Interactive Cultural Experiences using Virtual Identities

People create meaning through narratives or stories. Every culture has stories that are passed along from generation to generation. Culture influences our perspectives, values and behaviour. The story metaphor has been used in Multimedia and Virtual Environments to create interactive stories. Interactive stories enable users to interactively explore the story world and to be actively involved in the outcome of the story. Virtual environments are much richer in terms of freedom of navigation and ease of interaction. Projection-based systems in particular, don’t bind the user to a predefined path and enables the user to have a hands-on experience through immersion and interaction with the virtual world. Our approach for authoring interactive stories in virtual cultural environments allows the creation of several virtual identities, through whose eyes the user perceives the virtual world. Each identity is empowered with knowledge about itself and its perception about and embodiment in the virtual world. This approach allows free interaction and navigation that is appropriate for the specific virtual identity in the culture that is being experienced. This enables the user to experience the culture from many different angles and to get a true reflection and cultural experience