Akrivi Katifori

National and Kapodistrian University of Athens | uoa

In this article, we present the use-case of ArtStory Beats, a mobile application that aims to reflect the creative dialogue between visual arts and music, offering stories about the vibrant interactions that take place within the artistic communities over time. The app use is quite simple: it scans physical copies of visual artworks and provides au...

Contemporary visual artists often collaborate with musicians and composers to enrich their artworks and provide multisensory viewing experiences by leveraging the power of digital technology. In this paper, we present our approach to follow in their footsteps by creating a mobile application that provides “mixed-media interpretations” for a variety...

This work presents the design and development of a methodology investigating the ways that data deriving from human-embodied social experience can be synchronized, curated, and organized to be provided to artists for inspiration and integration in their creations. Given the new media artists' increased interest in utilizing biosignals in their art-...

Underwater cultural heritage constitutes an invaluable asset that needs to be conserved, preserved and enhanced. Innovative technologies can facilitate public access to underwater archaeological sites and make them more accessible, thus enhancing positive effects on tourism and the local economy. Focusing on the case of Greece, the paper aims at pr...

In this work we present the Narralive Unity Tool, a tool for the Unity Engine that supports the development of branching narrative experiences with multiple endings through a node-based graph and a set of automation features. The tool was designed with the objective to bridge the gap between intuitive branching narrative design and multimedia rich...

Throughout the history of tabletop role playing games (TTRPG), the image most associated with playing are people sitting around a table with notebooks, pencils, and occasionally map grids and miniatures. The Internet, however, especially in the post COVID-19 era, has enabled new ways of distance play and the emergence of virtual tabletop applicatio...

Citation: Trichopoulos, G.; Konstantakis, M.; Caridakis, G.; Katifori, A.; Koukouli, M. Crafting a Museum Guide Using ChatGPT4. Big Data Cogn. Comput. 2023, 7, 148. Abstract: This paper introduces a groundbreaking approach to enriching the museum experience using ChatGPT4, a state-of-the-art language model by OpenAI. By developing a museum guide po...

Introduction Point of Equilibrity (PoE) is a narrative game designed and developed with the aim to simulate the COVID-19 pandemic from a government's point of view and offer different perspectives on the complexity of managing a pandemic crisis. The players are called to make important decisions during a health crisis in the simulated environment w...

Recent studies in Virtual Reality highlighted the importance of avoiding Breaks inPresence that occur when experiment participants alternate between the virtualand physical environment to fill in questionnaires or interact with the evaluator.In this paper, we report on a within-groups experiment comparing threemeans of communication between the eva...

This paper introduces a groundbreaking approach to enriching the museum experience using GPT4, a state-of-the-art language model by OpenAI. By developing a museum guide powered by GPT4, we aim to address the challenges visitors face in navigating vast collections of artifacts and interpreting their significance. Leveraging the model’s natural langu...

Over the past decades, 360-degree virtual tours have been used to provide the public access to accurate representations of cultural heritage sites and museums. The COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to a rise in the popularity of virtual tours as a means of engaging with locations remotely and has raised an interesting question: How could we use suc...

The occurrence of cultural disasters, such as the fire damage at the Notre Dame de Paris in 2019 and at the National Museum of Brazil in 2018, and the recent COVID-19 pandemic highlight that the need to digitize cultural heritage is essential [...]

Virtual grasping is one of the most common and important interactions performed in a Virtual Environment (VE). Even though there has been substantial research using hand tracking methods exploring different ways of visualizing grasping, there are only a few studies that focus on handheld controllers. This gap in research is particularly crucial, si...

In comparison with a traditional museum, an “ecomuseum” is radically different: It is not housed in a building and does not have a collection of physical objects or artifacts. It aims to help visitors discover the tangible and intangible cultural heritage of a region through the identification of important points of interest (POIs), while offering...

Digital storytelling has been established as an effective approach for promoting visitor engagement in cultural heritage contexts. Interactive digital storytelling is however not as prevalent in this field. In this work we attempt to gain insight for the added value that interaction in the form of enhanced user agency brings to a cultural heritage...

