Talk to Sarai

The “Talk to Sarai” or TSE is a self-guided mobile exhibition that utilizes interactive mobile AR technology. It cognitively and emotionally engages users with the establishment, difficult heritage, and multi-cultural community of the city of Sulaimani, the cultural capital of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, and a UNESCO Creative City in literature. This engagement involves the city’s most iconic and symbolic historic building, Sarai, which was restored as a museum in 2014. In this interactive experience, mobile AR brings the Sarai Museum and eyewitnesses back to life to recount their memories of important historic events from the period of British colonialism after the first World War and the early post-colonial era. Through a blend of despair and hope stories from influential local historical figures, TSE aims at eliciting cross-generational and cross-cultural awareness and dialogue. Talk to Sarai is designed and developed by the Digital Cultural Heritage (DCH) Research Center based at Sulaimani Polytechnic University (SPU) and the SPU office of the Nahrein Network. It is the first AR-mediated difficult heritage interpretation in the Kurdistan Region and the rest of Iraq. The first version of Talk to Sarai was publicized in 2019.