Assessment of Virtual Guides' Credibility in Virtual Museum Environments

摘要

Immersive virtual museum environments can play a crucial role for communicating cultural information in an engaging and educational way, especially when storytelling is involved. In this paper we explore and assess the impact that the status of three types of avatars (embodiments of a museum curator, a museum security guard and a museum visitor, respectively) may have on the credibility of their storytelling and the emotions they evoke to virtual visitors. Preliminary results derived from an experiment provide evidence that supports our initial hypothesis that the status of the avatar may indeed influence their credibility and the participants' emotions of sadness/worry, distress, shame, anger, relief and admiration.