Interactive conversational character as a virtual tour guide to an online museum exhibition

Interactive conversational characters are increasingly being explored in online virtual environments to instruct, guide, advice and perform tasks on user's behalf Online museums could effectively explore such "life-like" characters as tour-guides to their web-sites and virtual exhibitions. The authors' research developed an interactive conversational character that establishes a customized "character-user" dialogue while guiding the user through the virtual exhibition. The interactive character attempts to provide adaptive guidance, to perform engaging storytelling and to promote user's participation through the virtual tour. In this paper, the authors describe the experiment and present some considerations for its upcoming implementation and evaluation.

Introduction

In real museums, visitors may find the help of a human tour guide in order to guide them through the exhibition and present information tailored to their interests. Accordingly, online museums could also benefit from digital interactive “life-like” characters in order to guide users to virtual exhibitions and to customize the virtual tour information in accordance to users interests.