Defining Cultural Agents for Virtual Heritage Environments

Abstract

This article describes the primary ways in which intelligent agents have been employed in virtual heritage projects and explains how the special requirements of virtual heritage environments necessitate the development of cultural agents. How do we distinguish between social agents and cultural agents? Can cultural agents meet these specific heritage objectives?

Kilo Hōkū—Experiencing Hawaiian, Non-Instrument Open Ocean Navigation through Virtual Reality

“…We have also discussed adding virtual agents, as described by Champion (2015), to enhance both the immersiveness of the simulation, as well as the cultural heritage representation; for example, by having the virtual agent speak in Hawaiian with subtitles, and by incorporating pule (prayer or ceremony) and protocols used by the Hōkūle'a crew before, during, and after sailing. This would enhance the cultural heritage aspect further, and avoid leaving a colder analytical work, as warned against by Pujol and Champion (2012).…”

Taxonomy of Virtual and Augmented Reality Applications in Education

“…Interestingly, a lack of intelligent agents was identified as one of the problems of sustaining user immersion and interest in educational VR applications [43] and a number of authors planned to include such intelligent agents in future work (e.g. [44] and [6]).…”

Playing with taskscapes

“…In virtual heritage projects, virtual characters are primarily used as guides programmed with limited conversational capabilities. 32 Both in games and virtual heritage environments, sooner rather than later it becomes apparent to users that the simulation of social life is reduced to theatrical props barely holding the illusion of a more meaningful social and cultural interactions. Some titles, however, have implemented more complex social behaviours, by including NPCs with their own individual routines and goals, carrying on with their lives even when they are not in the player's field of view.…”