Engaging Museum Visitors with AI-Generated Narration and Gameplay

It has become a challenge in recent years to raise interest in museum visits, especially among younger visitors, as the range of alternative entertainment options has become overwhelming and increasingly attractive, interactive, and playful. To re-engage a wide audience with art and cultural heritage, we propose to use artificial intelligence to make the presented artworks more interesting. By using natural language processing to generate a narrative around a selection of individual exhibits and presenting the story as a scavenger hunt, we connect the individual exhibits and make access more playful. The museum visitors are guided through the story by two characters, who also pose challenges to be solved in mini-games. The two characters were chosen as a living being (a puppy) and an embodied agent (a humanoid robot) to indicate whether an utterance is preformulated and fact-based (puppy) or generated and partially made up. By testing the prototype, we could confirm that the generated stories are plausible and exciting, that the participants became more interested in the presented items through the story and mini-games and that the participants could distinguish if the utterance was fact-based or fictional.