Changing the look of a city: The v-Corfu case

Virtual Worlds are becoming a valuable tool for teaching history and promoting cultural heritage in places like the city of Corfu, an Unesco monument. In this paper, virtual Corfu (v-Corfu) is presented, i.e., a virtual world consisting of historical buildings, monuments and other existing sites characteristic of the city of Corfu, transformed into virtual sites (v-sites). A possible way of implementing v-Corfu as an education enhancer tool is explored here, focusing on the ability to promote the study of the city´s history, highlight its culture and increase its attractiveness to interested potential visitors (e.g., students, tourists) or even its inhabitants. By exploiting the fact that most of these sites represented in v-Corfu do exist in the city, the aim is to further improve education by playing in the duality of both worlds. This is achieved by (i) projecting movie-like virtual tours (v-tours) consisting of parts of v-Corfu next to the real ones; and (ii) by having avatars of important historical persons participating in v-Corfu and walking nearby places that used to be their whereabouts in times long past. Both v-sites and avatars have the capability, through special virtual assistants (v-assistants), to provide the viewers with pieces of information related with the particular site or the person represented by the avatar.