The City of Uruk: Virtual Institutions in Cultural Heritage

The use of 3D Virtual Worlds in the domain of cultural heritage represents a unique opportunity to accurately recreate historically significant sites as well as to provide a collaborative working environment for historians, archaeologists, designers and programmers. While most existing solutions are purely focused on reconstructing the architectural elements we also find it very important to preserve the interactions of the people that populated the given area. Through the use of the Virtual Institutions technology we demonstrate how a virtual heritage site can be populated by autonomous agents imitating the behavior of ancient people in the Virtual World. Moreover, those agents can manipulate objects in the environment, interact, collaborate and synchronize their actions with other agents or humans. The presented prototype features autonomous agents reenacting the life of two typical fisherman families from the virtual City of Uruk in ancient Mesopotamia, 3000 B.C.