Conference Paper | CultureQuest: Deploying AI-powered Characters in Museum Spaces to Reimagine Visitor Engagement

Abstract | In the wake of a transformative wave of public-facing AI tools, the question that museums face is not what AI could do to them, but rather what AI could do for them. Our pilot focuses on the Egyptian Gallery at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, using the space as a testbed for a scalable quest system driven by Meaning Machine’s AI-powered NPCs (non-player characters). Visitors take on the role of ly-en-Amen-nay-es-nebet-ta, a deceased ancient Egyptian woman entering the afterlife who must discover her past in order to pass the weighing of the heart ritual and enter the 'Field of Reeds’. ly-en-Amen-nay-es-nebet-ta's character is directly inspired by an empty coffin on display in the gallery. Visitors then use their smartphone to engage in conversations with four ancient Egyptian gods - Osiris, Anubis, Maat, and Ra. These characters set the visitors tasks that require them to interact closely with objects and ideas across the gallery as they progress through the Duat. Each character’s knowledge and personality are shaped by a corpus of collection-specific data provided by the museum, and are designed in partnership with curatorial staff. This means that NPCs are aware of their ‘setting’: not only do they understand the collection data they have been trained on, but they also refer to their position within the exhibition space. Because the NPCs are powered by large language models (LLMs) and can respond to natural language input, the conversations visitors have with them are not pre-scripted, but generated dynamically. As a result, the quest can offer each visitor a unique experience that responds as their interests develop in real time and unfolds at a pace of their own choosing.