Storytelling has been recognized as a powerful means for engaging visitors of cultural heritage and fostering historical empathy. The creators of storytelling and other types of cultural heritage experiences are in need of reliable sources of information and inspiration that are often difficult to access. In this article we present the Voeska proje...

In this paper we present the results of a design and evaluation workshop to examine different approaches to affective tagging to promote engagement with music archives. As a part of the ongoing project ARIA (Augmenting the Reception of music through innovative solutions and archives), this work aims at understanding how the audience reacts to the m...

The ARIA project aims to create an engaging visitor experience for archives of music Cultural Heritage that targets the wider public. The challenge is to conceptualize an experience design where the intangible seamlessly meets the tangible, bridging the gap between obscure archival material and the direct and emotional experience of listening to mu...

The annotation of animated motion-captured segments is a challenging, interdisciplinary task, especially when it comes to characterizing movement qualitatively. The lack of intuitive, easy-to-learn-and-use frameworks is considered to be one of the biggest challenges in this process; another is the lack of approaches able to motivate a wide audience...

Social interaction has been recognized as positively affecting learning, with dialogue–as a common form of social interaction–comprising an integral part of collaborative learning. Interactive storytelling is defined as a branching narrative in which users can experience different story lines with alternative endings, depending on the choices they...

The sunken city of old Epidaurus is one of the most significant archaeological sea-sites on the east coast of Peloponnese, Greece. Remains of ancient buildings are preserved in the area with a Roman villa located about 50m from the coast, the most notable of them. The site is attracting tourists and researchers from various scientific domains, such...

In this paper, we present a conceptual framework and toolkit for movement annotation. We explain how the design of the annotation systems, based on the framework, if combined with specific strategies for the process of annotation, can enhance the collection of ground-truth datasets for training algorithms. Computational algorithms, such as machine...

Recent advances in information and communication technologies have enabled the design and implementation of novel applications that highlight the social role of disseminating Cultural Heritage. So far, different approaches have created a rich pallet of design options where users experience sociality whether they are spatially close to each other or...

In this work we explore the effect of personality traits on user interaction in virtual reality (VR), on the less widely studied aspect of task performance during object manipulation. We conducted an experiment measuring the performance of 39 users interacting with a virtual environment using the virtual hand metaphor to execute a simple selection...

Extensive research on mobile guides for museums has explored the potential of technology to offer some of the services that have been traditionally provided by human guides, including guiding visitors in the museum space, providing information about the exhibits, and using more advanced interpretative approaches such as digital storytelling and gam...

As mobile devices gradually became more pervasive, there has been an evolution in their use in the museum and cultural heritage context. Traditionally, audio guides and mobile mediated narratives in general, have been a single user experience. However, as a museum visit is, in most cases, social in nature, different experimental applications attemp...

This work investigates how to digitally mediate perspective sharing and face-to-face conversations within groups of museum visitors. We use the case of a storytelling group game and explore the potential of mobile technology as a tool to facilitate perspective sharing activities. Using information asymmetry, a "Social Mediator" role is introduced:...

Digital storytelling has been extensively used in cultural heritage sites with the aim to construct knowledge about the past and promote its significance to the present. From the body of research and practical implementations that are concerned with hybrid forms of storytelling in cultural heritage sites, only a few systematically explore the inter...

In this work we present our proposed approach for augmenting the documentation of cultural heritage assets to support the production of meaningful cultural experiences and other activities. As has been established, the use of experiential activities and storytelling is significantly more appealing to visitors to cultural heritage sites than simple...

Digital storytelling has been extensively used in cultural heritage sites with the aim to construct knowledge about the past and promote its significance to the present. From the body of research and practical implementations that are concerned with hybrid forms of storytelling in cultural heritage sites, only a few systematically explore the inter...

Labanotation is one of the most used systems for notating, analysing, and preserving movement and dance, an important part of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Labanotation consists of a powerful expressive symbolic language for documenting movement with a long history in dance research, history, and anthropology since its introduction by Rudolf von La...

In our previous work, we have experimented with branching narratives in cultural heritage, seeking to validate the efficacy of such narratives in this context and identify best practices in their creation. In this work we present the Story Maker, an authoring tool designed as a result of an iterative co-design process with heritage domain experts....

