Dissemination of Intangible Cultural Heritage Using a Multi-agent Virtual World

Most virtual heritage applications focus on the high-quality representation of ‘tangible’ cultural heritage, leaving out other aspects of culture, such as daily life activities, customs and rituals. The use of interactive digital characters that perform actions in the environment and communicate with users can help towards this end. In this paper we present a platform for virtual heritage applications, which is based on virtual worlds and can support multiple autonomous digital characters. Using this platform, we have constructed a recreation of a part of the ancient agora of Athens, and created an interactive scenario in it. We have performed a first qualitative user evaluation of the scenario and environment, which yielded positive results about the user experience and learning as well as areas of further improvement.