AI-Assisted Virtual Reality for Cultural Heritage Education: The Experience of the MARTA Museum

Technologies are used successfully to promote distance education in many domains. Recently, the Covid-19 pandemic forced people to rethink their educational experiences. One of the areas where technologies have been successfully used for distance education during the Covid pandemic is the cultural heritage sector. Many virtual reality experiences have been created to let people experience museum visits and get insights into the artworks staying at home. However, for educational purposes, this type of technological support might not be enough. This paper aims at exploring the impact of the virtual assistant metaphor to guide people vising a virtual museum, improve the accessibility to information about artworks and provide answers and explanations to visitors' questions. To this aim, we have developed a VR experience about artworks of the National Archeological Museum of Taranto and we created two virtual agents, one for welcoming people and explaining the visiting experience, staying at the reception desk of the museum, and another acting as a guide in a room with artworks that interacts with users in natural language. A preliminary evaluation regarding the user's acceptance of the system was conducted and the efficacy of the approach for acquiring new knowledge for educational purposes was tested. Results, especially as far as the user experience is concerned, are good enough to encourage us to continue developing a more complete system for cultural heritage education in which VR environments are integrated with AI-based virtual assistants and teachers.