Touring Machine is a personal tour guide that can be used for educational purposes. It is available in three editions: web edition, school edition and Windows Phone 7 edition. Using a Natural Language Generation System, Touring Machine produces personalized descriptions for the exhibits. The descriptions are not pre-written, but are being genarated on the fly. That way, we can bind the descriptions to the user's needs. For example, descriptions addressing children use easier to understand language with more common words. Also, the system produces comparisons between the exhibits that have already been described and the one currently being described ("Like the stoa that you saw earlier, this temple..."). The web edition creates a 3D representation of the place in which the user can navigate using a keyboard, a mouse or a touch screen. School edition uses Augmented Reality in order to map symbols to exhibits and transform a classroom into a virtual museum! Finally, regarding the Windows Phone edition, the system is location aware and it reorganizes the list of the exhibits according to the user's current position (it can also produce spatial expressions). This way, each tour is a unique experience for each user! Features such as text-to-speech are supported in every edition. Developed by George Karakatsiotis and Vangos Pterneas. http://venus.cs.aueb.gr/~erevodifwntas http://www.vangos.eu
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http://touringmachine.eu
facts & figures
9/10 believe that culture is important* *according to
Eurostat
*according to University study among 400 students8/10 prefer a
unified experience*
2,000,000 visitors in the Greek museums in 2010
Acropolis museum17,700 visitors in 1 day! people love
culture
