Breakbeat Narratives: A Personalized, Conversational Interactive Storytelling System for Museum Education

We introduce a novel interactive narrative exhibit supporting general public learning about Hip Hop culture and history developed as a collaboration of the MIT Center for Advanced Virtuality, the Universal Hip Hop Museum, and Microsoft and supported by the TunesMap Educational Foundation and internationally known Afrofuturist artists Black Kirby. The exhibit's narrative system is personalized by categorizing users based on evaluating their input data light of a social psychology-based model based in musical identity theory. The system uses user input to determine which interactive narrative and customized music playlist to present to the user. The system has been deployed as the central interactive display within the [R]Evolution of Hip Hop for an exhibit of the Universal Hip Hop Museum. Future work will involve analysis of user feedback data from the thousands of local and international exhibit visitors to determine the impact of personalization on visitor engagement, satisfaction, and learning.