Interactive conversational character as a virtual tour guide to an online museum exhibition

Interactive conversational characters are increasingly being explored in online virtual environments to instruct, guide, advice and perform tasks on user\´s behalf Online museums could effectively explore such "life-like" characters as tour-guides to their web-sites and virtual exhibitions. The authors\´ research developed an interactive conversational character that establishes a customized "character-user" dialogue while guiding the user through the virtual exhibition. The interactive character attempts to provide adaptive guidance, to perform engaging storytelling and to promote user\´s participation through the virtual tour. In this paper, the authors describe the experiment and present some considerations for its upcoming implementation and evaluation.