Interactive Character As A Virtual Tour Guide To An Online Museum Exhibition

Online museums could benefit from digital "lifelike" characters in order to guide users to virtual tours and to customize the tour information to users' interests. Digital characters have been explored in online museum web sites with different degrees of interaction and modes of communication. Such research, however, does not explore interactive "conversational" characters. The main interest of this research is a tourguide character that provides tour information through dialogue with the user. This research developed an interactive conversational character that establishes a "character-user" dialogue while guiding the user through the virtual tour. The tour guide character provides tour information and responses to users' textual inputs by speaking through audio output and gesturing accordingly. Moreover, the tour guide character attempts to provide adaptive guidance, to perform engaging storytelling and to promote users' participation through the virtual tour. This paper describes the experiment focusing on the systems implementation, the dialogue creation process and the character's ability to detect users' interests. It further describes and analyzes the system's evaluation. Lessons learned could serve as a base for developers of interactive characters as tour guides. Includes two tables and three figures. (Contains 15 references.) (Author/AEF) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. Register Workshops Sessions Speakers Interactions Demonstrations Exhibits Events Best of the Web Key Dates Charlotte