Abstract
Embodied conversational agents are an established approach for immersively conveying the narratives and information of virtual museums. Recent advances in large language models and text-to-speech systems enable the active guidance of users by agents and raise the question of how such assistants should be visually embodied to engage visitors and promote knowledge transfer. This demo showcases a stylized humanoid guide, a novel animism-based approach with speaking objects, and a combination of both concepts to interactively guide users through a digital replica of the famous Gropius Room at the Bauhaus University in Weimar.
Publication
Schott, E., López García, I., Zoeppig, T. J., Hartmann, M., and Froehlich, B.
The Guide's Apprentices: Engaging Visitors of Virtual Museums through Appropriate Agent Embodiments
In Proceedings of the 30th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 83, 1–2. DOI: 10.1145/3641825.3689529