Improving the user engagement in a fully immersive experience by the means of a conversational non-playable character used as a tourist guide

Virtual reality (VR) is a promising tool for the tourism industry as it allows an amazing replica of locations in the real world offering the opportunity to provide prospective customers with a virtual travel experience. Especially with VR headsets that allow fully immersive travel experiences where the users are essentially placed within a virtual world, which they can move around and, in some cases, interact with. However, even if vision alone is often perceptually dominant, interaction between users and virtual content is a crucial element of any immersive visualization environment in both virtual reality and 360-degree content (photos and videos). In this article we describe a way to improve the interaction between users and virtual content by the means of non-playable (NPC) characters which have the ability to provide a natural language conversation during an immersive experience.