3D Tune-In brings together relevant stakeholders: the SME digital games industry (Reactify, Vianet, XTeam and Nerlaska); academic institutes (Imperial College London, De Montfort University, University of Nottingham, University of Malaga); a large European hearing aid manufacturer (GN); and hearing communities (Associations - Extra Care, Hearing Link, Action Deafness, Accesibilidad y Personas Sordas and Ente Nazionale Sordi); to produce digital games applied to hearing aids, addressing social inclusion, generating new markets and creating job opportunities. With Europe’s ageing population the demand for assistive hearing devices is likely to rapidly increase. While the technology has dramatically advanced in the last 25 years since the commercialization of the first digital hearing aid, the new functions are often unexploited or inaccessible, particularly for children and older adults. Producers of hearing aid devices find that individuals prefer to use simpler less flexible devices even though functionality offered by miniaturised digital devices can considerably improve hearing in different acoustic environments (e.g. classroom, office, restaurant, street) leading to greater confidence, improved social interaction and more significantly inclusion back into society. 3D Tune-In aims to exploit existing, overlooked or neglected hearing aid functionalities to greatly improve people’s quality of life and their interactions with other people and their surrounding environment. This will be achieved through creating the novel 3D Tune-In toolkit based on participatory design methods and advances in 3D visual, audio and haptic technologies; to enable SMEs in digital games to generate a set of non-leisure game applications employing gamification techniques for supporting hearing impairment. The technology transfer between these scientific, technological and industrial communities will enable the game industry to expand into assistive technologies and support active ageing and healthy living.

Pluggable Social Platform for Heritage Awareness and Participation (PLUGGY) will support citizens in shaping cultural heritage and being shaped by it. PLUGGY will enable them to share their local knowledge and everyday experience with others. The participation will include the contribution of cultural institutions and digital libraries, building extensive networks around a common interest in connecting past, present and future. PLUGGY frames its objectives around the Faro Convention, in line with new social paradigms which declare heritage as an asset and a responsibility for all, aiming to encompass greater democratic participative actions with concern for the local and the everyday. The PLUGGY Social Platform will facilitate a continuing process for creating, modifying and safeguarding heritage where citizens will be prosumers and maintainers of cultural activities. It will be web based, easily accessed and will allow the development of shared identity and differentiation. PLUGGY Social Platform’s users will curate stories using the PLUGGY Curatorial Tool. Content will be both crowdsourced and retrieved from digital collections, allowing users to create links between seemingly unrelated facts, events, people and digitized collections, leading to new approaches of presenting cultural resources, and new ways of experiencing them. PLUGGY will provide the necessary architecture for the creation of pluggable applications, allowing for beyond-the-project, not yet imagined ways to utilize the content on the social platform, while focusing on the design of the social interaction, helping to build new virtual heritage communities. The PLUGGY consortium spans 5 countries and includes 4 academic partners (ICCS, TUK, UMA, ICL), a total of 10 museums (PIOP, ESM) and 3 SMEs (CLIO, VIA, XTS) in the fields of cultural heritage and creative applications. They cover the areas of cultural heritage, social platforms, authoring tools, VR/AR, knowledge management, semantics and 3D audio.