"di Piazza in Piazza": Reimagining cultural specific interactions for people-centered exhibitions

One of the most interesting innovations introduced by modern game console technologies has been that of new interaction systems which allow a large amount of people to interact all together with cultural artifacts and exhibits. Thank to them, human beings can interact with, manipulate and in some circumstances even hack digital contents, playing an active role and becoming part of cultural performance exhibitions. In this paper we present and discuss our recent experience in designing, implementing and putting in practice a hands-free interactive technology which lets visitors explore a hyper-multimedia system, playing a role of those who are able to transform historical audio clips and videos into a piece of public culture which needs to be lived together on a public place. The hands-free system in use is a part of a wider project (called "di Piazza in Piazza"), which comes with the initiatives of the University of Bologna, currently chosen to be displayed at the 2015 Universal Exposition in Milan (EXPO 2015).