Rembrandt House "Black in Rembrandt’s Time"

diVRsity: Explore diversity in VR

HERE. Black in Rembrandt's Time aims to sabotage the stereotyped representation of Black people in visual artwork in the 17th century and present. So how are adolescents affected by this? The aim of this research is to examine the extent to which the VR representation of this exhibition by Museum Rembrandthuis affects awareness of these issues in adolescents.

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Conversational access of knowledge graphs

Recent technology development has enabled Cultural Heritage institutes to make their digital collections more shareable, extensible and re-usable in the form of Knowledge Graphs (KGs). Different types of concepts, entities, relationships, and events are interlinked with explicit semantics in KGs. It is, however, challenging to explore such connected knowledge in an intuitive manner. Therefore, we investigate conversational AI technologies to provide meaningful, engaging and enjoyable interactions between individual visitors and the Cultural Heritage collections. By integrating a conversational museum guide into the virtual exhibitions, we hope to provide a more immersive and interactive user experience.

People involved

Computer Science and knowledge graphs - Shenghui Wang, Delaram Javdani, Dirk Heylen (University of Twente), Stephan Schlobach, Victor de Boer (Vrije Universiteit)

VR design and user experience- Robby van Delden (UT), Tilo Hartmann (Vrije Universiteit)

Diversity and Inclusion - Carolien Rieffe (UT-LU), Denisha Richardson (Leiden University), Maurice Crul, Ismintha Waldring (Vrije Universiteit), Rudy Chotoe (advisor D&I)

Museum Rembrandthuis - Hester Huitema, Julia Alvares, Jaleesa Clow

Key publications

Javdani Rikhtehgar, D., Wang, S., Huitema, H., Alvares, J., Schlobach, S., Rieffe, C., Heylen. D., (2023). Personalizing Cultural Heritage Access in a Virtual Reality Exhibition: AUser Study on Viewing Behavior and Content Preferences. In UMAP '23 Adjunct: Adjunct Proceedings of the 31st ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP '23 Adjunct), June 26--29, 2023, Limassol, Cyprus. ACM, New York, NY, USA 9 Pages.

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