Virtual Cultural Environments: Exploration of Information

There seem to be essential differences between shops, city halls, theatres and museums. However, when we try to design virtual environments allowing services, transactions, explorations and communication, are they really that different? Doesn’t the ‘virtual’ in virtual environments allow us to introduce possibilities for visitors that extend those that are available in each of the mentioned physical environments and that have to be common for each of them? Multi-media presentation of information, multi-modal access to information, multi-media retrieval of information, filtering of information, helping users to explore and get access to information, multi-user communication and collaboration, etc.; it is not difficult to argue that these issues, not or only poorly available in physical environments, are useful and can be realized in virtual environments. We survey our research on these issues and our attempt to integrate this research in a virtual environment devoted to the presentation and exploration of theatre information. We try to make clear that the research topics we have to deal with do not differ from those where research explicitly deals with access to commercial environments, museum environments, educational environments and other service and transaction environments.