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.