Designing Cinematic Storytelling for Sustainable Cultural Tourism: The Anime Experience

Extended reality (XR) technologies offer significant opportunities to promote sustainable cultural tourism, supporting cultural heritage preservation and accessibility, authentic and differentiated visitors’ experiences, cultural tourism sites’ sustainability and revitalization. Growing research in this area addresses the applications and design of storytelling with XR technologies. This paper focuses on the potential of cinematic storytelling through the case study of the Anime experience, which aims to provide a journey for exploring the Cult of the Purgatory Souls and its sites in the historic center of Naples (Italy), leveraging a semi-immersive cinematic panoramic environment and interactive storytelling. It presents the initial findings of this ongoing project relating to the design considerations for the development of the concept of the Anime cinematic storytelling experience, responding to the challenge of promoting cultural appreciation of this unique heritage of the city and its valorization in sustainable cultural tourism through an integrated, emotionally engaging journey through its sites, combining historical and spiritual dimensions into a compelling narrative.