Mixed-Agent Museum Tour Guide Design Improves Gendered Learning Outcomes and Visitor Preferences

2026-07-15

AI Summary

This study addresses gender disparities in visitor learning outcomes during museum tours by proposing a hybrid guided tour system that integrates a physical robot with a projected virtual agent, enabling their first-ever coordinated interaction. Leveraging a dual-agent dialogue mechanism and multimodal data collection—including questionnaires, behavioral sensors, and interviews—the system employs conversational style modulation to maintain consistent user experience quality while significantly enhancing learning effectiveness for female visitors. Experimental results demonstrate that this hybrid approach not only effectively narrows the gender gap in learning gains but also elicits higher interaction preferences across all visitors, thereby establishing a novel paradigm for intelligent museum guide design.

Abstract

Robots are increasingly integrated into everyday contexts, including museums, where they can both entertain and educate visitors. To enhance visitor experience and engagement, we present a novel mixed-agent tour guide system that combines a physical robot with a projected virtual agent that actively participates in the tour through conversation and interaction, achieving the interaction richness of two mobile agents from a single platform. We validate the system through a within-subjects study with 30 participants to assess engagement, quality of experience, and learning performance. Participants experienced different conversational styles and agent configurations, and data were collected via surveys, behavioral sensors, and interviews. Results showed that engagement and quality of experience remained consistent across conditions. Learning performance revealed a significant gender-moderated difference: the mixed-agent conditions improved learning performance for female participants. This suggests that the proposed dyadic conversational style in this paper influenced learning performance differently by gender. Nonetheless, in interviews, participants reported a greater preference for mixed-agent teams regardless of gender, citing interaction as a key factor in their experience.

Problem

• mixed-agent system
• gendered learning outcomes
• museum tour guide
• visitor engagement
• human-robot interaction

Innovation

• mixed-agent system
• human-robot interaction
• gendered learning outcomes
• museum tour guide
• dyadic conversational style