Heraklion Christmas Castle is a joint effort between ICS-FORTH and the Municipality of Heraklion-Crete (Municipal Public Service Enterprise of Heraklion), trying to pioneer and be innovative in the presentation of Christmas customs and ideas by creating a festive neighborhood governed by interactive technology. The approach followed by this research work was to employ interactive systems to give a feeling of Christmas to children and adults through the combination of education and entertainment. This work presents the innovative systems designed and developed for the Christmas Castle to augment and enhance the festive spirit through multimodal interaction techniques, such as virtual environments, kinesthetic interaction, physical object identification and serious games. All the systems were designed and integrated within art artefacts (special constructions) that match the Christmas look-and-feel and provide a user-centric design.

The Tourism Office of the city of Heraklion is a truly original facility that provides visitors with novel ways to access information through the use of modern technologies and innovative interactive systems developed by ICS-FORTH. This paper presents the innovative technologies employed at the tourist information office in order to enhance the information provision capacity of this type of facility in conjunction with traditional approaches, such as printed information material and human operated information provision. The info-point of Heraklion deploys a mixture of systems that augment the visiting experience while providing information through kinaesthetic interaction, Mixed Reality and play.

This paper presents an Ambient Intelligence infrastructure that fuses state-of-the-art technologies and related applications with digital cultural resources to deliver interactive and immersive user encounters through on-site Virtual Exhibitions (VEs) which respond to the demands of 'new museology'. The practical exploitation of the concept is presented through the reformation of the exhibition spaces of the Archaeological Museum of Heraklion which is one of the most important Greek museums hosting representative artefacts from all the periods of Cretan prehistory and ancient history, covering a chronological span of over 5,500 years from the Neolithic period to Roman times.