Fantastic Futures 2025

Description

Presenting 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.

With this short talk, we will present the findings from CultureQuest, a collaborative pilot project led jointly by the University of Bristol and Meaning Machine, working in partnership with Bristol Museums, and funded by Digital Catapult Creative Connect. The project uses generative AI to create personalised, interactive ‘quests’ that lead museum visitors away from passive consumption of information towards active interpretation of exhibits. The goal is both to educate—by encouraging deeper engagement with museum objects and narratives—but also to entertain, by turning the act of moving through a gallery into a dynamic and revelatory experience.

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.

The system is built using Meaning Machine’s Game Conscious™ NPC engine, which has previously been deployed for the purposes of immersive entertainment and is being tested in a heritage context for the first time. Meaning Machine’s NPCs are not merely chatbots with a historical skin—they are context-aware, conversationally rich characters who understand their own ‘world,’ refer to other objects in the gallery, and remember prior exchanges. By using the Game Conscious™ engine, CultureQuest offers museum visitors opportunities for agency and goal-oriented interaction that have previously been the prerogative of digital gaming, transforming them into ‘researchers’ or ‘explorers’ within the gallery space.

This presentation explores the project in light of the Fantastic Futures 2025 theme ‘AI Everywhere, All at Once’ by offering insight into the potential benefits and drawbacks of integrating generative AI into public heritage environments. We reflect on the design principles that guided our approach, including:

Co-design and interdisciplinarity: The project represents a fusion of academic research in historical simulation and games (University of Bristol), commercial innovation in AI character systems (Meaning Machine), and institutional knowledge within the GLAM sector (Bristol Museums). This triangulated model brings together a diverse range of expertise right from the outset, ensuring that quality assurance is integrated at all stages of the project.

Ethical responsibility: Drawing on curatorial input, we have put in place measures to ensure NPCs’ output is factually accurate, culturally sensitive, and non-hallucinatory (a known risk with LLMs). Characters are deliberately ‘bounded’ by their roles and knowledge, with meta-dialogue (e.g. explaining their limits) built in where appropriate.

Accessibility and inclusivity: The system prioritises intuitive UX design, offering both accessibility and agency. Visitors can interact via typing into a messaging app-style interface, with text-to-voice and voice-to-voice functionality also available to support visually impaired users. Onboarding is handled via in-gallery prompts and onboarding materials are co-designed with curators.

Scalability and sustainability: CultureQuest is a smartphone-based system that requires no specialist hardware. This ‘bring your own device’ model is both environmentally and economically viable, reducing the need for costly infrastructure that may be at risk of obsolescence, while also providing the basis for broader deployment across multiple institutions.

This pilot was the first real-world deployment of CultureQuest in a museum environment. Over the course of a four-month sprint (April–July 2025), we prototyped a fully functioning quest system, developed the narrative through iterative playtesting, and conducted an initial player study of 40 participants. The study gathered both qualitative and quantitative data to understand how visitors to the Egyptian Gallery responded to the AI characters inspired by the collection, as well as how the quest system influenced visitor behaviour in and experience of the space. Preliminary findings suggest that character-driven storytelling and personalised quest structures hold potential to boost visitor engagement, particularly with groups.

In sharing our findings, challenges, and lessons learned from this pilot at Fantastic Futures 2025, we aim to prompt discussion around the practical, ethical, and creative implications of deploying generative AI in GLAM contexts. What does it take to make AI characters that feel at home in a museum? How do we strike the right balance between control and openness, authenticity and artistic license? And how might visitor-facing AI influence not only how museums are experienced, but what they might become?

Period	3 Dec 2025 → 5 Dec 2025
Event type	Conference
Location	London, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International