Exploring cultural heritage repositories with creative intelligence. The Labyrinth 3D system

•Semantically annotated collections open the way to the visualization of the relations over items.•In Labyrinth 3D, a virtual maze represents the semantic relations over cultural artefacts.•The system is aimed at engaging the general public in the exploration of cultural heritage.

In cultural heritage, the use of ontologies makes the description of artworks clearer and self-explanatory, with advantages in terms of interoperability. The current shift towards semantic encoding opens the way to the creation of interfaces that allow the users to build personal paths in heritage collections by exploiting the relations over the artworks.In the attempt to leverage this multiplicity of paths, we designed and implemented a system, called Labyrinth 3D, which integrates the semantic annotation of cultural objects with the interaction style of 3D games. The system immerses the user into a virtual 3D labyrinth, where turning points and paths represent the semantic relations over cultural objects, with the goal of engaging the user in the exploration of the collection.