa where Ariosto spent part of his youth, as he says in the Satira IV.
The first path, designed for a target-specific audience of preschool up to secondary school students, is focused on the Orlando Furioso, reinterpreted in the context of the villa (i.e.,“Furiose Interazioni path”). This is divided into three stations that focus on the crucial themes of Orlando Furioso in innovative interactive ways: from chivalry to magic, and from travel to the relation between reason and madness.
The second one, designed for the adult public, aims to open to everyone the spaces of the building, concerning the stately apartments’ frescoed rooms, which are currently not accessible to people with disabilities (i.e., “Stanze dell’Ariosto path”).
In conclusion, the idea for Furious Interactions arose from a desire to use technology to re-actualize Orlando Furioso’s dimensions of play and knowledge and introduce children and teenagers to the work of one of Reggio Emilia’s most illustrious citizens of all times, with collaboration between a scientific committee made up of some of the most important Ariosto scholars, the TICHE Foundation (National Cluster of Technologies for Cultural Heritage), and the technological partner RE:LAB.
Reggio Emilia’s Civic Museums, the Istituzione of Preschools and Infant-toddler Centres of the Municipality of Reggio Emilia, and Reggio Children participated in this project by contributing their educational experience, which sees the hybridization of languages as one of the most effective approaches towards knowledge.
The technologies
The Furiose Interazioni path:
The Daring Feats which introduces and initiates the route through the game of the goose. This stage features four symbolic objects, representative of the heroic deeds of the paladins: sword, ring, horn, and horse. Custom-made 3D printed by designers, these objects are equipped with sensors (NFC tags) detected by a dedicated platform. The combination of a single object results in a three-dimensional holographic animation of the object itself, while the combination of two objects enables the viewing of a two-dimensional video animation of one of the most emblematic scenes from Orlando Furioso. Originally conceived in an engineering context, this technology has transcended its initial boundaries thanks to the
unconventional work of RE:LAB’s technical team, which has integrated the visual narratives of Orlando’s stories by adapting them to the combination of these objects.
The Book of Spells features a sizable interactive touch table, which reproduces the animation of an ancient book in which the individual presentations of the paladins are collected. Users can immerse themselves in the characters, experiencing a key literary contrivance through facial recognition in the ancient portrait of the poem’s key heroes while listening to their stories.
The Journey to the Moon faces the challenge of providing two different solutions for the same narrative. On the one hand, the chariot and, on the other, the hippogriff, built through a collaboration between design and carpentry. The chariot, like a small immersive movie theater,
welcomes young children with a double screen, front and back, to increase immersiveness. A synchronized programmed video presents scenes in which Orlando goes mad and Astolfo searches for his wits on the moon, riding the hippogriff. To make the experience interactive, four objects (hourglass, dice, anchor, cruet) were designed and printed in the form of four buttons, each symbolically narrating various meanings. The same narrative of the trip to the moon for older participants can be experienced through an Oculus Quest 2, sitting astride the hippogriff, in a
virtual reality experience. The animation was created through close collaboration between Furious Interactions scriptwriters, members of the scientific committee, and RE:LAB’s technical team.
The path of the Stanze dell’Ariosto begins with “The Arioscope” a kind of palm reading in which the fates of Love, Fortune, and Future are declared by a technological system activated through vocal, tactile, and visual interaction. Special phrases from the poem have been selected, recalling the play of human destiny. It continues with the virtual reality storytelling experience of the newly restored rooms, separated from the rest of the building by a narrow staircase: a combination of cinematic VR storytelling and three-dimensional exploratory space. In this guided tour, the user is immersed in the spaces, free to move around, while being guided by a narrative voice. The last station features a large multitouch screen, a ‘video wall’, designed for easy, immediate, and inclusive access. It serves as a platform for gathering video content related to studies, conferences, and projects about Ariosto. Currently, there are five thematic areas with around twenty short video clips, accessible through a user-friendly carousel interface suitable for both individual and group experiences.
During their journey and taking the metaphor dear to Ludovico Ariosto’s heart of a story as a “great canvas” that weaves together characters and events, children and adults encounter the places, protagonists, and adventures of the poem in constantly changing ways, moving between different content, and accompanied by Ariosto’s narrative voice.
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