Solis´Curse - A Cultural Heritage Game Using Voice Interaction with a Virtual Agent

This paper presents a game with the aim of developing persistent knowledge inside a Cultural Heritage exhibition. The authors developed a game called Solis Curse, that was used as a way of testing the knowledge acquired during the museum visit. Similar to an entertainment quiz, the game presents a set of questions with progressional levels of difficulty. Through the analysis of the responses and some others qualitative and quantitative metrics such, as the difficulty level and time, the players score is calculated and compared with a global ranking ladder. Beside putting to test the visitors knowledge, the game also offers the possibility of speech interaction with a embodied conversational agent that steers the game and helps the user to successfully complete the task at hand. Based on interdisciplinary multimedia technologies and cultural contents, Solis Curse supports an entertainment platform for a younger audience, which may be regarded as a mean to convey cultural heritage contents, conducted by the motto of learning by playing. The results of this research point out the benefits of having game as an aid to the learning process and also shows the impact of multi-modal interaction on the user immersion.