During the COVID 19 pandemic, cultural institutions were severely affected. To this end, they made an effort to enhance their online presence and online activity became the main way of approaching the public. Although the social aspects of a physical visit are well acknowledged and valued today, they nevertheless seemed to be largely neglected in t...

The last decades the development of whole-body interaction technologies, as well as XR (Extended Reality) technologies , including Augmented, Mixed and Virtual Reality , created a strong potential for embodied and immer-sive experiences to support learning and the use of notation while moving. In our ongoing work, we explore this potential on the u...

Visits to cultural heritage sites are generally social in nature, yet resources to support these sociable experiences are often individualized, catering to the solitary visitor. Digital technologies offer means to disrupt this predicament, encouraging social engagements in cultural contexts. Here we present the results of a user study that systemat...

Digital storytelling in cultural heritage has been recognized as an effective technique for communicating heritage interpretation to the public. This chapter reports on the iterative design, development, and evaluation of a mobile digital storytelling experience for the Athens University History Museum. The experience combines a visually rich, illu...

A growing body of research testifies to the capacity for archaeological and other cultural heritage sites to generate wonder, attachment, personal transformation and restoration, family bonding and community building amongst their visitors. Using evaluation data from two related European Commission‐funded research projects, CHESS and EMOTIVE, we di...

Storytelling has the potential to revolutionize the way we engage with cultural heritage and has been widely recognized as an important direction for attracting and satisfying the audience of museums and other cultural heritage sites. This approach has been investigated in various research projects, but its adoption outside research remains limited...

Digital storytelling in cultural heritage contexts has been recognized as a direction that cultural heritage institutions, including museums and historical sites, need to invest in to attract and engage their audiences. The term-interactive storytelling‖ is often used to characterize existing digital applications, whether these incorporate narrativ...

While preconceptions of archaeology and cultural heritage are generally formed at a young age through exposures to mass media and teachings in formal and informal settings, the quality of these exposures is extremely variable and often fails to engage young people in meaningful ways. Although digital technologies may appear as tempting means to int...

Storytelling has the potential to revolutionize the way we engage with cultural heritage and has been widely recognized as an important direction for attracting and satisfying the audience of museums and other cultural heritage sites. This approach has been investigated in various research projects, but its adoption outside research remains limited...

Motion Capture and whole-body interaction technologies have been experimentally proven to contribute to the enhancement of dance learning and to the investigation of bodily knowledge, innovating at the same time the practice of dance. Designing and implementing a dance interactive learning system with the aim to achieve effective, enjoyable, and me...

In this paper, we present the results of a user study focusing on whether the visitors' cultural preferences and expectations relate to different personality traits as defined by the Big Five personality model. We describe the user study procedure and report the correlations discovered between some of the Big Five factors and the participant assess...

Can a chatbot enable us to change our conceptions, to be critically reflective? To what extent can interaction with a technologically “minimal” medium such as a chatbot evoke emotional engagement in ways that can challenge us to act on the world? In this paper, we discuss the design of a provocative bot, a “bot of conviction”, aimed at triggering c...

This work presents an Android application using Near Field Communication developed with the aim to inspire the visitors of the Athens University Museum of Mineralogy and Petrology to focus on the details of the exhibits. The MoMaP application uses a gamification approach prompting the visitors to collect points in a game in which they participate a...

Recent advances in technologies for capturing, analyzing and visualizing movement can revolutionize the way we create, practice, learn dance, and transmit bodily knowledge. The need for creating meaningful, searchable and re-usable libraries of motion capture and video movement segments can only be fulfilled through the collaboration of both techno...

A multitude of challenges comes into play when attempting to design (and evaluate) an interactive digital storytelling experience for use by visitors in a museum. This paper reports on the evaluation of the prototype mobile-based storytelling “guides” designed, developed and deployed as part of a research project at the Acropolis Museum in Athens,...

Choreomorphy is inspired by the Greek words "choros" (dance) and "morphe" (shape). Visual metaphors, such as the notion of transformation, and visual imagery are widely used in various movement and dance practices, education, and artistic creation. Motion capture and comprehensive movement representation technologies, if appropriately employed can...

