Cultural heritage institutions nowadays face the important challenge of making their collections more engaging to visitors, especially the young 'digital natives', while exploiting, in new forms of cultural interactive experiences, the recently developed digital libraries. An approach for cultural heritage institutions (e.g. museums) would be to capitalize on the pervasive use of interactive digital content and systems in order to offer experiences that connect to their visitors' interests, needs, dreams, familiar faces or places; in other words, to the personal narratives they carry with them and, implicitly or explicitly, build when visiting a cultural site.
The principal objective of CHESS is to research, implement and evaluate an innovative conceptual and technological framework that will enable both the experiencing of personalised interactive stories for visitors of cultural sites and their authoring by the cultural content experts. Essentially, CHESS proposes to create narrative-driven cultural "adventures" through hybrid structures, which adapt continuously to their visitors, extend over space and time, and involve multiple users with different interfaces. To achieve this, CHESS will 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 the museological, cognitive, and learning sciences. This tightly integrated framework will be applied and tested in different types of cultural heritage sites; most notably two world-renowned museums, the New Acropolis Museum, and the Cité de l'Espace in France. Access to end-users will be further enhanced through the international User Group, a diverse body of cultural institutions and organisations.