CHESS (Cultural Heritage Experiences through Socio-personal interactions and Storytelling) was a research project, co-funded by the European Commission (ICT-2009.4.1 – Digital libraries and digital preservation), that from 2012 to 2014 aimed to integrate interdisciplinary research in personalization and adaptivity, digital storytelling, interaction methodologies, and narrative-oriented mobile and mixed reality technologies, with a sound theoretical basis in museological, cognitive, and learning sciences. The principal objective of CHESS was to research, implement and evaluate both the experiencing of personalized interactive stories for visitors of cultural sites and their authoring by the cultural content experts.

The project set out to design mobile experiences that attempted to shift focus from the traditional set of exhibit-centric, information-loaded descriptions typically found in a museum gallery, to story-centric narrations with references to the exhibits. The initial goals have been twofold. Firstly, to handle cultural content in a way that adopts an interactive drama-based storytelling approach, combined with features that promise to make mobile applications compelling (e.g., exploratory activities, interactive choices that inform a personalized and adaptive experience, games, augmented reality presentations of cultural artefacts, etc.). Secondly, to follow a user-centred participatory design approach in developing prototypes, coupled with an iterative design-evaluation-redesign cycle that involves in-depth exploration of all aspects of interaction: Through the device, between the visitor, the exhibits, exhibition space and the other visitors. Interactive experiences have been designed for and evaluated at two museums, each with a different scope and end-user requirements: The Acropolis Museum (AM) in Athens (Greece) which displays the archaeological findings of the Acropolis, and Cité de l’Espace in Toulouse (France), a science museum focusing on space and its conquest.

The quality of the research performed in CHESS has been highly recognised; the project was named as “gold story” by the European Commission, selected as one of the top 10 best FP7 projects presented at the EC’s Innovation Convention 2014, and named by the Guardian as one of the 10 global R&D projects changing art and culture.