Augmented reality (AR) has been extensively used in different contexts, including tourism and cultural heritage, in both commercial and research applications, and they are well known for their ability to capture the attention of their potential users. On the other hand, collaboration among groups in a museum context is proven to engage the visitors...

This study explores the effect of virtual reality on the sense of fear and presence in an immersive VR environment in comparison with a desktop screen. At the same time it attempts to answer whether users with specific psychological profiles measured with the Big 5 personality test are more susceptible to emotions of fear in digital environments th...

In this work, we propose MagicHOLO, a method to support engaging collaborative and collocated experiences through 3D projections using personal mobile devices in the physical space of a museum. The users of the MagicHOLO mobile app are prompted to coordinate in order to create a common communication network for their devices and to decide on the el...

Dance learning is by nature multimodal, while dance practice presents a wide diversity across genres and contexts. Choreography and artistic contemporary dance performances have been using interactive technologies to support their creative process for several decades. Nevertheless the use of interactive technologies to support dance learning and ed...

The museum visit is a collaborative activity: people typically visit museums in social groups, and conversation between group members has been highlighted as a key aspect for an engaging visitor experience. In this work, we detail initial findings and experience results from the design and evaluation of a group-based digital storytelling journey, w...

In this work we report on a recent user study where 20 couples experienced in a laboratory setting an interactive, mobile-based, digital story for an archaeological site. We describe the design of the experience and analyze our approach with regard to a design framework that was recently proposed for collocated interaction in mobile experiences. We...

Incorporating digital tools in the business and scientific research workflows is at the moment an on-going process, challenging and demanding as every domain has its own needs in terms of data models and information retrieval methods. The information in some domains involves entity evolution, a characteristic that introduces additional tasks, such...

Digital storytelling is one resource museums have in hand for enriching their offer to audiences and society at large. But how is the museum to author digital storytelling experiences that cater to various needs while maintaining scientific integrity? In this paper, we report on a series of experiences involving the creation of several interactive...

Incorporating digital tools in the business and scientific research workflows is at the moment an ongoing process, challenging and demanding as every domain has its own needs in terms of data models and information retrieval methods. The information in some domains involves entity evolution, a characteristic that introduces additional tasks, such a...

Incorporating digital tools in the business and scientific research workflows is at the moment an on-going process, challenging and demanding as every domain has its own needs in terms of data models and information retrieval methods. The information in some domains involves entity evolution, a characteristic that introduces additional tasks, such...

CHESS is a research prototype system aimed at enriching museum visits through personalized interactive storytelling. Aspiring to replace traditional exhibit-centric descriptions by story-centric cohesive narrations with carefully-designed references to the exhibits, CHESS follows a plot-based approach, where the story authors create stories around...

In this work, we present the CHESS research prototype system which offers personalized, interactive digital storytelling experiences to enhance museum visits, demonstrating the authoring and visiting experiences.

In this paper, we present the vision of an open source learning analytics platform, able to harvest data from different sources, including e-learning platforms and environments, registrar's information systems, alumni systems, etc., so as to provide all stakeholders with the necessary functionality to make decisions on the learning process. The pla...

This paper discusses issues related to digital storytelling and its use in Cultural Heritage institutions. It will demonstrate the usefulness and advantages of digital storytelling by providing concrete examples of adoption and suggest how digital storytelling may be used in different cultural heritage environments. We will identify issues and chal...

Sets of 'personas' representing archetypical visitors of two very different museums, the Acropolis Museum in Greece and Cité de l'Espace in France, were defined and described as part of a multitude of user-centered design methods used to better understand the needs of visitors and develop for them a personalized mobile storytelling experience. Here...

Digital archives comprise a valuable asset for effective information retrieval. In many cases, however, the special vocabulary of the archive restricts its access only to experts in the domain of the material it contains and, as a result, researchers of other disciplines or the general public cannot take full advantage of the wealth of information...

While Digital Libraries (DLs) are moving towards universally accessible collections of human knowledge, considerable advances are needed in DL methodologies and technologies to make this happen. Interoperability between DLs is a crucial requirement to achieve this goal. The European project, DL.org, is focused on advancing the state of the art in t...