The MuseIT EU project aims to co-design, develop, and co-evaluate a multisensory, user-centred platform for enriched and inclusive engagement with cultural assets. It follows equal opportunity for all as its core principle. There is a market niche for an improved understanding of disability and diversity of needs to facilitate and broaden accessibility when developing technological systems for the digital transformation of the cultural heritage museums. 

MuseIT explores these needs in close contact with people with disabilities in co-design and co-research processes. The project focuses on the development of digital technologies to represent cultural heritage artefacts in multiple modalities by focusing on detecting semantic content about cultural heritage objects and translating their semantic content to knowledge graphs that are further used to create multisensory representations of them. 

These developments include the idea of a haptogram vocabulary with static vs. dynamic patterns carrying word vs. sentence meaning mapped to the body. One version of the vocabulary rethinks patterns from Social Haptic Communication (SHC), employed in co-design with users by our tool called HaptoDesigner. The other version automatically converts a high number of precomputed word embeddings to haptic signals for the Unitouch pattern design studio. While holding the promise to translate cultural heritage objects to the tactile domain, work in progress is also exploring conceptual vs. technological bottlenecks to enable their presentation in the context of a virtual museum.

MuseIT also explores the options of cultural objects in other modes, e.g. converting an image to sound, presenting 3D tactile representations and including these possibilities into virtual inclusive museum exhibitions.