Hello, my name is Elle Crawley, and I am a postgraduate student in Serious Games and Virtual Reality at the Glasgow School of Art, where I have been able to pursue my passion for developing games and interactive experiences. My work is strongly rooted in education, with a particular focus on making history more engaging and accessible. Other recurring themes in my practice include the environment, AI dialogue systems, and character design.

My most recent project, Dear Mary, investigates how real-time dialogue systems can be used to enhance engagement and learning in museum contexts, particularly for young adult audiences in Scotland. This research explores the potential of historically informed AI characters to support museum applications and aims to guide curators, exhibition designers, and digital heritage practitioners in integrating adaptive, AI-based interpretation into public-facing spaces. In doing so, it supports strategies that enrich the visitor experience and encourage sustained engagement with collections.

The application developed for this research combines a reconstruction of Mary, Queen of Scots, with an interactive 3D environment modelled on her chambers at Holyrood Palace. Visitors are able to converse with Mary in real time, learning not only about her life but also about the artefacts and history connected to the space. Through this work, I explore how AI-driven, conversational characters can enrich museum interpretation and provide a replicable framework for museums and heritage institutions to create meaningful, immersive visitor experiences.