Food and Wine Heritage in the Marche Region: Digital Storytelling Through Virtual and Augmented Reality

The local wine and food heritage is a crucial element of the identity of a territory and often becomes a crucial theme in tourism promotion. Typical food and wine products are used both to develop branding strategies aimed at redefining the image of a territory and to launch initiatives in the field of experiential tourism. However, so far there are not many projects that explore the potential of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) technologies in this field. Recently, the rapid development of devices that allow the use of Mixed Reality (VR and AR) has made these technologies - which have been known for decades but have always been relegated to the experimental field of technological and media research - very topical. This article aims to summarize the assumptions of an interdisciplinary research concerning the enhancement and storytelling of the wine and food heritage through applications built on technologies of Mixed Reality. The purpose of the research is twofold: to investigate, in general, what are the potential of VR and AR to enhance and promote the richness of the territory in terms of wine and food heritage; experiment with new design strategies and new forms of communication through the use of cutting edge technology, in particular, in the case of the Marche Region.