VOXReality
Voice-driven interaction in XR spaces
VAARHeT
Voice-Activated Augmented Reality Heritage Tours
Challenge:
Integration Challenge
The Voice-Activated Augmented Reality Heritage Tours (VAARHeT) enlivens the way visitors engage with Āraiši lake dwelling site from the late Iron Age (9-10 century), at the Āraiši ezerpils Archeological Parks in Latvia, through voice-driven interaction in an XR environment.
By integrating extended reality (XR) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, VAARHeT provides a transformative, immersive, and multilingual visitor experience. Expanding the reach of this important heritage site and providing visitors with a unique and engaging way to discover and learn.
VAARHeT addresses key problems faced by open-air museums like Āraiši ezerpils Archaeological Parks.
- Meeting Modern Audience Expectations: A key motivation for implementing AR tours in open-air museums is to enhance the visitor experience, making it flexible and entertaining. Visitors need ways to prioritise information according to their preferences and on-site needs, and museum staff need space and time to engage directly with visitors to provide personal and authentic interactions.
- Preservation and Resource Strain: Traditional open-air museum experiences, such as guided tours and live historical reconstructions, are resource-intensive, requiring staffing and handmade replicas of archaeological finds. Physical reconstructions and living history can damage sites and artifacts, and can be costly, while facilitating limited visitor numbers.
- Season-Independent, Scalable Experiences: Open air museums are limited by shorter tourist seasons. As museums strive to increase visitor numbers off-season, and to extend the interpretation of their sites, they face a strain on staffing resources and the need to respond to increased information queries by visitors.
VAARHeT leverages AI and AR to create an immersive, voice-activated experience for visitors at open-air museums like Āraiši ezerpils Archeological Parks.
Key features include voice-driven personalised tours, multilingual translations, and real-time geospatial content delivered via visitors’ own smart devices. VAARHeT provides a scalable, innovative approach to museum experiences, reducing reliance on resource-intensive physical reconstructions and making heritage content more interactive and accessible year-round.
VAARHeT stands out through its use of voice-activated interaction with a conversational agent for personalised content presentation. It offers real time multilingual translations, making it accessible to international visitors. It presents features geospatially anchored content, providing location-specific experiences. Visitors can use their own smart devices, removing the need for specialised equipment and enhancing scalability. VAARHeT provides a more user-friendly, interactive, personalised, and accessible AR experience for cultural heritage sites.
Use Case Description
The VAARHeT project represents a transformative use case for augmented reality (AR) applications in cultural heritage, especially in open-air museums like the Āraiši ezerpils Archeological Parks. Unlike conventional AR tours, which often rely on static content or manual interaction, VAARHeT introduces voice-activated engagement, allowing visitors to interact with a conversational AI that delivers dynamic personalised tours. This makes the experience more interactive, responsive, and tailored to individual preferences, significantly enhancing user engagement.
A standout feature of VAARHeT is its integration of neural machine translation (NMT), which provides real time multilingual support. Visitors can experience live guided tours in their preferred language, breaking down linguistic barriers and making the tours accessible to a wider, more diverse audience. This capability is particularly important to heritage sites that attract international visitors.
Additionally, the solution offers geospatially anchored AR content, where visual effects and contextual information are linked to specific physical locations within the museum site. This feature enriches the experience by seamlessly blending digital content with the real-world environment, creating a more immersive and contextually relevant narrative. By using their own smart devices, visitors can access the AR experience without the need for specialised hardware, making the application scalable, cost-effective, and easy to adopt for museums. VAARHeT’s innovative use of extended reality (XR) technologies enhances the visitor experience while addressing critical challenges faced by cultural heritage sites, such as the resource-intensive nature of physical reconstructions and the limitations of seasonal tourism. Offering a year-round on-demand experience reduces operational strain and expands museums’ capacity to engage audiences. This combination of AI-driven personalisation, multilingual accessibility, and seamless integration with physical environments sets VAARHeT apart as a pioneering application of AR in the cultural heritage sector.
CONSORTIUM
Āraiši Ezerpils Archaeological Park
The Āraišu lake settlement is the only reconstruction of a 9th-10th century fortified settlement in Europe. The park is distinguished by its unique archaeological findings, the reconstruction’s location in its original setting and the well-preserved cultural landscape.
TEAM
Guillaume Auvray
XR Ireland
Founder of the Innovation Hub Nuwa Ltd, XR Ireland and the MSP 1Cluster, and former multilingual AI/ML Engineer at Apple, he leads the organisations as Head of Spatial Cloud Computing & XR Technologies combining 8+ years of technical expertise with hands-on experience in AI, XR and use case applications in the heritage, performing arts and humanitarian sector.
Cordula Hansen PhD
XR Ireland
Senior Creative Developer specialised in User Experience Design brings to the sub project 10+ years of experience in immersive design and prototyping, notably in the heritage sector.
Anastasiia Petrova
XR Ireland
Communications Officer overseeing communications and dissemination, ensuring innovative solutions and key project milestones reach the right audience with clear and impactful content across platforms.
Edu Prado
XR Ireland
Edu Prado is a multi passionate engineer, developer and producer, founder of Edu Prado Sounds, co-director of XR Ireland, and the mind behind Breaking The Inertia; working on a broad range of creative and innovative projects, from software and business development, to composing for media, producing artists and VR operas.
Anastasiia Zhmur
XR Ireland
Finance manager with solid experience working for international NGO’s multi million budgets.
Janis Meinerts
Araisi ezerpils Archaeological Park
Jānis Meinerts is an archaeologist and heritage specialist, his research interests include landscape and settlement archaeology, as well as regional studies and underwater cultural heritage.
Eva Koljera
Araisi ezerpils Archaeological Park
Eva Koljera is the manager of Araisi ezerpils Archaeological Park. With 20+ years of experience, Eva is a tourism and cultural heritage management specialist.