Morpheus Cup 2016: Meet the ‘Smart Culture’ champion

During this year’s edition of the Morpheus Cup, we introduced for the first time a competitive category named “Smart Culture”. We challenged university students from across Europe to showcase innovative re-use of Europeana Collections through imaginative and entrepreneurial solutions.

Encouraging student entrepreneurship

The Morpheus Cup is a competition which brings together students from European universities and graduate schools to develop innovative ideas across various categories, ranging from mobility, engineering and coding to business, design, education and culture. The Cup happens in parallel with the ICT Spring Europe – one of Europe’s largest B2B ICT events, gathering 6,000 leaders, entrepreneurs, startups and investors from 72 countries. Under the patronage of the European Commission and the Government of Luxembourg, the Morpheus Cup is supported by Europeana and has as sponsors internationally known companies, such as Vodafone, ING and Deloitte.

The Morpheus award event took place on 10 May in Luxembourg. The finalists in each category and from the challenges on the day pitched their projects in front of all participants and an international expert jury and competed for the prize fund of 50.000 EUR (in cash, training, consultancy, materials and travel).

In total, eight teams from three different countries (France, Germany and Luxembourg) subscribed their proposals to compete for the ‘Smart Culture’ category. 24 students from eight different nationalities and coming from seven universities participated of the competition, presenting applications in the areas of education, health and accessibility.

We chose team Lyr and their project AudioSight as a winner in the Smart Culture category. Louis Chemineau, Romain Karpinski and Yelen Per from the French School of Engineering in Information Technology (TELECOM) delivered the best proposal according to the category criteria related to clear social and/or economic impact, re-use of our openly licensed content.

As prize, our category winner received our recognition and also qualified as one of the finalists for the Morpheus Cup award.

AudioSight: See with your ears

Improve culture access for visually impaired people is the main drive of team Lyr. The three French students developed the concept for the AudioSight, an app that intends to facilitate the access to digital cultural heritage for over 30 million visually impaired people in Europe.

According to the team members, the current market presents solutions to extract texts regarding cultural materials, but none of these are focused on blind or partially blind people. The project will utilize the Google Vision project to retrieve information about the Europeana Collections records. And, with this information in hands, the team will produce an audio description of the artworks to be shared with visually impaired people.

Team Lyr has envisaged about one year for developing the alpha version of their product.

We congratulate the champions and hope to see their project running soon!