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 powered by ChatGPT4, we aimed to address the challenges visitors face in navigating vast collections of artifacts and interpreting their significance. Leveraging the model’s natural-language-understanding and -generation capabilities, our guide offers personalized, informative, and engaging experiences. However, caution must be exercised as the generated information may lack scientific integrity and accuracy. To mitigate this, we propose incorporating human oversight and validation mechanisms. The subsequent sections present our own case study, detailing the design, architecture, and experimental evaluation of the museum guide system, highlighting its practical implementation and insights into the benefits and limitations of employing ChatGPT4 in the cultural heritage context.

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 language understanding and generation capabilities, our guide offers personalized, informative, and engaging experiences. However, caution must be exercised as the generated information may lack scientific integrity and accuracy. To mitigate this, we propose incorporating human oversight and validation mechanisms. The subsequent sections present our own case study, detailing the design, architecture, and experimental evaluation of the museum guide system, highlighting its practical implementation and insights into the benefits and limitations of employing GPT4 in the cultural heritage context.

360° panoramic virtual experiences have become a widely adopted medium for enabling remote exploration of cultural heritage sites and tourist destinations. Compared to fully immersive virtual reality systems, these experiences provide accessible, cost-effective web-based environments that allow users to navigate panoramic scenes enriched with interactive and multimedia elements. Despite their growing use in museums, tourism, and heritage dissemination, the design characteristics of contemporary 360° virtual experiences remain insufficiently examined from a holistic perspective. This study investigates how such experiences are structured and designed in practice. We conducted a structured review of 29 publicly available 360° virtual experiences from cultural heritage and tourism contexts, examining technical implementation, navigation mechanics, information presentation, and content formats. In addition, a focus group with 6 experts in digital experience design and cultural heritage applications qualitatively evaluated a subset of 20 content-rich experiences, assessing aesthetic quality, usability, informational clarity, and structural coherence. Our findings reveal recurring design patterns as well as common limitations, including reliance on sequential navigation, inconsistent integration of interpretive content, and limited support for layered information exploration. By synthesizing quantitative structural analysis with qualitative expert insights, this work proposes a preliminary set of empirically grounded, expert-informed design hypotheses, paving the way towards supporting the development of more engaging 360° virtual experiences for cultural heritage and tourism applications.

Museums increasingly employ digital playful experiences to engage younger audiences, yet designing for both engagement and deeper historical understanding remains challenging. This paper presents Letters from the Past, a sequenced multimodal museum learning experience designed to foster historical empathy among middle-school students. The experience combined three interconnected phases: (1) digital storytelling through historical letters and contextual information, (2) a mobile scavenger hunt game linking narratives to museum objects, and (3) collaborative creative writing in which students composed responses from historically situated perspectives. We report findings from an exploratory mixed-method field study with 37 students aged 12–15, using questionnaires, interviews, observations, and analysis of collaboratively written letters. The results indicate that the multimodal playful sequence supported high levels of engagement, collaborative meaning-making, and emotionally grounded interpretations of the past. Students reported high levels of engagement and perceived learning, while interviews and observations highlighted enjoyment, collaboration, object discovery, and engagement with historical content. The collaboratively written letters provided qualitative evidence of historical perspective-taking and affective connection: students adopted historically situated voices, incorporated historical and material elements, and produced imaginative yet historically plausible elaborations of the scenarios. These findings document forms of engagement, meaning-making, and historical empathy emerging within the complete experience. The paper discusses how the observed patterns relate to the theoretically motivated progression from narrative encounter through material exploration to collaborative reinterpretation and considers implications for the design of multimodal museum learning experiences.