Cultural Heritage Meets Game Development

On Friday 20th of February, 2026, the 3D Pop-Up Projekt team held a small conference on the intersection of cultural heritage preservation and game development disciplines.

Cultural Heritage Meets Game Development was a collaboration effort between the NFDI4Culture, the consortium of national research data infrastructure, and the FemDevsMeetup, a community of developers focused on women and other marginalized groups in the video games industry.

The conference was hosted at the delightful venue of Haus Bastian – Centre for Cultural Education, with the support of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. The introductions begun with Prof. Dr. Marion Ackermann, president of the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, followed by Reinhard Altenhöner, permanent representative of the director general of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, and Linda Rendel, founder of the FemDevsMeetup.

The goal was simple yet difficult to execute: to bridge two worlds, at first glance dissonant, with a pair of practical examples.

We presented our current project, the Pop-Up 3D, to illustrate how digitization efforts in the context of cultural heritage can benefit from the expertise of designers with an industry background. Questions like procedures, pipelines and quality control can take inspiration from film, TV or game production, without colliding with the expectations of visual data standards already in use like the IIIF.

Zoe Schubert, the coordinator of this project, put the collection, its research questions and objectives in context for a mixed audience of GLAM and gamedev backgrounds. Fenya Troch and I explained some examples of texture stitching, retopology and animation workflows. The material with which we can execute our tasks as 3D artists comes mainly from the work of Natalia Sucharek, the photographer, videographer and photogrammetry expert.

The second talk was held by Kassandra Huynh, half of Neonature, an arthouse game studio dedicated to developing games and interactive instalations with a strong focus on preservation and the soft balance of ecosystems.

The last part of the event consisted on a planned networking discussion divided into topics around the event’s multiple themes:

  1. Working with cultural heritage institutions or at game studios. What is the work environment? What skills are demanded?
  2. Games for cultural heritage
  3. Knowledge transfer: skills and know-hows applicable from one environment to the other
  4. Research obsessions: what are you working on right now that you cannot stop talking about?
  5. Economics of cultural heritage and the games industry: How do they get financed? How are teams designed? What is the configuration of work?

We sure enjoyed an interesting end of the week walking among heritage and digital worlds.

Photographs: Natalia Sucharek

Author: Casilda de Zulueta