The imitation game to cultural heritage: A human-like interaction driven approach for supporting art recreation

Smart IoT technologies set a milestone in supporting new enjoyment models for Art and Cultural Heritage, providing amazing technological experiences. However, users, while interacting almost purely by mediation of smart devices or augmented VR displays, practically keep themselves out from living the fullness of the surrounding cultural sites experience, establishing no direct dialogues or interactions with artworks. It sounds quite like to be in the livingroom, looking at very appealing documentaries, equipped with exciting smart technologies. This paper focuses on the importance of “re-humanize” art recreation models, proposing a human-like interaction driven approach. Holographic projections, reproducing human or fantasy characters, play the human presence imitation game, when users are detected close to any artwork, interacting and dialoguing with them in natural language. An IoT infrastructure, an NLP platform and a Holographic Projection Engine implement a system for supporting holographic projections. Preliminary experiments were promising, thus motivating authors to further investigations.