Browsing by Author "Alexopoulos, Lampros"

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    Beyond Street Signs: Ethical and Situated Cultural Storytelling using AI and Extended Reality
    (The Eurographics Association, 2025) Toumpouri, Marina; Constantinides, Marios; Milata, Václav; Ppali, Sophia; Alexopoulos, Lampros; Liarokapis, Fotis; Campana, Stefano; Ferdani, Daniele; Graf, Holger; Guidi, Gabriele; Hegarty, Zackary; Pescarin, Sofia; Remondino, Fabio
    Honorific street names that commemorate historical figures, events, or cultural symbols constitute a frequently overlooked, yet symbolically potent layer of urban heritage. Beyond their practical function in navigation and spatial organization, they also encode ideological narratives into public space that shape collective memory and identity. However, they often go unnoticed, while traditional cultural heritage (CH) tools do not engage with their contested meanings, particularly in politically divided urban landscapes. This paper addresses this gap by exploring how the integration of extended reality (XR) and artificial intelligence (AI) can reanimate toponymic inscriptions into dynamic, context-sensitive forms of storytelling. Focusing on the center of Nicosia, Cyprus, we present an intelligent tourist guide that combines mobile XR, conversational AI, and lifelike avatars to deliver personalized, multilingual narratives, at the sites of honorific street names. We conclude by discussing the ethical challenges of algorithmic memory mediation in contested urban spaces and we argue that such systems, when designed responsibly, can foster critical engagement, pluralistic representation, and new forms of civic pedagogy within the domain of CH.