From Heritage to Market: How Mixed Reality Is Creating New Business Opportunities in Cultural Heritage

For most of the last century, a museum visit followed the same fixed shape

everywhere in the world. You walked past glass cases at the pace the exhibition set

for you, read a text panel, and left with a postcard as the only thing that came home

with you. That model held up for decades because nothing else was competing for

people's attention in the same way. It is not holding up anymore, and I think the

institutions that treat that as a threat instead of an opening are going to spend the

next decade losing ground to the ones that do not.

In a studio in Nicosia, a dancer puts on a headset and a pair of haptic gloves and

steps into the Syrtos, a traditional Cypriot dance. She feels the rhythm land in her

palms before her feet catch up, and a specific scent drifts in, tied to the memory of

the dance itself rather than to the room she is standing in. There is no glass case, no

rope, no photograph fading behind it. There is only the dance, rebuilt from motion

capture data, ready to travel anywhere there is a headset.

We built that experience under the ELLIE project, using Meta Quest headsets,

bHaptics gloves, and a scent synthesiser, to preserve three traditional Cypriot

dances, Syrtos, Kouza, and the Scythe dance. It works, and I am proud of the

engineering behind it. But I did not get into this to build a demo. A single pair of the

haptic gloves we use costs around five thousand euros, and if that is where the story

stopped, this would be a showcase for people who already have money, not a tool

for the institutions that actually need one. That is the part most companies in this

space leave out of the pitch, and it is the part I care about most.

At Ascanio, we lead the Business Opportunities and Exploitation workstream across

the entire ELLIE consortium, not only our own demonstrator, because I think the

biggest failure mode in cultural technology is not bad engineering, it is engineering

that never becomes a business. Europe does not have a shortage of clever heritage

prototypes sitting in academic reports. It has a shortage of ones that survive past the

grant that paid for them. Closing that gap is the actual work.

I know there are people in this sector who believe the physical object is the whole

point, and that anything virtual is a compromise at best. I respect that view more than

most technology companies are willing to admit, because it comes from people who

have spent their careers protecting something real. My answer is not that mixed

reality replaces the object or the room. It is that it reaches the people who were

never going to get on a plane to see either one, the diaspora communities, the

schools, the audiences who engage with culture digitally before they ever engage

with it in person. That is not a smaller mission than preservation. It is preservation for

an audience the physical building was never built to reach.

Museums do not run on software budgets. Most cultural institutions across Europe

operate on tight public funding, seasonal visitor income, and zero appetite for

anything that needs its own IT department. So the question I ask about every ELLIE

demonstrator, including our own, is not what does this look like, it is who is going to

pay for it once we are not the ones writing the cheque. For the dance studio, that

buyer might not be a museum at all. It might be a diaspora association abroad, a

tourism board that wants something more memorable than a brochure, or a cultural

ministry funding preservation directly. Different buyers, different price points, different

proof required before anyone commits.

The pandemic reset what audiences expect, permanently. Hybrid access is not a

novelty anymore, it is a baseline expectation, especially for younger visitors who

expect to interact with heritage rather than observe it from behind glass. That shift is

real, and it is the opportunity. But I built my career on not confusing enthusiasm with

evidence. What earns an institution's investment is data: how long people stay inside

an experience, whether they return, whether the experience reaches people who

never would have visited otherwise. Across ELLIE's demonstrator sites, from a

digitisation project in Florence to a maritime heritage site on the Clyde to the dance

studio in Cyprus, we are building that evidence pilot by pilot, on purpose, because a

business case built on data survives contact with a budget committee and a

business case built on excitement does not.

ELLIE passed its first formal review with the European Commission in June, putting

the project at its midpoint, and our exploitation work is now moving from mapping

what might have value to deciding what does. That means identifying which outputs

are genuinely exploitable, building real partnership routes for each demonstrator,

and delivering a commercialisation report at month 24 that a partner or investor can

actually act on, not one that sits in a folder.

The near-term future for the studio in Nicosia is not a reinvented museum, it is

smaller and more immediate than that: a diaspora cultural association licensing the

experience for a heritage evening abroad, a Cypriot festival offering it as a paid

experience alongside the live dancers, not instead of them. That is the version of this

I am building toward first, because it is fundable now, not someday.

The cultural heritage sector has never doubted the value of what it holds. What it has

lacked is a way to put a price on it that a funder, a municipality, or an investor can

act on. That is what we are building at Ascanio, one demonstrator at a time, and I

would rather ship the smaller, real version of this future than talk about the big one.

This blog post has been produced as part of the ELLIE project. ELLIE has received

funding from the European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation

programme under Grant Agreement No. 101178099. Views and opinions expressed

are those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European

Union or the European Research Executive Agency (REA). Neither the European

Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

Ascanio Entertainment Ltd | mkyriakou@ascanio.io | www.ascanio.io | Nicosia,

Cyprus