Inside virtual: A new app for interactive and intelligent cultural heritage fruition

Technology is even more embedded into everyday life and its pervasiveness grows ceaselessly. People are becoming more and more addicted to technology that is seen a mean to improve life quality, extend human capabilities and enjoy free time. In this framework, the proposed research work seeks to combine information and communication technologies, web technologies, mobile technologies and serious games to create new models for cultural contents fruition and dissemination. The proposed approach results in a desktop and web application, INSIDE VIRTUAL, that can be installed on mobile devices. The user of INSIDE VIRTUAL, is involved in a learning path under the guise of a virtual museum (archaeological site) visitor that, in proximity of an artifact, receives information and cultural contents from dedicated avatars (driven by intelligent agents). Such avatars act as guides and are able to interact with the user avatar in several ways (even vocally through questions) and deliver custom contents based on the user preferences gathered at the game start and during the game evolution. In this paper, some aspects of the INSIDE VIRTUAL design and development process are covered and preliminary implementation activities are introduced.