Cultural mirrors: an epistemological approach to artificial life for cultural heritage communication

A basic limit of most of VR applications reproducing cultural sites is that they do not fire up the attention and the involvement of public: they are empty and silent, often limited to architectural reconstructions without activities for the visitors, or lacking of some contents explaining why those architectures were built according to those spatial needs. According to us, Virtual Reality should integrate levels of visualization, models, metadata, storytelling, behaviours, tools of visualization and interaction, in order to "reconstruct" and communicate a cultural context, an ecosystem where all the information is integrated. For this reason we propose a methodological approach to introduce autonomous agents inside virtual ecosystems. Artificial life based interaction paradigms in cultural heritage can be adopted to add an impression of reality to virtual reconstructions of cultural landscapes, through the insertion in the VR scene of animated living characters representing simulated natural species of plants or animals, or social behaviours. The use of AL based paradigms in managing humanoid digital characters that interact with the audience in a narrative way is a new frontier. In the paper we will present several experiences collected in the construction of interactive installations based on VR and the interaction between people and evolving artificial creatures. The discussion investigates the possibility to create cultural contexts where the agents can evolve their behaviour while interacting with people capturing human icons (words, gestures, information, voice, ...).